Case Study: Freshdesk scales from 500 to 80,000 customers with Chargebee

How Freshdesk Unlocked Massive Scale

Freshdesk, founded by Girish Mathrubootham in 2010, scaled rapidly from about 500 customers in early 2012 to 80,000 across 193 countries. That growth exposed limits in their home-built billing system (a Rails engine on Braintree): a two-person DevOps/billing team was swamped with requests for discounts, trial extensions, multiple payment methods and subscription details, and constant tinkering slowed the whole company.

Freshdesk adopted Chargebee, onboarding new customers and migrating legacy accounts so Chargebee became the source of truth—integrating with Braintree for card processing, enabling in‑app checkout, multiple currencies and payment methods, APIs, webhooks and role-based access. The result was smoother conversions and reconciliations, reduced operational overhead, better cross-team productivity and retention, and the ability to iterate pricing and launch new products while scaling to 80,000 customers.

Freshdesk

Girish Mathrubootham

Founder & CEO