The subscription bundling imperative: why building yourself is harder than it looks

Introduction

Subscription services are woven into daily life. From streaming platforms to fitness and food delivery apps, consumers now juggle a dozen or more recurring debits every month. It’s no surprise that subscription fatigue is real. For providers, fatigue drives churn, lowers loyalty, and makes the fight for consumer attention tougher.  

Bundling multiple services into one subscription is the obvious solution. It’s convenient for consumers, and it boosts retention and ARPU for providers. But here’s the catch: building a bundling solution in-house is rarely as simple, or as fast as it looks.  

The temptation of DIY

At first glance, building your own bundling platform has appeal: 

• Control over the roadmap  

• Ability to leverage existing IT systems  

• Ownership of IP and customer experience  

For large enterprises, this looks like the “smart play”. But beneath the surface, the downsides outweigh the control.  

Integration complexity

Every subscription partner comes with unique APIs, entitlement logic, and billing flows. Netflix doesn’t look like Spotify, and Spotify doesn’t look like Disney+. Onboarding just one partner can take 6–12 months, and up to 18 months in some cases.  

Multiply that by 5, 10 or 50 partners, and the operational load explodes. APIs evolve, providers change systems, regulations shift. DIY means you’re constantly chasing fixes instead of focusing on growth.  

Maintenance: the hidden cost  

Building is only the beginning. Once live, ongoing complexity becomes a permanent drain:  

• APIs update without warning  

• Entitlement rules and billing flows change  

• Cancellations, upgrades, and trials demand constant oversight  

Industry benchmarks show over 40% of engineering time can be consumed by maintenance. What started as a project quickly becomes a business unit, diverting resources away from innovation.  

Marketing handcuffed by code 

In bundling, speed is everything. Consumers expect fresh offers tied to cultural moments -season finales, sports tournaments, and blockbuster launches. These are golden opportunities to capture attention.  

But in a DIY setup, every campaign is shackled to developer cycles. What should be a quick marketing move becomes weeks – or months – of coding. By the time the bundle is live, the cultural moment has passed.  

Think about it: Season 5 of Stranger Things drops at the end of November. You want to tie in a special offer with your first-party product to win new customers. But without a flexible orchestration platform, pulling this off is either near impossible or comes at a huge engineering cost.  

The risk? Missed opportunities, wasted spend, and slower growth while competitors ride the wave.  

Data blind spots  

Effective bundling depends on insight:  

• Which services convert best together?  

• Which segments drive the highest LTV?  

• Where is churn most likely?  

DIY leaves data scattered across partner dashboards and spreadsheets. Without a unified analytics view, marketing is forced to guess instead of optimize.  

The cost of delay  

A DIY bundling engine costs $500K–$2M to build. But the bigger issue is time. While you’re building for 12 – 24 months, competitors are using proven platforms that are already in market, acquiring customers and capturing your market share.  

The smarter alternative  

DIY isn’t impossible. But for most, it’s a strategic distraction. High costs, long timelines, and constant maintenance make it an uphill battle.  

Forward-thinking providers are choosing to outsource the complexity and focus on growth. In part 2, we’ll explore the smarter alternative: the Digital Vending Machine® (DVM™) from Bango – a platform that removes integration pain and lets you launch, scale, and optimize bundles at speed.  

Want the full breakdown on the topic of Build vs Buy?

Read our new guide, Build vs Buy: why the smart choice for subscription bundling is the Digital Vending Machine® from Bango