Leading with product: How Bango is powering the next wave of bundling innovation

The global subscription economy is accelerating at pace, forecasted to exceed $1 trillion by 2028. With this momentum comes fierce competition and increasing consumer frustration. The modern subscriber juggles a mix of streaming, gaming, lifestyle, and productivity subscriptions across multiple devices and platforms, often with no easy way to manage them all. Our recent US research from Subscriptions Assemble, states the average subscriber has 5.4 subscriptions rising to 8.2 subscriptions for those with banking and financial budgeting apps.

This has changed the game. To stand out, content providers, telcos, retailers and financial institutions must rethink their approach. The solution? Subscription bundling. A strategy that simplifies access, builds loyalty and enables businesses to deliver the flexibility subscribers now expect.

“The brands winning today aren’t those that offer the most content – they’re the ones that offer the best experience. Bundling done right delivers that.” – Marisa Teh, Chief Product Officer

Why bundling delivers real business impact

At its core, bundling connects multiple services through a single, streamlined journey – removing the friction from acquisition, activation, and renewal. Consumers benefit from a simplified, value-rich experience. Businesses benefit from stronger engagement, deeper customer relationships and more predictable revenue.

But the real magic happens when bundling is treated as a product strategy, not just a pricing or promotional tool.

Successful platforms like Verizon +play, Optus SubHub, and Telenet with Disney+ are proving exactly this. They aren’t just aggregating content they’re building dynamic, customer-first experiences that evolve with changing preferences and behaviors.

One of the most powerful, yet underused, advantages of bundling is frequency. With the Digital Vending Machine®, partners can launch new offers faster and more easily unlocking more moments to engage customers throughout the year. More touchpoints mean more chances to tell your story, test new go-to-market strategies, and de-risk seasonal campaigns by spreading out acquisition activity.

By simplifying the bundling process, Bango empowers partners to run more frequent experiments, adjust offers in real time and maintain relevance across key moments in the customer lifecycle.

Key benefits include:

• Reduced churn – Bundles create stickiness by linking services to core products (e.g. broadband, mobile), making it less likely a customer will cancel.
• Higher ARPU – Consumers are more willing to spend when value is packaged in a seamless, consolidated experience.
• Expanded reach – Bundling unlocks indirect channels like telcos, retailers, and banks – broadening the addressable market.
• Increased frequency of engagement – With faster bundling tools, businesses can deploy more campaigns, test offers and engage users more often. Driving better long-term performance.

Segmenting the subscription market

There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to subscription bundling. Success depends on how well your strategy matches both your organizational maturity and the readiness of your end users.

Across global markets, we see a clear matrix emerge, where two dimensions shape success:

• Partner Maturity – Your ability to onboard, manage and scale bundles across multiple content partners.

• End User Maturity – Your customers’ ability and appetite to engage with multiple subscription services, often influenced by disposable income, digital habits and regional expectations.

In high-income, digitally mature markets like the US or Western Europe, users are ready for fully configurable, multi-service Super Bundles – meaning more partners, more integration, and more sophisticated DVM capabilities. But in developing regions, the same end user may prefer short-term, flexible access to content – what we call “perishable” subscriptions, where ongoing commitment is less appealing.

To help guide your bundling strategy, think of user/partner maturity across three bands:

1. Emerging

Low user spending power meets basic bundling capabilities. Offers tend to be simple and prepaid, with fewer partners involved. Bundling here is about offering clear value with minimal friction. Think mobile + music or mobile + data + streaming, where content rotation is high.

2. Mid-Maturity

User expectations rise with the ability to swap, pause or upgrade services. Partners at this stage have begun to scale their bundling programs and are exploring deeper DVM integration. Think mix-and-match experiences, soft bundles and targeted offers.

3. Advanced

This is the territory of power users and power platforms. Think Verizon +play or Optus SubHub. Subscribers want dynamic bundles, curated recommendations, unified billing and control over their entire subscription experience. Partners here operate with full DVM orchestration and access an extensive ecosystem of connected services.

Bottom line? You need to evolve your capabilities to match and shape the market you serve. Partner and user maturity go hand in hand, and the more aligned they are, the more successful your bundling strategy will be.

The strategic core: Three pillars for bundling success

To deliver these tailored experiences at scale, businesses need to master three key enablers:

1. Multi-party integration

Integrating content providers quickly and consistently is critical. But traditional methods, like one-to-one integrations for each new partner, don’t scale. This is where platforms like the Digital Vending Machine^® (DVM) comes in, offering a “connect once and scale” model.

2. Flexible pricing and entitlement models

As bundling becomes more sophisticated, so do customer expectations. Your platform must support free trials, phased plans, discounted offers, top-ups, upgrades, downgrades and much more. But without creating operational overhead.

3. Personalization at scale

Successful bundling isn’t static. With insights into user preferences, engagement patterns and churn signals, businesses can dynamically tailor bundles and pricing to maximize customer lifetime value.

Beyond the subscriber: Partnering smarter

Bundling isn’t just about satisfying your subscribers as it also drives value for ecosystem partners.

As more content providers seek alternative routes to market, platforms that enable fast discovery, seamless onboarding, and joint monetization will become the standard. Benefiting from accelerated growth of those who are investing in the indirect channel.

Partner Discovery tool gives resellers direct access to over 100 connected content providers, categorized by region, vertical and commercial model. This allows telcos, banks, and retailers to build high-value bundles with minimal effort and maximum relevance.

And for those transitioning from legacy solutions, the Migration Engine enables live subscriptions to move to the DVM without downtime or service disruption which is a critical step in future-proofing the business.

The DVM includes an upgraded Sandbox environment. Enabling partners to create, test, and launch new bundles using a sandboxed interface at any point in the sales cycle. Partners can validate with a broader suite of use cases at any point in the sales cycle to ensure confidence and thus speed to market. Access the Bango API Sandbox here.

Automation: The real enabler of scale

Without automation, bundling becomes an extremely heavily burden putting operational pressure on the business. Managing activations, renewals, eligibility, pricing, billing and all the relevant partner logic are all unsustainable at any scale.

This is why automation is a core design principle in the DVM. Here’s some of the key features that sit under the hood and how it works in practice:

Offer Orchestration: Partners can define, create, and deploy offers in minutes, after offers have been approved. DVM handles eligibility checks, entitlement creation, plan management, and billing events in real-time.

Smart Top-Ups: For predominant pre-paid customer bases, this automatically notifies, bills, and activate renewals by allowing your subscribers to stack their pre-paid top-ups ensuring no disruptions on their current content usage and seamless billing support for multiple top-ups. Can also work for any treasury wallets and application that involves topping up ad-hoc.

Looking ahead: The future is bundled

As competition intensifies and customer loyalty becomes harder to earn, bundling is emerging as a strategic pillar and not just a promotional tactic. 2 in 3 US subscribers (68%) have taken an indirect subscriptionbuying via bundle or 3rd party channel. With cost per acquisition on the rise across the board, the indirect channel is a lower cost option to consider. And done right, bundling becomes a product-led growth engine. It builds stronger connections between businesses and customers. It fosters resilient, scalable partner ecosystems. And it transforms the subscription experience into something more flexible, personalized and intuitive.

The race is on. The winners will be the ones who build with the right foundations from day one.

Want to unlock the power of bundling?

If you’re ready to simplify complexity, accelerate your bundling strategy and create exceptional subscriber experiences, we’re here to help.

📩 Contact us at sales@bango.com
🤝 Or reach out to the Bango team on LinkedIn

📺 Watch Marisa Teh in her recent Bytesize: DVM Power-Up – Bango CPO reveals new features for 2025

The Digital Vending Machine® from Bango. Subscription bundling starts here.