Bango: Software subscription ‘super bundling’ explained
This is a guest post for the Computer Weekly Developer Network written by Cei Sanderson in his role as vice president of product at Bango.
Bango has developed purchase behavior technology that enables users to buy the products and services they want, using methods of payment including carrier billing, digital wallets and subscription bundling. The world’s largest online merchants, including Amazon, Google and Microsoft, use Bango technology to acquire more paying users.
Sanderson writes in full as follows…
The subscription economy (at all levels) is booming in the UK, but with more subscriptions comes more stress. Underused plans, fragmented billing and platform overload scenarios have led to widespread ‘subscription fatigue’ among users.
Enter super bundling for subscription services. By unifying diverse subscription offerings into a single, integrated hub experience, super bundling is rewriting the rules of the subscription economy. We’re seeing businesses everywhere –– from streaming services to wellness apps to telecom giants –– using super bundling to meet subscriber demands for more convenience, flexibility and value.
The technology driving this revolution is the Digital Vending Machine (DVM). This is the engine powering the subscription bundles now offered by BT/EE and all-in-one platforms like Verizon +play, Optus SubHub and EE Marketplace. The DVM turns what was once a massive, bespoke technological challenge into a standardised, plug-and-play solution reducing development and go-to-market timelines from years to just a few months. Here’s how.
Creating bundled offers is anything but straightforward. Resellers of these bundles face significant hurdles, including creating the commercial deals with each individual subscription provider, building and managing complex platform integrations, synchronising diverse billing cycles and designing attractive offers. These challenges are resource-intensive and can take years to resolve.
Developer delivery empowerment
We developed the Digital Vending Machine to simplify these technical and operational complexities, offering a scalable platform that enables developers to deliver reliable, adaptable and seamless subscription experiences. At scale, managing subscription bundles demands precise orchestration across billing, activation and service adjustments – particularly when users modify or cancel individual subscriptions within a bundle. Supporting high-traffic events, such as major sports games or blockbuster content launches, requires infrastructure engineered for peak scalability and load resilience.
So what makes this approach so transformative for businesses looking to bundle?
At the core of the product is an abstraction layer that bridges the technical divide between content providers like Disney+ and resellers such as BT/EE. This architecture eliminates the need for individual connections, enabling partners to integrate once and access an ecosystem of over 180 providers and resellers.
Instead of having every partner build separate connections for each bundling collaboration, the platform provides a unified API endpoint that both content providers and resellers can integrate with. This reduces the time and complexity involved, cutting through the usual maze of kickoff meetings and legal back-and-forth. Each company connects just once to the DVM and from there can access a growing ecosystem of over 180 content providers and resellers.
We designed all DVM APIs to be flexible enough to accommodate significant changes from partners, while ensuring backward compatibility and zero downtime. When one partner updates their systems, the abstraction layer ensures those changes don’t disrupt live services or the broader ecosystem. This allows us to guarantee service continuity for our customers while reducing integration overhead.
Billing & payment flexibility
In the real world, no two billing cycles are the same. A customer’s Disney+ subscription might renew on one date, while Verizon’s billing operates on a completely different cycle.
That’s why we made an early design decision to decouple billing from offers (what is available for purchase or subscription) and entitlements (what the customer is entitled to use or access). This separation of concerns provides a highly flexible billing framework capable of supporting the diverse models our customers depend on. By abstracting billing logic, content providers can innovate freely — experimenting with pay-per-view models, tiered subscriptions, or promotional offers — without affecting the reseller’s billing systems or creating unnecessary integration challenges.
The DVM also supports dynamic pricing, enabling seamless updates to pricing structures as content providers adjust strategies to maximise acquisition and lifetime value. This is not a one-time project but a constantly evolving market, so our software needs to be able to adapt.
We also wanted to make life easier for end-users. That’s why we built a “bill on behalf of” feature, enabling resellers to handle end-user billing for content providers. It’s a feature that not only reduces complexity from a provider POV but also solves a core element of subscription fatigue by consolidating subscription charges into one convenient place for subscribers, making for a happier and more loyal customer.
Evolving customisation capabilities
Our partner ecosystem is growing faster than ever and we’re constantly adapting to match the innovative solutions our customers are bringing to the table. While we’ve designed the DVM to be consistent and scalable, we also recognise that no two partners are the same.
We take a modular approach, using specialised adapters to tailor solutions for unique needs and allow developers to address diverse integration challenges without disrupting the product’s foundation with lots of work for individual partners.
Whether it’s integrating with legacy systems or helping partners with limited IT resources, this approach allows for seamless adaptation without disrupting the core DVM structure. This flexibility means we can onboard partners quickly, no matter how complex their requirements might be – and when we notice the same patterns popping up frequently, we go a step further by building these features into the core system itself.
By creating a standard yet flexible approach to bundling, through a consistent product core and adapted APIs, we’re able to ensure long term scalability for all connected partners
The future is bundled
Ultimately, it’s exciting to be working on a product that is being used by millions of people in their day-to-day lives — even if it’s often working behind the scenes. The use of subscription services grows every year and consumers are getting ever more used to bundling services to get the content and deals they want. That (arguably) puts this approach in demand around the world.
As we look ahead, super bundling is redefining what it means to deliver convenience, choice and satisfaction in the subscription economy. As the demand for unified ecosystems grows, the DVM positions developers to lead this transformation with innovative, user-focused solutions.
