AI is reshaping nearly every part of our lives, from how we shop to how we work. Now it’s even becoming part of how we train.
Zing Coach is one of the world’s leading AI-powered personal trainer apps. It helps its users stay active with tailored workouts, guidance, and motivation. Basically, it’s like having a coach in your pocket, available anytime.
As a subscription-based product, Zing’s growth depends on more than just new customer acquisition. Retaining users month after month is critical, and payments sit at the center of that experience.
That’s why Elaine Nguyen, Payments Operations Lead at Zing, set out to rebuild the brand’s payment strategy around flexibility and control.
Putting Zing’s payments in its own hands
Until recently, Zing’s payments and billing were managed centrally by Palta, a health and well-being incubator that helped launch and invest in the brand.
As Palta transitioned its portfolio companies toward greater independence, Elaine took the lead on Zing’s payments, giving her full control to build the right setup for its users.
Because Palta had already been using Primer across its portfolio, Elaine knew the value of the platform first-hand. When she took payments in-house, she chose to continue with Primer, confident it was the right platform for her to achieve her goals.
“As a startup, we need to move fast without relying on heavy engineering resources,” she says. “Primer gives us the perfect combination of enterprise-grade capability with startup-level agility.”
Maximizing recurring revenue
For any subscription business, a failed payment isn’t just a temporary blip, it’s a moment where a customer can silently churn. Every declined renewal means lost revenue, disrupted user experience, and extra operational cost to win that customer back.
Elaine knew that improving authorization rates would have a direct impact on retention and recurring revenue. With Primer, she built a multi-processor payment stack designed for resilience and reach, serving Zing’s growing global audience.
“Primer gives us control,” she says. “Using Primer Workflows we decide which PSP to use per region, currency, or even BIN, and easily experiment to see what delivers the best performance.”
The use of network tokens further strengthen Zing’s authorization rates by keeping stored credentials up to date, ensuring renewals don’t fail unnecessarily.
Zing has also seen a major impact from Primer’s Fallbacks, which automatically retries failed transactions through an alternative PSP.
“We’ve recovered 20% of failed payments using Fallbacks,” says Elaine. “That’s 20% of customers who stay subscribed instead of dropping off. And for a business like ours that’s real revenue you can’t afford to lose.
Expanding with the right payment methods
Zing’s ambitions are global. What started as an AI-powered fitness app is now building a community of users stretching from New York to São Paulo to Berlin. That diversity is both the opportunity and the challenge because payments look very different in every market.
“Every market has its own preferred way to pay,” says Elaine. “Younger users in the US want Venmo or Cash App, while in Brazil, you can’t get by without offering PIX. If we don’t offer what they expect, we lose them at checkout.”
With Primer, adding new options like Venmo and Google Pay takes days rather than months of engineering. That agility means Zing can reach new audiences faster and run A/B tests to see which methods truly drive adoption and retention.
“Primer gives us the speed to move like a startup but operate with enterprise reach,” she says. “We can enter a new market, switch on the right payment methods, and see results almost immediately.”
What’s next for Zing?
With a payments foundation built for scale, Elaine and her team are focused on the next chapter: expanding into new regions and reaching new generations of users.
“Our goal is to keep growing globally and reach new audiences,” says Elaine. “Primer helps us do that through one integration that gives us access to everything we need.”
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