Deep: Payment journey UX Explored
How companies like OpenAI, Miro, Midjourney, Adobe, DuoLingo and more take payments. Your ultimate guide to payment journey UX.
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This April marks a full year since the last time we took a look at the payment journey UX of some of the world’s top tech companies. Since then, Stripe acquired a stablecoin business for $1.1 billion, Apple Pay expanded to all browsers and the rise of AI agents and tools like Operator has made it possible for users to offload parts of the payment journey entirely to AI on their behalf.
But have any of these new advances and technologies actually made their way into real world products?
In this Deep dive, we’re going to dig deeper into the UX of payment journeys across some of the world’s leading tech companies including OpenAI, Miro, Midjourney, Adobe, DuoLingo and more to understand how exactly they take payments. This 2025 set includes an entirely new crop of companies vs the ones we looked at last year. We’ll look at both the full end to end payment journey and the finer details of the types of payments on offer.
If you’re currently exploring new payment methods or you’re looking to optimize the end to end customer payment journey of your business, this DoP Deep dive should hopefully help.
Coming up:
The payment flow so confusing it triggered legal action - and lessons you can learn from this
How one company’s new AI pricing page pits AI Assistants against humans - with a built-in calculator to prove it
Why Stripe’s “Link” feature is gaining traction… but raising some eyebrows too
How to design a modern payment experience: emerging trends, themes and takeaways
Analysis of the full payment journeys of companies including Duolingo, Miro, OpenAI, Anthropic and more
Downloadable UI for the entire payment journey of each product featured
What’s included in this analysis
Here’s a snapshot of what’s included in this analysis:
For each company featured, you’ll get a snapshot of how their payment journey is structured including:
Payment methods - what payment methods does each product support?
Payment gateways - do they use Stripe, Ayden or custom infrastructure?
UX patterns - what UX elements / patterns does this journey use? These are broken down into some of the more common elements to help categorize them. More on that below.
Number of steps - the total number of steps involved in the payment journey. At the end of the report, you’ll also get a summary of the average number of steps involved
Payment button CTA - the CTA used on the button to complete the purchase. This changes depending on the type of product featured. All CTA text is included for your reference.
The UX patterns categorized in the analysis include a wide variety of different patterns including:
Defaults to annual - for SaaS products in particular, an option that sets the payment frequency to yearly. If a payment journey defaults to annual, this is marked.
Placeholder label - the label displayed within a form input field that disappears when the user begins to type.
Padlock icons - some companies use the padlock symbol used to indicate that a transaction is secure, often found next to input fields for sensitive information like credit card details. Any payment journeys that use this are clearly marked.
Inline validation - errors appear inline for each form field without pressing save.
Errors appear on save - displays error messages when users attempt to submit a form with incorrect or incomplete information.
Live chat - some companies offer a live chat feature that provides users with the option to chat with a sales representative for assistance during the purchasing process.
A closer look at the payment journey UX of the companies featured
Now let’s take a closer look at the UX of all of the companies featured along with some emerging new trends and takeaways you can use to inform your own product’s payment journeys.