Beyond the Checkout: How Payment Infrastructure Shapes Your Pricing Strategy with Ryan Doran and Danny Smith

Ryan Doran is a Partner in Lead Creative and Head of UI/UX for Turkois, with over 17 years of experience in monetization strategy, payments, and scaling technology businesses.

Danny Smith is a Solution Architect at Stripe, working on AI-driven commerce innovations and partnering with AWS.

In this episode, Ryan and Danny explore the critical intersection of pricing strategy and payment infrastructure, discussing how AI is transforming both the mechanics of pricing implementation and the challenge of pricing AI products themselves.

Why you have to check out today's podcast:

• Understand the difference between billing systems and payment systems and how they work together.
• Learn why flexible technical infrastructure is essential for modern pricing strategies.
• Discover how AI is enabling hyper-personalized shopping experiences with built-in guardrails.

"Your pricing strategy is only as good as the background tech that you have to operationalize it. If you have a legacy monolithic stack and you can come up with these great strategies, but it takes you six months to implement that strategy, then you've probably been left behind already."

– Danny Smith

Topics Covered:

02:15 - How Ryan got into pricing through product development and payment flows.

04:30 - Danny's journey from cloud architecture to payments infrastructure.

06:45 - The difference between billing systems and payment systems.

10:20 - Why new billing companies continue to emerge despite established players.

14:15 - How AI is accelerating data utilization in pricing decisions.

17:30 - The dual challenge: using AI for pricing vs. pricing AI products.

19:45 - Hyper-personalized shopping with AI agents and built-in guardrails.

23:10 - The ethical concerns of "sleazy price segmentation" and AI pricing.

28:40 - Agent-to-agent negotiations and policy engines.

31:20 - How AI products are changing pricing models: tokens, credits, and hybrid approaches.

35:15 - Creating "action units" to translate technical complexity into business value.

Key Takeaways:

"Data is basically the new margin. What you can do with it is only gaining in value." - Ryan Doran

"We've implemented API level technology that will create a budget... and it will create a virtual debit card on the backend for that exact amount, tied to today as an expiration date, tied to that particular transaction." - Danny Smith

People / Resources Mentioned:

• Turkois: https://turkois.io/
• Vanilla POS: https://vanillapos.io/
• Stripe: https://stripe.com
• Perplexity: https://www.perplexity.ai/
• OpenAI: https://openai.com/
• Chargebee, Chargeify, Zora: Alternative billing platforms
• MCP Server: Technology enabling AI agents to interact with Stripe for dynamic pricing

Connect with Ryan Doran:

• Website: https://turkois.io/
• Email: ryan@turkois.io

Connect with Danny Smith:

• Contact through Ryan Doran

Connect with Mark Stiving:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stiving/
• Email: mark@impactpricing.com