Business Model Canvas examples from 10 real companies

Streaming / subscription media

Netflix

Netflix converts a fixed-cost global content library into recurring subscription and advertising revenue, using viewing data to decide what to make and scale to amortize every title across 300M+ households.

On-demand marketplace

Uber

Uber is an asset-light, multi-sided marketplace that monetizes a roughly 27% cut of $193B in annual gross bookings by matching independent drivers, couriers, and merchants with consumers in real time, then cross-sells each user across rides, food, grocery, and freight.

Travel marketplace

Airbnb

Airbnb is an asset-light, two-sided marketplace that monetizes trust: it lets ordinary people rent out their spaces (and now experiences and services) to travelers, taking a roughly 13-14% cut of every booking without owning a single property.

Specialty coffee retail

Starbucks

Starbucks sells an affordable daily ritual, premium coffee wrapped in a consistent third-place experience, monetized through roughly 40,000 company-operated and licensed stores and a rewards app that functions like a small consumer bank.

Franchise quick-service restaurants

McDonald's

McDonald's is less a burger chain than a franchisor-landlord that monetizes roughly $140B of customer spending it doesn't book as revenue, collecting rent and royalties from ~95% franchised restaurants while owning the real estate underneath them.

Payments infrastructure

Stripe

Stripe sells the internet's economic plumbing as an API: it abstracts the messy card-network, banking, and compliance stack into developer-friendly building blocks, takes a thin slice of every transaction, and then upsells software on top of the payment flow it already controls.

Consumer Fintech / Neobank

Revolut

Revolut is a branchless financial superapp that acquires customers cheaply with near-interbank FX, then monetizes them across payments, deposits, trading, and subscriptions on a single global tech stack.

Productivity SaaS

Notion

Notion sells a freemium, per-seat all-in-one workspace that lands with individuals for free, spreads bottom-up into their companies, and then monetizes teams through paid tiers and bundled AI.

Eyewear / direct-to-consumer retail

Warby Parker

Warby Parker is a vertically integrated eyewear brand that cut out licensing middlemen to sell designer-quality prescription glasses at a flat low price, then evolved from a D2C website into an omnichannel vision-care company spanning stores, eye exams, contacts, and insurance.

Freelance services marketplace

Upwork

Upwork is a two-sided talent marketplace that monetizes the full lifecycle of remote knowledge work (matching, contracting, payment, and compliance), taking a cut of every dollar billed plus fees for access and visibility on both sides.