Chargify's company blog covers subscription billing, pricing changes, payment gateways, and small business hiring and growth.
HN mentions Chargify mostly as a recurring billing provider, with commenters saying it worked well enough and was straightforward for a couple of developers to set up.
So lets do some math:
From http://chargify.com/blog/why-we-changed-our-pricing/:
"Grasshopper Group has been supporting Chargify for 15 months, and Chargify is now supporting 3,000 merchants - again, the large majority of whom are paying $0."
And from the linked article:
"We should have shared the data we collected for over a year that demonstrated quite clearly to us that only 0.9% of customers were paying us at all, and that there was a direct correlation between those that did not pay anything and a high volume of support requests."
3000 merchants total * .009 paying = 27 paying merchants
Now, these numbers could be off in several ways, but even if they're off by an order of magnitude (and I doubt they are) - ouch!
So many lessons to be learned from this:
- Freemium's applicability is so over-rated. I couldn't be happier that we've had a (cheap) pay-to-play structure at Spreedly since the beginning. Personally I think freemium should always be a strategy introduced post-profitability, never before.
- It's been said many times, but I'll say it again: the "overnight success" is a myth. Most businesses take 2-5 years to reach any kind of profitability. Selling to startups? Better keep that in mind.
- Capital infusion causes market distortion. Not saying that's a bad thing, but it's worth recognizing. Spreedly noticed a definite drop-off in signups when Chargify came out, and why not - wouldn't you take the free option vs. Spreedly's pay to play? And wasn't that…
PayPal might be very quick and easy to get going just like Google Checkout or Amazon Payments but you need to think about what is best for actually serving your customers and making it easier for them to pay.
- Standard PayPal
Your customer must have a PayPal account which could lower your conversion and for sure does not give a professional image. You can schedule a payment to happening each month but it is an amount not a product/plan, making managing customers very difficult and reporting almost impossible. Similar issues apply with Google Checkout and Amazon Payments
- PayPal Website Payments Pro
This is a gateway and merchant account combination that they offer as a package to try and attract merchants. There are some simple recurring payment options but nothing really. The bigger problem here is errors and support. Try calling PayPal when something does not work, good luck. We have a senior level account manager and direct contact with the Director of Support for this product and this bug has been open for 3 weeks and they still cannot fix. http://support.chargify.com/discussions/support/3296-declined-transaction-the-reason-given-for-the-declined-transaction-was-failed-with-500-internal-server-error
- Real gateway and merchant account
Your best option and not a lot of effort if you are in the US or have a US bank account. Overseas it is a little more effort but nothing crazy. If you are concerned with getting the best rate and quickly, we have a few partners for…
Ahh, the buy vs build debate. Disclaimer, I work for https://www.chargify.com/, another provider of recurring billing software in the same space as Chargebee.
We see this question asked a lot it really boils down to resources and what you want to spend your time on. Yes, it is pretty easy to build a basic system with a gateway such as Stripe or Braintree but there are two main problems: 1. It does not scale well (your needs will likely increase) 2. Building and maintaining your own system takes away from focusing on your product (and it is not a core competency)...
As Krush said, there are "hundreds of small things that come up as you grow." By using a best of breed tool, most of these things are available out of the box with little to no dev work needed such as testing plans, coupons/promo codes, taxes, reporting/analytics, billing portal for customer account management, a portal for your support team to see/edit account history/info, system emails, dunning management, and so much more.
The price for billing software like Chargify is minimal compared to the time saved building and maintaining your own system. In fact, the money saved by leveraging our dunning features alone have proven to provide a 4x return based on the monthly cost of Chargify's software. So not only does it save a lot of resources, it provides an ROI.
We have a ton of people that come to us after building their own system, and wished they implement Chargify in the beginning. But it is never too…
We looked at Recurly too... You are wrong that you can just zero out the gateway numbers in the calculators. Recurly charges 1.25% + 10 cents (http://recurly.com/pricing). 1.25% is a CRAPLOAD. Using a merchant account from FeeFighters would for us end up costing something like 2.1% + 20cents for the merchant account but then we'd have to pay an additional 1.25% + 10cents to Recurly, making it a total of 3.35% + 30 cents, far more than Stripe. Plus there's a $69 minimum fee, which sucks when you are starting out
Chargify (http://chargify.com) or Spreedly (http://spreedly.com) + Samurai (http://samurai.feefighters.com) is going to be significantly cheaper in our case (we expect to ramp to $30k/sales/mo). I'll pretty-up and share the google spreadsheet I used shortly. Stripe is still the best option if you have low transaction size and low volume (I think it was <$6k/mo). Other than that it was either chargify+samurai or spreedly+samurai (depending on the number of transactions because of chargify's tricky pricing)
I'm a reasonably experienced consumer and until now I always would have answered "yes" if someone asked "is cancelling your credit card an acceptable way of terminating a monthly service?" I'm also a reasonably experienced seller of recurring services... and my answer would have been the same.
If I'm pre-paying a service each month and I cancel my card, getting threats about collections is the exact opposite of what I expect. What I usually expect is for the service provider to either cancel my service or put it in some kind of suspended mode and then follow up with me to see if I really meant to cancel. Good billing providers would actually do this automatically: http://chargify.com/features/dunning-management/
As an aside, half the purpose of Zipcar is that it isn't a critical account. It's an easy-to-use convenience that saves you from the complexities of owning a car or making arrangements with a traditional rental service.
Chargify | Operations Engineer | San Antonio, TX | Full-Time
We're looking for special individuals to join the Chargify mission and serve customers on our operations engineering team. You’ll be joining the team focused 100% on security, reliability, performance, and internal tooling. This means backend-heavy work. Diagnosing hard problems, monitoring activity, building custom solutions, and delivering internal value.
You can expect to work on the following types of projects:
* Refining internal tools that help to coordinate and manage all our applications
* Automating more of our AWS infrastructure
* Building a workflow for helping other devs get up to speed with our environment
* Helping to to test and launch our Docker cluster (Kubernetes anyone?)
https://www.chargify.com/careers/?gh_jid=751751