For anyone else looking into recurring billing I'd highly recommend Chargebee (not affiliated at all).

We've tried a few different solutions and were a little apprehensive at first because it looked a bit clunky but it's actually one of the best bits of software I've used. You don't realise the number of features a subscription billing platform needs until you use something like chargebee and discover how wonderful it is to have someone do it all for you. What's really great is before changing anything they give you a pop up showing what's going to be billed now, what will happen in the future etc. We used stripe before switching and I was a nervous wreck before ever pushing any buttons.

My co-founder and I were saying just the other day that we think it's one of the best investments we've made as a company.

https://www.chargebee.com

I'm also curious as to why you moved from Baremetrics to ChartMogul.

Thanks!

In all honesty, we're way over Heap's free limit, but they haven't throttled us or reached out, so shhhhhh.

Intercom is so worth it. We wouldn't be in the same position without it. The reason it's so high (as I mentioned in another answer) is that we also use it for sending our monthly newsletter. We could definitely get the cost much lower, and we're planning to, but I just need to sit down and do it. We've got our hands full with our current roadmap, so I haven't had the chance to move everyone to a more affordable email marketing service, but sooner than later.

When I used Baremetrics, they were changing their pricing a lot and experimenting so much with growth tactics that I don't agree with, like removing the ability to cancel on your own—you now need to contact them.

I tried ChartMogul and they've been absolutely wonderful. The team is so kind, helpful, and responsive. They also don't make drastic changes, which is refreshing since I only need them to track my Stripe metrics.

Heyo! Founder of Baremetrics here.

Wanted to touch on a couple of things in this sub-thread on Baremetrics.

It means a lot that literally _anyone_ has ever used Baremetrics. I started it over 3 years ago to scratch my own itch and hot dog it kinda took off. So, I'm grateful...certainly for the nearly 700 happy paying customers, but also for the others over the years who's experiences were less than stellar.

We've had some growing pains, but the majority of the painful ones are far in the past.

I did want to address the specific things folks brought up here, just to clear the air.

* Regarding changing our pricing "a lot"...we've changed pricing just once in 3 years. And that was based directly on customer feedback.

* Regarding us being "notoriously slow for the past 2 years"... We had some temporary scaling problems over a year ago, but that's just not the case any more. We've got a whole suite of server monitoring tools that show we have, in fact, not been "notoriously slow for 2 years".

* Regarding us being "inexperienced"...busted! I've never built a complex analytics platform storing and processing in near real-time terabytes of data! ;) Every single entrepreneur is winging it. You'll make some good decisions and some bad ones. That's life. :) But to be clear our team is very equipped and extremely talented. We're just solving a complicated problem...much more complicated than anyone who's never built this sort of thing before realizes.

At the end of the day, though, there are obviously some people who haven't had the experience they wanted with Baremetrics. I hate that that's the case, but we're constantly improving and innovating...most of the time for the better.

If anyone has had a less-than-positive experience with Baremetrics, please email me. I'd love to chat: josh@baremetrics.com

Thanks again for all the feedback!

Ha! Not at all. It was a big expense, but I think it’s worth it for how we use it. The domain is "in.vc" and it’s used when sending an invoice link to clients. Instead of sending a super long link and possibly confusing clients with our app name, they see a short, generic link.

I wish we had cushion.com, but last I checked, it sold for $120k in 2012, so that's off the table. :)

FYI I don't think it's beta anymore :)

We would, but unfortunately, we need their "old" SSL add-on to get SSL to work with the root URL of our invoice url, in.vc. Apparently, the new SSL doesn’t work the same.

We've thought about it, but Cushion is incredibly lightweight and doesn't need to be used constantly, so our load is very low. We've only needed 2 dynos since we launched and we're nowhere close to needing more than that. As much as I'd like to lower the cost, they truly take so much weight off our shoulders. I gladly pay what we're paying now, so it's not an issue for us.

Heh. I was curious if anyone was still subscribed.

I think I wrote that when they had their older pricing, or I didn’t realize their real value. Also, I’m pretty sure we could run Cushion on a single dyno, but I like having two around to balance.

Fortunately, I was able to find a really great lawyer who is actually affordable (previously interviewed a few law firms who were $700+/hr). Besides incorporating, legal costs haven't been too high. Just the occasional contract here or there, or updating our terms.

Hi! Great question. I love static websites, but we hit a point where we were updating the site constantly and needed dynamic content, like the running costs (which pulls its data from a google spreadsheet). There are certainly ways to do this with a static site, but with the size of the site and frequency that we update it, I really wanted to be able to hit save and it was live, rather than wait for everything to compile and publish. I still use Siteleaf for all of my other websites, but cushionapp.com is a different beast.

Also, lol at "marketing team". I am marketing team. :)

We switched to Intercom for sending our monthly email simply because its email editor is so good. I wish a proper email marketing service would come close to their simplicity, but I haven't seen anything yet. We might be moving back to Mailchimp soon because the per-user cost for Intercom has really skyrocketed since we've used them for email marketing. Granted, Intercom actually don't want people to use them for sending batch emails. I wish they'd come out with a standalone service for it—remain as dead-simple as their editor is now and they'd make a killing.

We just made the page static to handle the HN traffic, so there were a few seconds between the switch. pulls collar Didn’t expect to get featured today.

Hi! The crossed-out costs are ones we no longer use. We either no longer needed that service, or we found a better alternative.