As a Chargify customer from very early on & having been in a paying position since early March (we launched in mid-January & it took a month & a half to hit a paying level) would we have used Chargify from the get-go if we had to pay for it? I can't say for certain but it's quite likely as it still would've been cheaper than moving development cycles into building a billing system (as it is we're still backlogged in that dept).

If I was running a business that relied on a lot of freemium customers I might think twice, but then unless you're asking for credit cards up-front just don't put them into Chargify until they upgrade and give you their CC details. We handle gift subscriptions this way, unless they convert to a 'real' subscription when their gift is up they never go through Chargify.

For what it's worth, it's safe to say after using Chargify for almost a year and having an active site using it for 9-10 months, the level of service and support we've received has been more than worth what we're paying — our development backlog is already a pain-point, I can't imagine what it'd be like if we were rolling our own billing system.