Ask HN: How do you handle billing for your SaaS product? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you handle billing for your SaaS product?

21 pointsjonathanleane14 comments

Hey guys... just wondering if you've built a payment module from scratch or if chargebee, stripe, recurly, etc are worth it?

And if you've used one of these out of the box solutions, how much customization is typically necessary?

Some of the stuff I'm hoping it'll deal with so I won't have to mess with it myself...

Plan upgrades / downgrades... I plan to use a 'credits' type system where each plan has a number of monthly credits that reset every month.

Pay as you go option for people who just want to buy packs of credits and not sign up to an ongoing thing

Cancellations / refunds etc, and whether these should be pro-rated etc

And obviously the core stuff like collecting payments, protecting against fraud, etc.

Any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks

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Billing and the associated subscription models is a problem that has been largely solved, so there isn't much need to roll your own. Instead you can dive straight into the 'fun' parts of your project.

I used Laravel Spark + Stripe for my SaaS and it works great.

However.. The downside is that if major changes happen (e.g. The new SCA regulations) you could find the core modules used in a package such as the Laravel billing package need to be upgraded, so you have a domino effect where everything needs to be upgraded. We were left with a LOT of work as we had to upgrade Laravel core to a new version, which meant upgrading from Bootstrap 3 to 4 (a huge job).

I wouldn't change our initial approach as it allowed us to quickly get a product to market and see whether it was viable, but the reality is that we will be rebuilding the entire system from scratch in the future to get rid of the legacy inefficiencies.

I would use https://paddle.com/

because sales tax is too complex to handle myself. paddle is a reseller who can handle it for me.

How much does paddle cost? I can't find any pricing information on their website

Incase you didn't see the other comment.

They take 5% + $0.50 for each transaction. Seems pretty high to me, guessing that is why they're effectively hiding this information. Interesting conversion technique.

How much does paddle cost? It is very difficult to find any pricing information online

What's Paddle's pricing? I can't find any information online. I want to bill people for a SaaS for example, using Paddle.

Incase you didn't see the other comment.

They take 5% + $0.50 for each transaction. Seems pretty high to me, guessing that is why they're effectively hiding this information. Interesting conversion technique.

For my paid Chrome extension https://www.checkbot.io/, I use Paddle. They take 5% + $0.50 for each transaction - the big plus for me compared to say Stripe is Paddle take care of the sales tax for you so I can sell worldwide without having to do any complicated tax forms or dealing with EU VAT.

Can anyone that deals with sales tax themselves as a solo founder comment on how much time it takes them a year to deal with sales tax and EU VAT?

Disclaimer: I work at Stripe.

I use Stripe Billing. I opted to use Checkout so I don’t have to build the UX for subscribing/checkout. Stripe handles the payment collection and fraud protection.

I opted to prorate cancellations to simplify the customer experience. I built the cancellation UX on my own since Checkout doesn’t (yet) support this. I haven’t yet built the UX to change plans.

For your specific case, it might make sense to track your internal credits separately from payment. When payment is made, add credits to the user’s account. Remove credits when a refund occurs.

Quick question about Stripe Billing. Is it possible to create a subscription plan that would combine a Per Seat model with a Usage one? (see the "Building blocks for billing" section)

We use Stripe for charging members, and Tipalti to disburse to our private contractors.

I use GoCardless for collecting payments. Airtable and a python script for billing.

And how do you handle accounting/taxes? Esp if you are in Europe?

Try Chargebee. They support multiple payment gateways as well.

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