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Comment by austinkhale | Hacker News Reader

We recently made the decision as a SaaS company to switch from a subscription management platform I won't name to Stripe. The process has not been without a couple bumps along the way, but frankly working with Stripe is similar to that scene from Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers when Gandalf tells Theoden to "Breathe the free air again, my friend."

Please continue to do what you're doing in this space. Payments are such a complex beast and it's refreshing to work with a company that works so hard to abstract that complexity.

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My personal experience is that all subscription management platforms fall over when you're doing enterprise SaaS. At a certain level (because literally your most valuable customers insist), you have to deal with credit cards, ACH, wire transfers, and checks. On top of that: custom plans, all sorts of weird line items and discounts, prepays, etc. And then you usually want reporting in multiple different formats (e.g. for the accountants/IRS, for company leadership)... it gets messy really quickly and I haven't seen platform that can handle the mess. Probably a startup in there, but not one I'd like to build.

I’m curious if any other HNers know of solutions out there that solve these problems.

In house solutions. Once a company becomes large enough where paying a company like Stripe's fees becomes larger than hiring enough people to create and maintain an internal billing system, then you do it yourself.

This is something that companies that are near public company size do since the amount of work required to meet payment regulations alone, not to mention all of the infrastructure to support things like subscriptions is staggering.

This is why there aren't many solutions to this problem. It's a very difficult problem.

I have migrated 2 companies away from internal billing systems (one went to Stripe and the other went to Chargify). The amount of hacks that went into maintaining these internal systems was shocking. One company literally devised its own currency to deal with the complexity.

Managing and developing your own billing system is a almost always a bad idea, no matter how big your company is. There is a high likelihood that you will end up running a business within a business if you go that route.

Yea it depends on the technological competencies of the company. I have a friend who works at a company who implemented their own, and they seem to be doing fine, but you hit the nail on the head saying

> you will end up running a business within a business if you go that route.

Zuora can do complex billing. You still need to provide a processor though.

Take a look at open-source solutions, specifically Kill Bill [1] (disclaimer, I'm a core contributor)

It provides a subscription management platform with all the features you would expect out of the box (recurring billing, plans management, dunning, notifications, etc.), but with also a plugin framework where you can implement your own billing logic.

You can continue to use processors like Stripe to handle the recurring charges (and compliance associated with storing cards), but they are only used to charge the payment methods. The mess that OP mentions stays in-house, where you have tighter control over it.

[1] https://killbill.io/

Stripe just started accepting checks. It was very much missing given the 'creative' ways that enterprise customers like to pay.

Thank you! A lot still to do.

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