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Comment by spookthesunset | Hacker News Reader

Or better, buy a billing system instead of inventing one inhouse. Billing is hard to do correctly. For one thing it interconnects with so many different platforms in your company. For another thing, the cost of fucking something up is high--people don't exactly like seeing mistakes in their bill. Hell, think about tax... you wanna deal with that shit?

To do it "correct" you've got to have people who truly understand accounting concepts like double entry bookkeeping, financial reporting, cash vs. accrual, financial regulations, auditors, etc. Unless your company's product is billing, good luck hiring an engineer who knows this shit.

But trust me from experience. Don't build your own billing system. There are several good ones out there that will grow with your organization. Buy one.

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Similar experience in some companies in my CV. Billing systems aren't fun to maintain, develop nor debug. They take a non-trivial amount of time when done wrong and if you are building one in-house you'll inevitably run into some mistake.

Buy a billing system, it'll save engineering hours having to deal with it and if you choose right they'll scale with your company.

Not only will you get mistakes, but much worse in my opinion is the opportunity costs involved. You will always be playing catchup to add new (very basic) features that the real packages offer right out of the box.

For example if your homebrew thing doesn't handle price changes, that might take you quite some time to build in functionality. That time spent is time where you couldn't quickly react to market changes, which is money left on the table. Had you bought something that supports a simple use case like "change the price", you'd hit a couple buttons and boom... your product now sells for a different price.

A companies billing system is one of the most important systems in the company. It is literally how money gets into your pocket. If you build it yourself, you will sign up for pissing away a ton of time writing code that literally will let you collect more money from your customers. Had you bought something, you'd just fucking go do the change right away and collect more money from your customers almost instantly.

I totally agree with you, I had to work on the Qonto's billing system (that Raffi is talking in the blog post) and it wasn't fun to maintain. I remember the pain it was to change anything without breaking the whole system, not because the system was bad, but because it's complex and when you build it in-house, you will certainly take some shortcuts that makes it not so flexible!

Could not agree more. Even building your own billing system atop something like stripe is super complicated. Rebill dates, proration, upgrade/downgrade, cancel, updating card on file, refunds, charge backs. These are all things you end up patching as you come across them.

There was a really nice and simple to use billing software that was built on stripe. I used it for a handful of products after I decided to never roll my own again. It is gone now. GoDaddy bought them and shut them down.

I think Stripe checkout is a valid solution now if you don't mind sending your customers away from your site, but I haven't played with it since they rolled it out.

As you say; billing system is tip of an iceberg. There's reconciliation, settlement, payouts, tax, financial reporting and what not. For a small mom-and-pop store, sure build it. But for any half-complex business billing is a rabbit hole.

"How to realize when you're about to build your own billing system" would be a more useful discussion.

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