Show HN: ChargeBee - Recurring Billing | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: ChargeBee - Recurring Billing

chargebee.com

32 pointsskrish24 comments

As a current Chargify customer, I'll list some of my pain points:

1) Price keeps changing. We've had the underlying price change multiple times over the past few years. This can make it very difficult if your margins are thin. I see your price guarantee, and I think it's a good idea except for one thing: what if your underlying service providers (Authorize, Samurai) change their prices?

2) Still waiting on better reporting. This is a good article on metrics to track: http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2010/09/6-saas-metrics-you... A recurring billing provider should have most of the info to provide these. Sure, I could write it all up in excel, but I have other stuff to do. Make my life just a teeny bit easier.

3) Vendor lock-in - As others have mentioned, portability is a big concern. If we had to switch away from Authorize.net it would be a nightmare to get everyone to re-input their card details. You should make it absolutely explicit what new customers need to do in order to achieve portability. This means knowing your underlying providers, but trust me, your customers don't know them. The reason they're coming to you is because they want to offload the burden of knowing and managing all that.

I wrote up my reasons for going with Chargify a while back: http://peachshake.com/2010/06/15/saas-subscription-billing-o...

Thanks for the feedback.

1. As you pointed out we do not control the prices of underlying partners. However, our price guarantee is for the subscription billing solution that we provide.

We understand that we become an integral part, an extension of customer's application to manage billing. And that is a lot of responsibility. Will clarify on the price guarantee part by rewording it correctly.

2. This is one of the things we want to focus on immediately with our customers on-board. Thanks for the reference. We intend to help manage the entire accounts receivables piece for you, so you don't have to even worry about integrating info back to a Freshbooks or Quickbooks. Coming soon. :)

3. Will ensure we document the portability part very well upfront, so you know we have a plan in place.

Thanks again.

We are a bunch of folks experienced in building cloud apps for the last several years. Myself and one of my partner were college classmates. We stayed in touch and kept discussing about quitting and building a business of our own and eventually did.

On hindsight, we should have quit & started lot earlier. It took 10 years working in the industry and 2 years of thinking about quitting, dabbling with different ideas before we eventually did. :)

We quit our jobs last year along with two other friends who complement in areas of expertise and started working on this together.

We have first hand experience of subscription billing issues building multiple products in previous jobs and felt we could definitely do a good job of solving this problem.

So, here we are. We just started our private beta and have few folks testing our app and integrating with us.

We build out API doc framework ground-up (design inspired by docco, used by Stripe as well) and our auto-generated doc doubles up as documentation for our code.

Here is a link to our API documentation: https://apidocs.chargebee.com/docs/api

Help us with your review comments. Thanks!

Looks good, a few comments

Some of the English doesn't quite feel right. For example under FAQ:

We understand that we are in serious business

I'd expect to read "We understand that we are in a serious business". Really minor, but these things matter, especially when you are asking people to trust you.

Secondly, when looking at a solution like this, the first place I want to go is your API docs, to see what I can/can't do , and how easy it is. I can't seem to see those linked from your website.

Finally- I'm a little bit suspicous/worried that your pricing is so low (e.g. no recurring charge and 20 cents per transaction). Although that's a plus point from one point of view, it makes me think you must be skimping on some important details or costs (customer service??), or that you're not going to be around in 12 months time!

I'm not suggesting that is the case with you guys, just that this could be the perception of someone landing on your page.

Thank you. Valuable points.

- Will have the English fixed quickly.

- Just submitted my comment with API link. Here it is: https://apidocs.chargebee.com/docs/api

- We gave lot of thought to our pricing. Because of our cost structure, we think we are priced it optimally. One thing we founders are very clear about is stick to the price customers sign-up for and only apply new price for newer customers.

- We intend to bring value adds like integration to a third party tax API, integration to CRM, accounting system etc., and use that to generate additional revenue than dump it on 100% of our customer base, making it an integration add-on.

But as you rightly pointed out pricing is something we should think about, especially how it is perceived (premium product or not!).

Thanks again.

EDIT: Updated pricing clarification.

With the great things that Stripe and GoCardless are doing I worry that the market for apps like this Chargify and the others will start shrinking soon. Stripe may not be able to gobble up the whole market themselves but I'm sure there will be other services inspired by them.

Rather than focusing on the nasty PCI compliance stuff there could be a bigger opportunity to work a layer higher. Think business tools for managing and measuring subscriptions across different services. Recurly, Chargify et al seem to have stagnated on that front, probably because they're having to spend so much time on retaining PCI compliance while scaling.

Valid points that we keep getting asked about.

Our thought is: how can I build the essential tools to help you manage entire accounts receivables for you? What reports, integrations can I provide so you are able to focus completely on core product and marketing functions.

This is our first entry into building a business and our focus is to add more value on the side of merchants than the processor end.

Thanks for the input. Will definitely keep this in mind as we add features to our application.

Good day....

I really like:

- the names of your plans. 'Start up', 'Growth', and 'Scale up' are great terms. - your overall colour scheme (though I wish you'd either change the blue in your logo, or the blue in the top headline bar)

I'm not a big fan of:

- your icons (ie - the PCI icon beside 'Highly Secure'). Some of them have shadows. Others don't have any shadows. Some of the light sources don't match up. I found this part rather jarring. - the three email addresses in the bottom right corner. If you choose to put email addresses on your page, only go with two -- sales and service. Based on my experience, only having two choices will increase the rate at which people contact you. However, a contact form would be best! - when you mouseover menu items, the text lightens a little bit (barely perceptible). When you mouseover an active menu item, the underline turns orange. I'm not sure why, but I found this a little jarring. - When you enter your blog, it opens up a new tab and there are no navigation items. From a marketing point of view, I think that prevents you from doing any kind of article marketing.

Great work and congratulations on your launch!!

Great feedback. Will work on each one. Yes the blog menu really needs rework and we had been planning on migrating to wordpress with a design same as that of website.

Thanks.

Re: your website design

* Shade of blue in logo (nice) and blue stripe do not match. Bluish color of links in main navigation is yet another shade of blue, perceptually.

* Your logo is, judging from favicon, round thing on a black square - black square is completely lost when put on top of a black stripe at the top of the page.

* I really like your suggestions in prices table: 'Ideal for 2000+ transactions', 'Ideal for 3000+ transactions' Prospective client will do her math by herself, three times, but this gives a feeling of prices being thought out well and optimised not only from your perspective, but from client perspective, too.

* I like your plans names ('Start Up', 'Growth', 'Scale Up'). How about makeing them a bit more dynamic: 'Starting Up', 'Growing', 'Scaling Up'?

* 'Special pricing with Samurai: 15¢ per txn. No minimums.' txn - reverse engineer. Also, could be clickable - link should explain offer in full detail.

* Overall feel is a bit static and 'this-is-theme-based-design'.

* Back to colors. Green dashed lines in price table and green button (against all sorts of blue). Overall feeling is rather sad, grey.

* 'Frequently Asked Questions?' on pricing page - skip the question mark. Its not even a FAQ.

* Line spacing in FAQ is way to big (and font way too small). Also, fonts do not fit in. It almost feels like my browser didnt pick up some stylesheets.

* page: http://www.chargebee.com/features.html even more 'shades of blue' (inside box on the left); Also, first header starts on blue stripe - major div/CSS problems here.

* http://www.chargebee.com/faq.html font selection, font sizes, line spacing!

* Lots of work on copy, in my opinion. Example: 'Here we are building ChargeBee, earning your trust & business one transaction at a time.' Earning my business?

* Found video on /howitworks - well.. machine voice in video is unacceptable.

* Your blog is on some other platform (and its not good, design wise) - it should be part of your 'company website', design wise, url wise and what not.

* Overall, this is your frontend to the world and it must look, read and feel better. Dont underestimate it.

Me thinks.

Thank you for the detailed feedback. Will address each one of them.

I am not a native speaker but it has been mentioned by others in related comments here on HN that the usage of the words "Plans and Pricing" is redundant. Your link in the top menu says "Pricing" and when I click on it I come to a page that says "Plans & Pricing" which can also be a problem in itself.

Minor nitpick here, but it's an odd mix of serif and sans-serif fonts attacking my eyes on the home page.

Quick note on my gut reaction about the design:

The changing text and the header below the blue section don't look very good with serif fonts. They seem to not flow well with the rest of the design and are giving (at least me) a feeling of disjointedness.

Thanks for the feedback. Will fix it.

It looks like your service is a front-end for existing payment processors, some of whom already offer recurring billing products. How do you differentiate your service against something like Braintree's Vault and recurring billing?

Braintree provides great customer service, payment processing and recurring billing. We specialize in specific needs of web app subscription billing.

Certain functionalities like Dunning management (follow-ups for card failures), proration logic, readily available custom hosted pages, coupon code support, metered billing etc., In all we have tried to build ChargeBee as an extension of your app specializing in subscription business needs.

We will start providing extensive reports, integration to accounting, CRM systems to help manage entire accounts receivables function. Hope that helps.

We are in private beta and requested for feedback on the website. The title has been changed by moderator I guess and it doesn't reflect the original intent. Thanks for all the feedback.

Your recurring billing service works in India? (saw zaakpay there)

Not with Zaakpay due to RBI regulation. (For the wider audience: Reserve Bank of India has a regulation in place for last year+ that all credit cards in India need to go through 2 factor authentication including a one-time-password that is generated by card issuing banks. This makes recurring billing non-viable for Indian payment gateways).

We work with 2Checkout to make recurring billing work for companies registered in India. And you can use multiple gateways eventually via ChargeBee as you build traction for the business.

When your business has equal split of customers from India and abroad that is when you might prefer to have a local payment gateway offering 3 months, 6 months or 12 month subscription via Zaakpay. Some of the businesses does this successfully. One of the use cases we (intend) to solve with Zaakpay is

I had an account with 2Checkout awhile ago. At the time their terms were like that I needed like $600 in my account before I could withdraw.

I earned like $470 over time, and then they started deducting various fees from my account effectively wiping my balance.

They rank alongside paypal in my book, and I avoid them with the passion of the christ.

One of the main concerns when using a new payment startup is that if they fail are you still able to retain/transfer the recurring payments to another provider?

Good point. We do not store the card ourselves. We intend to store it with established gateways like Authorize.net or gateways like Samurai that have an open vault.

And when we build the vault ourselves (if business demands it) we'll totally let you transfer card information freely without ever holding data as hostage.

I don't get how there is even 1 company that manage to survive doing something so simple. I've argued this before - recurring billing is super simple, no need to pay someone to manage it. Can be programmed in hours.

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