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Comment by mattbee | Hacker News Reader

I don't know about this advice, you ain't gonna need half the features it talks about, and you absolutely can build it out gradually as your business grows.

You do need to understand the concepts of invoices, credit, tax periods, pro-rata billing changes and so on... but all of that knowledge can be used to make an informed decision on build vs buy, rather than an automatic reason to outsource.

The only external API you need for software-as-a-service is a credit card processor, two if you're fancy. Sure after the first year you will probably have a bunch of manual work to do and your accountants will tell you the dumb stuff you've done, and you'll learn a lot about accounting :)

(I would still shop around to start a new business today, but with the confidence that building isn't very scary)

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As someone who's been involved in both building and integrating billing systems, I can say you speak from a position of blissful ignorance.

Building the system always looks easy, and on day 1, it really is. It also guarantees you'll spend many hours with your Finance Director explaining why the reports you send them are complete garbage; many hours with your Support team explaining why your invoicing failed, why you charged incorrect subscription prices, any many more fun edge cases you never knew existed.

Next up, regulations change that you need to adapt to, or maybe your chosen gateway doesn't support a growing region.

And before you say "just build it better," remember: that's also time. Time not spent on your product, improving your pricing model (oh, you need to build that yourself, too, of course), or any number of things you want to do that actually grow your business instead of standing still.

My very first startup (early 2000's) was a SaaS billing platform. It was acquired long ago, but I've yet to work on any system that approached that level of complexity. Ignoring all of the challenges of taxes and such, things rapidly scale in complexity as soon as one needs some level of flexibility.

For simple cases where entitlements are limited and the billing is generic, I think it's fine to built it yourself as long as you're aware of the time and cost of doing so vs. buying it. As others have said, time spent on building billing is time NOT spent on building products.

> As someone who's been involved in both building and integrating billing systems, I can say you speak from a position of blissful ignorance.

As someone who has worked on exactly the same billing code and running system as the GP, I can say that you have dramatically underestimated their experience in this area.

>>> Sure after the first year you will probably have a bunch of manual work to do and your accountants will tell you the dumb stuff you've done, and you'll learn a lot about accounting :)

> I can say that you have dramatically underestimated their experience in this area.

No, I really haven't.

I'm not going to join the willy-waving but I truly did spend a lot of time building a completely custom billing system! Lots of monthly subscriptions, per-unit billing, pricing changes, tax changes.

We added complexity as the business grew, and it was an integrated part of the hosting service that we sold.

I'm not saying it's for every company and every product, but for a bootstrapped British company in 2004 it wasn't even a question, there was nothing to buy.

That experience might colour my opinion that it's easier than it appears, or that you can get away with a lot less than SaaS billing solutions provide.

> for a bootstrapped British company in 2004 it wasn't even a question, there was nothing to buy.

So that's context I didn't have and it makes a lot of sense for 2004. I wouldn't apply this to 2024 any more than I'd apply my old boss's lessons about dBase to modern database design.

> I truly did spend a lot of time

This is the core of the issue. If I were starting a business in 2024, I'd say "stick Stripe Billing on it" and "spend a lot of time" on things my customers care about instead. The reality of building your own billing system is that you have to learn about all the things we both mentioned above and, as your business grows, start praying that the team you have working on it also learn those things. Otherwise you end up with the problems I mentioned (and I know this because I inherited these problems from my predecessors).

Whatever route you are going, talk to your accountants first and see what information you must have attached to a payment for legal reasons.

You can ignore everything else, but if you can't calculate your taxes later or end on the bad side of a KYC law, you'll have a really bad time.

Also, keep in mind that just because some system sells for more money than you'd expect to spend and lots of companies that you imagine were savvy use it, it doesn't mean that the system is fit for purpose, and even less that it's fit for the purpose you want to give it. Buying doesn't free you from research.

The core thing with B2B SAAS is you make money off of higher touch sales, that lead to requirements.

The objective as someone working on this kind of billing is simple: offer your sales teams the right options so they can close deals. This involves collaborating with your sales team to figure out what is in the “easy to implement x good enough to close deals” bucket

I can’t stess this enough. Your sales team is closing sales! Stop whining about your perfect billing system. Yes it is shocking but sometimes you have to apply elbow grease to problems involving business relationships

You should try to do things in straightforward ways when possible but really you should have a system that is legible to other teams in your company, and one that is easily to manually tweak even with automation running around it. This is like 80% of why Stripe feels so good to use. Manual tweaks are a fact of life, even if for some businesses they’re rare

You are underestimating how hard just managing pricing in subscription bundles are once you have expanded to multiple countries and currencies. Pro-rating, different billing schedules, trials, testing the new prices, pricing per region, taxes per region, listing your bundles with different currencies and rolling out new prices is suddenly 6 currencies * X regions * Y products * Z billing schedules * L different languages. All of this while you will be adding new subscriptions, merging subscription plans, discontinuing old plans while gracefully rolling customers over to alternative new plans all the while communicating well with the customers. And since you are doing SAAS, pretty much all has to be automated and self service and well tested or you will drown in customer support and customers leaving.

You assume you will have time to work on it. We are a business of 35 employees, 300k SAAS customers in low cost B2C, we are busy building product and fixing bugs there, we basically have zero minutes to spend on extending the billing system or implementing custom deals. Rolling out a price change can take anywhere from 3 days to 2 months (dealing with early efforts on custom deals is a nightmare). If it cant easily be automated, we can't do it. It takes too much time. If we had based our billing on a product like those mentioned here, we likely could have had way better chance of doing custom deals and rolling out price changes per customer segments.

It comes down to what you want to be your core competency.

If it's billing, sure go for it. Being fully able to customize your billing stack is I think a strength, exactly because of all the points the OP is making, plus many other traps. I think it can be genuinely interesting and there's always more to discover, but it's a full time job for a at least a small team for most companies.

If instead your goal was to run a business or build user features, do other things, offloading the billing part is definitely the best (probably the only) option.

Obtaining income from customers, and correctly accounting for it such that you can pay the right amounts of taxes on it so the government and your customers’ lawyers will let you keep it, is in many senses the only core competency a business needs.

IMHO you'll probably need a reason for your customers to pay you in the place.

Perhaps you're giving Walmart money because they're very good at accepting it, but as a customer there's probably something else you're expecting from the exchange...

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