Ask HN: Subscription platform suggestion for side project? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Subscription platform suggestion for side project?

1 pointmonkey_slap5 comments

I'm making an app package for golf courses. I've written a demo app and have gotten some interest from some local courses that I think could be perfect first customers. I don't want to start things too simple and do something like Stripe payments or Paypal. I'd like to get some sort of system up and running to attempt to let them sign up and subscribe so I can immediately start working on getting new customers.

I've looked into things like Shopify+Chargify [0], SaaSy [1], Zoura [2], Recurly [3], etc. I'm usually a DIYer but I just don't want to invest the time into a potentially unscalable and insecure solution. Plus, all of the account management and analytics included in these packages look great.

I honestly just want Shopify with subscriptions, but from just 30 minutes of research on Chargify, it looks like it causes some hassle for users (not to mention its pricey). Any suggestions, tips, or warnings would be greatly appreciated.

[0] http://chargify.com/

[1] http://saasy.com/

[2] http://www.zuora.com/

[3] http://recurly.com/

My advice, is to not build that in just yet. Say you charge, tell them the price, and take their credit card or money - and put them on a plan. Manually charge them through Square or whatever the first month or two, then build that portion out as it's required. 37Signals and a whole other slew of companies did just this too - so I'm not crazy.

The real reason to delay it personally, is that you might find their acceptable industry payment is different than you think. They may be used to paying monthly via check, and not do CC's. You never know. But this gives you the ability to charge, AND figure out the correct long term solution.

This is really great advice. I'll have to talk to potential first customers and maybe even just ask them "how do you want to pay" to see how much of a priority this is to get rolling.

Thanks!

I hope it helps. That lesson came from pain in my last B2B company. We built in CC payments into our SaaS - and then found out most companies paid all their vendors monthly via check.

my take is that all those options are fine (except Paypal!!)

i have many biz friends who use Stripe, including some for recurring subscriptions, and I've never heard any bad feedback on it. Only good.

Chargify and Recurly are specifically aimed at recurring subscriptions for developers.

Other solid options are Memberful and Spacebox.io

Awesome I'll look into those two.

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