Show HN: BillForward – Subscription billing platform for startups and developers
billforward.net
billforward.net
The site looks great, I enjoyed viewing it on mobile even mroe than on Desktop. Now to the observations:
1. I would try to reach billforward.com domain owner to purchase it, if you have not tried. .net, while it is popular and the purpose somehow fits (.net - network infrastructure services), I fear 1-5% of customers will be lost due to accidentally typing .com, or simply feeling that if a company is on .net, it might not be as credible as it claims.
2. http://imgur.com/g6KQ3FP - it is zoomed out, initially the background would fit the screen, but the "Tiered, tiered volume ..." phrase was cut.
3. Pricing choice shall attract enough customers to further improve the product. Great idea for fast expansion, but is risky in terms of revenue. I assume, your bet is that many startups going for free, will eventually cross the bracket and start paying 1%.
4. Lack of application screenshots, some would like to look at the product itself before trying.
5. Billing services are obviously critical for any business, some statements and justifications of uptime, robustness and integrity would be very much welcoming.
Great job on explaining what the product is about right in the beginning. And as vijayaggarwal mentioned, call to action is well placed indeed, reminding that there is essentially no risk to try out.
Out of personal curiosity, do you mind sharing what technologies the product is built on?
Good call on the mission critical aspect, we spent a lot of time of that side of things - so even more reason to highlight.
I think we have a few blogs posts lined up which discuss technology, as you can imagine we use quite a few things. As a quick overview we use some relational and no-SQL dbs, a bunch of Java with some Hadoop and Cassandra thrown into the mix :). Node.JS and AngularJS for the front-end servers.
There's a typo you should correct: > Since installing BillForward, Wifinity has seens (should be seen).
Also, consider increasing font size in the docs. 12px is a bit too small to read comfortably. Otherwise this section is very good and comprehensive.
As an entrepreneur myself, I love the fact that there is a relevant call-to-action at every scroll level on every important page. Except just one - Customers page. Perhaps you should put one there also. Guiding visitors to appropriate next action is extremely important for conversions, this I can tell from my experience of running an A/B testing service.
It's a nice touch that they've explicitly called out using ISO8601 for all datetimes and store everything in UTC.
For example if you have a Stripe plan where you charge $5 a seat, but want to reduce the cost as the volume increases or you want to diversify the way you sell, maybe the subscriptions includes a usage charge billed monthly.