Show HN: Subscription Billing for Developers and Startups
billforward.net
billforward.net
Then I went to sign up and it all came apart. Firstly, I didn't get the email that I was supposed to (even after waiting a while.) Then, I went to sign in, figuring that I didn't need the email anyway. Once I did this, I was greeted with a confusing screen: what the heck is a Unit of Measure? I couldn't find any information on what it was anywhere, including with Google, so I went back and tried to set up a payment gateway. I chose PayPal. For that, I apparently have to email the help account to "discuss integration". So I tried Braintree, Balanced, CyberSource, Authorize.Net - all the same story. Boom, I've already hit several major roadblocks.
Contrast this with https://snappycheckout.com/, which was really easy to set up, and I've had a great experience overall with it.
[0] The only flaw I saw was that I didn't know what my users would see. Would they see a standard form, as with Snappy Checkout or Stripe, or would I pass credit card details to your service with my own form and you handle the rest?
[edit] Still no email, two hours after signing up.
First, Billforward tells you to check your email after you signup which I waited a few minutes for then found it contained no activation link or anything (it just contains some "see our docs" type message). So you let me signup successfully then have me exit your site to read an email that is not required to then come back to the site to login? Why not just log the user in right after signup? Or at least send the user to the login page after signup. This round trip from signup to useless email to login was a waste of time.
I then logged in to see a message telling me to setup a unit of measure. What that is supposed to be I have no idea. The tooltips on the units of measure modal offer no real help. Why not just do a "Create a billing plan" wizard or something similar. Also on the sidebar, there is a link that says "Dunning" that contains no helpful text and just another empty table. If I have to Google a word and read a wikipedia entry to figure out what it's for, you've failed in your mission to 'simplify'.
For a site that is supposed to make billing easier the site is incredibly confusing and unintuitive.
If you think you are going to be selling your product with usage based pricing, or want to use tiered pricing then we can add value from what you get with Stripe. Feel free to drop me an e-mail at ian AT billforward . net and can talk through you use-case.
https://www.mandrill.com/features/
I definitely prefer pages like that.
Our goal is to enable any company to bill how they want without hassle or constraints of building out a full subscription stack. Billing models such as tiered/volume pricing and usage billing can get complex but we make them very simple to use. You can often implement these features in places such as Stripe et al but often the minutiae becomes complex. We built the product that can scale from a simple flat price all the way up to composite price plans with tiered/volume pricing.
What we are trying to do is enable companies to have a single billing platform that grows with them from simple flat priced subscriptions all the way up to subscriptions which have multiple components and pricing strategies.
For example some of our customers sell their subscriptions with 3 or 4 components, for example international calls, local calls, 4g usage, 3g usage etc. Inside each of these units they give discounts the more you use. For example up to 100 minutes of X is $1 a minute, whereas anything above 100 minutes X is charged at 75c a minute.
Docs are fixed! Thanks for letting us know... http://docs.billforward.net