adamfeber

Disclaimer: I work for Chargify. While biased, I'd have to agree with (and thank!) the Chargify supporters below :)

Here is a great post from our blog to check out: https://www.chargify.com/blog/buy-vs-build-subscription-bill...

And an excerpt from that post:

Nick Sonnenberg, Co-Founder of Leverage, explained that “Chargify has a wide variety of capabilities you don’t know you need until you need them, such as dealing with expired credit cards by notifying the client automatically. It allows us to upgrade, downgrade, or cancel a client’s subscription easily. There’s a self-service page, which allows clients to update information on their own. It provides metrics month-over-month on critical data such as the number of customers, revenue, and lifetime client value.”

Looking back at their own experiences, Sonnenberg has this advice for new subscription-based startups: “Start with Stripe + Chargify. You’ll save time and money in the long run.”

Good luck in your quest. Let us know if we can help answer any questions for you!

Awesome, thanks for sharing!

Check out: https://www.chargify.com/

Check out https://www.chargify.com/stripe/

Ahh, the buy vs build debate. Disclaimer, I work for https://www.chargify.com/, another provider of recurring billing software in the same space as Chargebee.

We see this question asked a lot it really boils down to resources and what you want to spend your time on. Yes, it is pretty easy to build a basic system with a gateway such as Stripe or Braintree but there are two main problems: 1. It does not scale well (your needs will likely increase) 2. Building and maintaining your own system takes away from focusing on your product (and it is not a core competency)...

As Krush said, there are "hundreds of small things that come up as you grow." By using a best of breed tool, most of these things are available out of the box with little to no dev work needed such as testing plans, coupons/promo codes, taxes, reporting/analytics, billing portal for customer account management, a portal for your support team to see/edit account history/info, system emails, dunning management, and so much more.

The price for billing software like Chargify is minimal compared to the time saved building and maintaining your own system. In fact, the money saved by leveraging our dunning features alone have proven to provide a 4x return based on the monthly cost of Chargify's software. So not only does it save a lot of resources, it provides an ROI.

We have a ton of people that come to us after building their own system, and wished they implement Chargify in the beginning. But it is never too late!

Happy to answer any specific questions.

Awesome tool - I surprisingly spent 248 hours in meetings over the past year. Now it's time to work on cutting that back and only taking meetings when there absolutely necessary.

I work for Chargify and wanted to comment on the "disappearing service problem." Chargify has been around for over 7 years and has been growing and profitable for the last 4 years. If disappearing services is a concern, we do not plan on going anywhere for a long time :)