Chargebee

Vorteile

I love that Chargebee allows young startups to get their feet under them before charging them. The integration into Braintree was SUPER easy and we haven't really had any problems with it since we started using it.

It allows us to manage subscriptions without building our own dev dashboard to do that and gives us much more flexibility than Braintree for doing so. We use coupons to run promos and Chargebee makes that super easy. We use their hosted page for payments inside of an iframe and that has been helpful as well.

Again the biggest thing as a young startup is not having to build all of that ourselves or asking the dev team to make changes every time we need to address an issue. Overall I've been very happy with Chargebee and we plan to continue to use them moving forward.

Nachteile

I'd love for the reporting dashboard to be a little more robust and user friendly. It's not bad but it could definitely be better.

Being able to accept multiple currencies could also be handled better, but we get by just fine with the way it's set up.

It makes you change your password every 90 days, which is annoying to me but I guess it's more secure...

Vorteile

We rely on Chargebee to manage subscriptions to our product. It's easy to use and to be integrated, and offers many features such as invoicing, TAX calculator based on location, several plans, offline payments, etc. Customer Support is great and they always hear what you say.

Besides managing your subscriptions, it does something very important. By using their payment form on your website, you can easily integrate with several payment processors. This is especially important if you have payments that have been rejected by one processor and you can send them to another processor. It also reduces the dependency on one single processor.

Nachteile

The only thing that comes to mind is that the invoices it produces are not legal in some countries. For instance, in my country, invoicing software needs to be certified and to produce a SAF-T file with all invoices, that we need to submit to tax authorities. Since Chargebee doesn't do any of that, I need to have a separate invoicing platform.

Vorteile

Easy to set up and has a good API. Support is good and fast response so long as the issues are simple and don't involve anything technical.

Nachteile

The backend system is grossly unoptimized to the point many of my customers cannot be billed anymore. I was not informed of these issues when signing up and was promised that the system would be able to handle my very specific usecase. It clearly can't despite me giving them actual numbers. I've already lost over $6000 in charges I can't add to my customers' invoices and a few thousand dollars in invoices that can't be generated. For the past two months I've been unable to add charges for any of my customers and keep getting the runaround by different support agents as to what the cause is. First I was told I was violating a 150 API calls per minute limit despite the fact that not a single call had gone through successfully in the entire time period they were citing but also I'm skeptical of because each API call I make to their service takes between 2 and 10 seconds to complete. Now I'm told I need to batch things weekly because adding charges to my customers is too taxing on their CPUs. Billing line items should scale linearly but it is clear from how quickly their API bogs down that it scales exponentially for them at best and likely even worse. I never had this problem with my previous provider and they aren't even a billing or invoicing company.

Vorteile

Excellent platform to manage your Saas Business. Great, very easy to use integrations with many vendors (Stripe, QuickBooks, Zapier, etc). Highly customizable settings for everything: email templates, the general look, and even the workflow & the custom fields.

Nachteile

Takes some time to get used to how to work together with your app and integrate everything to work flawlessly, but it worth it. I just wished that when the client has to select the quantity of their licenses, you could edit the label from Quantity to "users" or "licenses".

Vorteile

- Perfect UX/UI: all the filters, mass operations, detailed settings are available just as I need them, never think a second where to find a function I need
- Great API & integration support
- Very powerful analytics (especially with RevenueStory)
- Awesome support
- A very, very carefully and thoughtfully planned interface with a deep understanding of the user.

Nachteile

I faced literally two issues through the course of 6 years using Chargebee in production.