Chargebee

Stripe or Paddle for payment processing for SaaS?

we used Stripe + Chargebee once and will NEVER use them again (they charge too much (300usd/month while offering way fewer integrations than Stripe)

Furthermore, Chargebee doesn't support managing disputes. We still need to go to stripe for that.

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts

Dear StackShare Community,

I am seeking inspiration on creating a billing & subscription stack and came across this wonderful website and community.

From what I understood so far, I need something like Stripe or Braintree to collect payments without dealing with PCI compliance or setting up merchant accounts, etc... Additionally, services like Chargebee, Recurly, Chargify, etc. are said to make life easier when dealing with recurring billing.

Stated below, I've tried to give you some context on what I want to achieve. I am very curious about your ideas and how you'd configure an optimal stack.

Project context (very high level):

• Loyalty program for local merchants (stores, restaurants,...).

• Customers support their community and merchants by shopping local.

• Merchants grant points to customers based on a customer's value spent in a store, restaurant, etc.

• Customers can redeem their points at any participating merchant.

Billing / Subscription scenarios to be considered:

(affecting merchants only)

One-time setup fee

• What: Merchant pays a setup fee by signing up for the service

• Where: Order placed on the website

Monthly retainer fee

• What: Merchant pays a monthly recurring retainer for the service.

• Where: Order placed on the website

Manually initiated payment

• What: Merchant initiates a payment to top up his virtual points wallet. E.g. pays 100 USD to top up 100000 points which then can be used by the merchant for granting points to customers.

• Why: Points issued to members need to be paid for by the merchant. We first considered billing the merchants post-ante, e.g. monthly based on the points they've granted to their customers in the last 30 days, but this seems too risky: If they can't / won't pay we'd still have to pay out points to the customers (technically to the merchants where the customers redeem their points). Thus, the pragmatic idea to reduce risk by having the merchants to pre-pay for their points by topping up their balance.

• Where: Web application (with the merchant logged in)

• Nice to have: Opt-in for automatically initiated top-ups if a merchant's balance falls below a certain amount.

Invoicing

• What: After every transaction (setup, retainer, top-up,...), we need to automatically issue and send (E-Mail) an invoice to the merchant.

• Nice to have: Customer portal with all their invoices.

Other potentially relevant parameters

• Currency: Only Euro

• Country: Only Germany (so far)

• Tax: Only one tax rate

• Payment for setup & retainer: Credit Card; ideally SEPA Direct Debit (but that still causes headache due to the SEPA regulatory and risk of chargebacks still after weeks), PayPal?

• Payment for top-up: Same as above plus any other that makes sense (Klarna, Sofort, PayPal...)

Again, thank you very much for sharing your ideas and thoughts! I'd highly appreciate any input :-)

Stripe is awesome and works great for subscription models but there's a problem: If you want to make money, you need to have multiple payment gateways. That's why we choose Chargebee .

We can integrate with Adyen or SagePay for EU customers without needing to create a new integration

Running a subscription service with just direct calls to Stripe or similar payment gateways is possible but also needs dedicated person(s) for decent amount of development and maintenance.

Plus features like updating card details, invoice history - all these can be built. Again, more dev work and resources.

Use of subscription platform like Chargebee or Recurly is definitely a great help here.

Chargebee offered a simple pay-as-you-go transparent pricing and almost trivial signup process.

#Paymentgatewayintegration

Deciding what tools to use to set up selling from a JAMstack site. Stripe, PayPal, Braintree, @snipcart, @gumroad, @foxy, @memberful, Chargebee, Recurly.

Gonna talk about the #business side a bit by chiming in on our decision for a #billing software with Livestorm. Like many (all? :p) SaaS softwares out there, we're accepting most payments as a subscription via Stripe & credit card. While implementing it in 2016 and accepting our first payments, we soon realized that some customers needed other ways of payments and some had specific needs when it comes to invoices. We also needed ways to create coupons, offer refunds, find delinquent payments etc. Finally, we also wanted an easy way to measure our business metrics (number of customers, MRR, churn etc), even if there are other dedicated solutions for it. So that's how we ended up choosing Chargebee. Chargebee helps us be more flexible and quick to react to customers' needs. Everything can be done by our CS people without any dev time. We're in the process of updating our billing system, and although it's a big project, Chargebee's doc makes it as painless as possible.