What is Stripe Billing and what are its top alternatives?
Stripe Billing is a popular subscription and billing platform that helps businesses manage recurring payments, invoicing, and revenue recognition. It offers features like flexible billing plans, invoice customization, dunning management, and subscription analytics. However, some limitations of Stripe Billing include complex pricing structure, lack of built-in support for multiple languages/currencies, and limited customization options for invoices.
- Chargebee: Chargebee is a subscription management and recurring billing platform that provides one-time payments, automated invoicing, revenue recognition, and subscription analytics. Pros: support for multiple languages/currencies, flexible pricing plans. Cons: pricing may be higher for small businesses.
- Recurly: Recurly is a subscription billing platform that offers automated billing, revenue optimization, and dunning management. Pros: robust API, flexible pricing models. Cons: limited customization options for invoices.
- Zuora: Zuora is a subscription management platform for enterprises, offering features like quote-to-cash, subscription billing, and revenue recognition. Pros: enterprise-grade solutions, scalability. Cons: may be too complex for small businesses.
- ChargeOver: ChargeOver is a recurring billing and subscription management platform with features like automated invoicing, dunning management, and payment processing. Pros: user-friendly interface, customizable reporting. Cons: limited integrations with other platforms.
- Chargify: Chargify is a subscription billing platform that provides automated invoicing, dunning management, and revenue recognition. Pros: easy to use, support for multiple payment gateways. Cons: limited customization options for invoices.
- Fusebill: Fusebill is a subscription billing platform with features like billing automation, revenue recognition, and subscription analytics. Pros: scalable solutions, customizable billing plans. Cons: may be complex for beginners.
- FastSpring: FastSpring is an e-commerce platform for digital businesses that includes subscription billing, global payments, and compliance management. Pros: global payment support, easy setup. Cons: limited subscription management features compared to others.
- Chargehound: Chargehound is a dunning management platform that helps businesses reduce churn by automating failed payment recovery processes. Pros: specialized in dunning, easy integration with billing platforms. Cons: limited features beyond dunning.
- Razorpay: Razorpay is a payment gateway platform that also offers subscription billing solutions, providing features like automated invoicing and revenue optimization. Pros: easy payment gateway integration, user-friendly dashboard. Cons: limited subscription management features compared to full-fledged billing platforms.
- Paddle: Paddle is an e-commerce platform for software businesses that includes subscription billing, payment processing, and revenue attribution. Pros: all-in-one platform for software sales, global payment support. Cons: fees may be higher for smaller businesses.
Top Alternatives to Stripe Billing
RecurlyRecurly is the leading pay-as-you-go recurring billing service because setup is easy, integrations are quick, and our service grows with the needs of your business. ...
ChargebeeChargebee is a subscription billing platform that lets you bill, manage and understand your SaaS or subscription based eCommerce business easily. ...
ZuoraZuora gives you the enterprise-class, cloud-based tools you need to launch and scale any subscription service, quickly and affordably. Design your pricing and packaging, start taking quotes and placing orders, automate your billing and payments, and keep tabs on your financials. ...
StripeStripe makes it easy for developers to accept credit cards on the web.
ProfitWellIt provides free subscription metrics to help you identify opportunities and then tools to help you reduce churn, optimize pricing, and grow your subscription business end-to-end. ...
ReChargeIt is the shopify subscription solution for online businesses. It makes it easy to transform one-time products into subscription options. It was built with the goal of making payments easy for customers. This was primarily by looking for ways for customers to reorder products ...
OctaneIt is a drop-in metered billing system that gives you the flexibility to bill how you want. It enables software companies to offer usage-based billing. It helps companies meter customer usage, price according to flexible plans, and bill customers through payment gateways. ...
QonversionQonversion allows fast in-app subscription implementation. It provides the back-end infrastructure to validate user receipts and manage cross-platform user access to paid content on your app, so you do not need to build your own server. ...
Stripe Billing alternatives & related posts
- Recurring billing20
- Simplicity10
- Works with multiple gateways9
- Supports Value Added Tax9
- Great support & easy to use7
- Simple4
- Amazing3
related Recurly posts
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 :-)
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
Chargebee
related Chargebee posts
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 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
- Well documented API1
- Recurring billing1
- Reliable1
- Extensive Documentation1
- Pricing1
related Zuora posts
- Easy setup302
- Developer friendly292
- Well-designed api248
- Great documentation191
- Clear pricing169
- Secure75
- Reliable74
- Full integration with webhooks63
- Amazing api43
- Great customer support38
- Easy11
- Credit cards never hit your server - no pci worries6
- Recurring billing5
- No merchant account/gateway required4
- BitCoin3
- Easy to integrate3
- Support for SCA (Strong Customer Authentication)2
- Fast UI2
- Great app2
- Beautiful1
- Connect1
- Checkout.js1
- Great UI1
- So easy to use1
- Payments without own backend (using Stripe Products)1
- Connect4
- CANNOT withdraw USD to a Canadian Bank Account2
- Does NOT have a currency conversion option like Paypal2
- They keep 25% of the income for 60 days2
related Stripe posts
To accept payments on updown.io, we first added support for Stripe which is by far the most popular payment gateway for startups and for a good reason. Their service is of awesome quality: the UI is gorgeous, the integration is easy, the documentation is great, the API is super stable and well thought. I can't recommend it enough.
We then added support for PayPal which is pretty popular for people who have money on it and don't know where to spend it (it can make it feel like you're spending less when it comes from PayPal wallet), or for people who prefer not to enter a credit card on a new website. This was pretty well received and we're currently receiving about 25% of our purchases from PayPal. The documentation and integration is much more painful than with Stripe IMO, I can't recommend them for that, but not having it is basically dodging potential sales.
Finally we more recently added support of BitPay for #Bitcoin and BitcoinCash payments, which was a pretty easy process but not worth the time in the end due to the low usage and the always changing conditions of the network: the transaction fees got huge after price raise and bitcoin because unusable for small payments, they then introduced support for BCH and a newer Bitcoin protocol for lower fees, but then you need a special wallet to pay and in the end it's too cumbersome, even for bitcoin users, to pay with it. I think unless you expect a bit number of payments using cryptocurrencies it's not worth implementing this solution, and better to accept them manually.
Google Analytics is a great tool to analyze your traffic. To debug our software and ask questions, we love to use Postman and Stack Overflow. Google Drive helps our team to share documents. We're able to build our great products through the APIs by Google Maps, CloudFlare, Stripe, PayPal, Twilio, Let's Encrypt, and TensorFlow.
ProfitWell
related ProfitWell posts
related ReCharge posts
We are currently on ReCharge and are thinking of moving to Upscribe.io.
Our reasons: - inflexibility of Recharge checkout (e.g. does not integrate with our Upsell app)
cost (charges per transaction so we pay more as we grow even if we make no changes)
lack of retention tools ( they have messages when people unsubscribe but these cannot be adapted and are not very engaging)
Any Suggestions?
related Octane posts
- Integration with Facebook Ads3
- Get data from app stores3
- Fair pricing2
- Send data to Amplitude2
- Dedicated support1
- In-app purchase infrastructure1