Pros
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.
Cons
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...
Rating breakdown
Likelihood to recommend: 9/10
Pros
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.
Cons
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.
Rating breakdown
Likelihood to recommend: 9/10
If I could do things over again I would have selected a similar provider even if I was forced to pay several hundred dollars per month it would have obviously been worth it. Now I have to make the decision of whether I want to potentially lose over half my subscribers again like the last time I switched billing systems (to Chargebee) or accept that I'm locked in for life.
Pros
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.
Cons
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.
Rating breakdown
Likelihood to recommend: 0/10
Overall a very capable subscription management tool with great integrations and great support them!
Pros
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.
Cons
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".
Rating breakdown
Likelihood to recommend: 10/10
We're ourselves are SaaS product, and use Chargebee as a backend for our payments and billing. We extensively use addons and various combinations of subscription plans. I couldn't name another product that I would be that happy with as I am with Chargebee.
Pros
- 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.
Cons
I faced literally two issues through the course of 6 years using Chargebee in production.
Rating breakdown
Likelihood to recommend: 10/10
Launch: Free tier - $50k aggregate revenue free
Rise: $299/month - includes $50k/month revenue
Scale: $599/month - includes $75k/month revenue
Contact Chargebee for details of Enterprise plans.
Chargebee is a subscription management software that enables small and midsized businesses across industries to simplify the process of sending recurring and custom invoices to their customers. It sends out invoices and personalized email notifications on your behalf, connects with your accounting solution, provides a brandable customer portal where your clients can update and manage their own accounts, and integrates with commonly used business tools such as Shopify, Salesforce, and MailChimp.
Chargebee’s simplicity and flexibility is suitable for all users – from the novice to the experienced developer. Aside from a backend system that’s easily navigable and customizable, businesses with complex billing structures can use the app’s API to address their unique needs. For example, the API can make checkout processes more seamless for customers by keeping them inside the same app to complete their purchases, versus taking them to another site without the API.
Some of Chargebee’s core features are automated invoicing and dunning management, responsive payment pages and customer portal, trial management and usage-based subscriptions, insights and analytics, and multiple payment gateway integration.
With a pricing structure that’s highly scalable, Chargebee is a cloud-based subscription management software option for startups and growing businesses. It allows you to set up recurring billing frequencies and automate workflows for invoice generation and distribution, payment collection, and follow-ups. The app also lets you work with pricing discounts, promotions, and coupons, even without developer help.
Access to the system is role-based, meaning the permissions assigned to each user are based on their roles within the organization, and the Chargebee dashboard provides quick, at-a-glance insight into your subscription base and revenue figures – which can be clicked for details – to keep you on top of things. Hosted pages settings can be customized, as well as your email SMTP settings, among other things. Event-based notifications can likewise be set up, such as when payment fails to push through.
Chargebee offers subscription-based businesses the ability to streamline otherwise tedious recurring billing processes through automated backend workflows that take care of invoice generation, follow-ups, and payment collection.
The app also has a dunning management functionality that handles credit card declines stemming from factors that include expired credit cards, insufficient funds, temporary holds, exhausted credit limit, and fraudulently acquired cards. The retry schedules Chargebee follows are totally within your control. Customizable email notification templates are also available.
Chargebee provides checkout pages that are responsive and customizable, and come with custom fields and theme support. The checkout/payment page is where customers input their account and billing information when signing up – payment method, email address, first and last name, home address, and so on.
Chargebee also has a self-serve customer portal system so your customers can manage their accounts anytime, anywhere, through any connected device, with no need for them to contact your customer support department for any changes they have made to their account. They can upgrade or downgrade their subscriptions anytime, update their billing information and card details, view their past payments, and even cancel their account.
Just like the checkout page, the customer portal is a hosted page solution, mobile-ready, and can be customized as needed.
Besides invoicing and dunning management, Chargebee boasts features such as trial management, proration, metered billing, cancellations and reactivation, refunds, credits, taxes, and many more. If your business offers free trials, Chargebee lets you specify how many days an account can be on trial mode. Once the trial period is over, the account is automatically converted to an active subscription. If the account owner’s credit card details are unavailable, the account is automatically canceled.
For plans with base and usage fees, Chargebee’s metered billing feature ensures your customers are only charged what they actually use. Several different add-ons can also be created and tracked - on/off such as premium support, recurring and nonrecurring, and quantity-based add-ons.
Aside from quick snapshots of your revenue and subscription numbers, Chargebee offers comprehensive insight into the metrics that matter most to you – subscription count, monthly plan revenue, monthly add-on revenue, average revenue per user (ARPU), monthly recurring revenue (MRR), renewal summary, transaction summary, transaction trends, lost opportunities, and refund summary.
Reports can be exported as individual CSV files in zip format. The fields you’d like included in the exported reports can be specified. Filters can be applied so your reports contain just the right amount of information. Chargebee also has a custom reporting feature where on-demand, customized SaaS metrics reports are provided to customers.
In addition to offline payment options such as cash, checks, and ACH, Chargebee’s partnership with major payment gateways allows you to accept online payments from your customers. Depending on the country where your business is located, the app can be used with Authorized.net, Braintree, Stripe, eWAY, Pin Payments, and WorldPay. Payment gateway details can be configured in the Settings page. Note that Chargebee only facilitates authorization, refunds, and capture, which means the settlement happens strictly between you and the payment gateway.
Chargebee also offers support to record offline and alternative payments through PayPal Express Checkout and Amazon Payments. All payments are recorded in a single, consolidated dashboard.
Chargebee readily integrates with third-party apps such as MailChimp for email marketing, Squarespace for website development, PayPal, Stripe, and Amazon Payments for payment processing, Salesforce for sales and contact management, ShipStation for order fulfillment, Refersion for referral management, Google Analytics for website traffic reports, and Zapier for SaaS integrations.
Webhooks, an API, and plugins for Shopify and WordPress are also available.
Chargebee offers four monthly subscription options, the pricing structure based on the number of invoices generated for successful transactions. Startup is at $49 for up to 50 invoices per month, Silver at $79 for up to 200 invoices per month, Gold at $149 for up to 1,000 invoices per month, and Platinum at $249 for up to 2,000 invoices per month.
Chargebee also provides sandbox test accounts you can perpetually use for free to try out all of the app’s features.
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