The Payment Provider Shortlist, Part 2: Chargify

(This is part 2 in a series on payment and subscription billing providers. Read part 1: FastSpring or part 3: Spreedly)

In part 1 of our payment provider shortlist, we covered FastSpring, a great-looking platform that unfortunately doesn’t have support for recurring payments just yet. Today I want to talk about Chargify, the second member of the three-items-long list of platforms we’re considering for integration with Quplo.

“Build Your Business, Not Your Billing System”

Unlike services like FastSpring, Chargify focuses on just doing the recurring part well. They make this clear right out the door when you arrive on their homepage: “Chargify simplifies recurring billing for Web 2.0 and SaaS companies”. Unfortunate use of the Web 2.0 moniker aside, at least we know what we’re dealing with.

An inviting slogan, something fairly unique in the market. I feel spoken to!

Chargify’s slogan of “You build. We bill.” is impressive. It’s pretty much exactly what Martin and I had been telling one another we wanted in a payment service: someone who takes responsibility for things we shouldn’t have to worry about. Sort of like Joel Spolsky’s Development Abstraction Layer concept, but for a company building a product.

No transaction fees!

Pricing is pretty interesting, too: you don’t pay any transaction fees, which makes Chargify one of a kind in the market. Instead, you just pay a monthly subscription, and it’s free for up to 50 customers. That’s great for starting businesses, since the first tier above that (up to 500 customers) charges $49. But it’s all very reasonably priced, especially given what we want to start charging for Quplo accounts.

There’s one downside: “each tier includes up to 1,000 free (non-paying) users”. This sort of set off an alarm in my head. What does Chargify have to do with my users? I want a billing system, not a customer management system. Wouldn’t non-paying users not even be managed by Chargify? And if so, why are they limiting things to 1,000 (and $10/month for each 1,000 on top of that)?

Sign up is really straightforward, especially compared to the now-archaic-feeling FastSpring. 6 fields, give or take (it was so quick I don’t even remember) and you’re in, no questions asked. The configuration dashboard is clean, with simple navigation and well-labeled fields. Nice. But so far, nothing unexpected.

Insight and data analysis

These stats might be useful if they didn't all read "0".

This is where Chargify starts pulling its weight, and there are hints of it on its marketing site. Chargify cares a lot about making sure you have a good idea of your revenue. The product dashboard is truly a dashboard, with readouts and a graph ready to show you at-a-glance information on how much each subscription/plan has been making you over time and data like “number of signups today” or “number of expired cards”.

Not perfect

Request Credit Card at signup? Req.. oh wait, Require. Reading comprehension fail.

Chargify stumbles a little once it comes to configuring products, though. The forms feel a little unfinished and long, as if the database table they’re associated with were just dumped onto a HTML page. I had to read the “create a product” form a few times to make sure I’d filled it out correctly.

I also had some trouble trying to get it to accept a free product. Quplo has a “free” plan that’s free forever and has no subscription requirements, but Chargify kept telling me “Recurring interval is not a number”. So you’re telling me no one ever tries to sign up with Chargify and create a free product in their catalogue?

Looks great, now what?

Despite a few glitches here and there, Chargify looks great. The data visualisation and dashboard are good enough to put up on a screen on the wall for all to see, and although configuring it could be better, it’s already metric tons better than most of rest of the market for payment services. So now what?

Unfortunately, although Chargify made it onto our shortlist because they claim to support European businesses through partnerships with payment gateways and merchant account providers, a commenter on our previous post about FastSpring notified us that startups with no prior processing history get rejected by InspireCommerce (the only merchant account provider hooked up to Chargify and supporting European businesses). So that doesn’t sound too great.

We may still dive into it if we must, but for now, as with FastSpring, we need to consider our options. So Chargify’s on the shortlist, but as Yoda said: there is another. See you in another few days when we talk about Spreedly!

Update: Chargify just nixed its free plan and doubled its entry level pricing, all without grandfathering for current accounts. That certainly doesn’t count towards them, although their new pricing plans are still pretty reasonable.