
Ask HN: Building a universal SaaS billing solution for entrepreneurs - xstartup
Problem is with SaaS billing.<p>Most companies build their own billing solution or use off the shelf solutions like Chargify, Chargebee, Recurly etc... but I am missing multiple payment methods like WebMoney, wire transfer (manual), cryptos (bitcoin, ethereum) in them. These service providers end up having your data.<p>Why must every entrepreneur go through all this pain?<p>There is Killbill.io but it&#x27;s in Java and quite deep.
It does not have many payment plugins. I am finding it difficult to hack.<p>Currently, we use WHMCS but it&#x27;s difficult to customize its look and feel to match our SaaS app. It solves every billing issue but it&#x27;s unable to offer seamless integration with SaaS+SPA app.<p>It has many payment plugins https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.whmcs.com&#x2F;Payment_Gateways and it&#x27;s quite easy to develop your own, see: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developers.whmcs.com&#x2F;payment-gateways&#x2F;<p>So in terms of hackability, WHMCS scores above Killbill.<p>Most product and services are moving to subscription-based billing and this space does have some friction as evident from the fact that I am forced to use WHMCS which is built for hosting industry. And it&#x27;s the only product which solves all my problems except one. (seamless integration)<p>I want to build a self-hosted app based on GitLab&#x27;s business model and I am interested in sponsoring work in this direction if anyone is interested,  please drop me an email at istartup@protonmail.com<p>Please let me know your thoughts on this.
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staticautomatic
I'd really like to see support for both inbound and outbound ACH.

The area I've seen where most offerings fall short is invoicing and billing
transactions (as opposed to subscriptions). It's easy, for example, to use a
product like MoonClerk to do a Venmo-like one-off invoice for a given amount
but you can't even do something like charge for 100 widgets at $10 per. I also
would really like the ability to mix multiple payment forms for a single
invoice. For example, I'd like to be able to send someone an invoice for $10K,
automatically debit something $2,500, and then accept the balance some other
way (e.g. ACH, paper check, etc).

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xstartup
I think servicebot does this kind of split pricing (?) See:
[https://github.com/service-bot/servicebot](https://github.com/service-
bot/servicebot)

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stargrazer
It has an API:
[https://developers.whmcs.com/api/](https://developers.whmcs.com/api/)

What sort of 'seamless integration' issues are you having?

Also, what sort of bookkeeping/accounting system do you use for transaction
management?

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xstartup
Yes, it does have an API.

Through which you can sync your user database to WHMCS and account status like
(active, suspended, terminated) etc...

But if you've stripe payment plugin (or any other plugin for that matter)
enabled in WHMCS, a customer has to login to WHMCS and make payment in WHMCS
only. So, it gets in the way.

The approach to integrating SaaS app with WHMCS is quite hacky and involves
pain.

And many things are designed with hosting industry in mind.

For accounting, we simply use WHMCS reporting, see:
[https://docs.whmcs.com/Reports](https://docs.whmcs.com/Reports) We extract
the various reports, send it to our bookkeeper and that's it.

