

Show HN: BillForward – Subscription billing platform for startups and developers - lostpixel
http://www.billforward.net/

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alandarev
Hello Ian. I am glad to see fruition of your ideas. (We had an interview, I
was a guy with Russian accent, Jevgenij).

The site looks great, I enjoyed viewing it on mobile even mroe than on
Desktop. Now to the observations:

1\. I would try to reach billforward.com domain owner to purchase it, if you
have not tried. .net, while it is popular and the purpose somehow fits (.net -
network infrastructure services), I fear 1-5% of customers will be lost due to
accidentally typing .com, or simply feeling that if a company is on .net, it
might not be as credible as it claims.

2\. [http://imgur.com/g6KQ3FP](http://imgur.com/g6KQ3FP) \- it is zoomed out,
initially the background would fit the screen, but the "Tiered, tiered volume
..." phrase was cut.

3\. Pricing choice shall attract enough customers to further improve the
product. Great idea for fast expansion, but is risky in terms of revenue. I
assume, your bet is that many startups going for free, will eventually cross
the bracket and start paying 1%.

4\. Lack of application screenshots, some would like to look at the product
itself before trying.

5\. Billing services are obviously critical for any business, some statements
and justifications of uptime, robustness and integrity would be very much
welcoming.

Great job on explaining what the product is about right in the beginning. And
as vijayaggarwal mentioned, call to action is well placed indeed, reminding
that there is essentially no risk to try out.

Out of personal curiosity, do you mind sharing what technologies the product
is built on?

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lostpixel
Hey! nice to hear from you again :) Thanks for the great feedback...

Good call on the mission critical aspect, we spent a lot of time of that side
of things - so even more reason to highlight.

I think we have a few blogs posts lined up which discuss technology, as you
can imagine we use quite a few things. As a quick overview we use some
relational and no-SQL dbs, a bunch of Java with some Hadoop and Cassandra
thrown into the mix :). Node.JS and AngularJS for the front-end servers.

~~~
alandarev
Glad to help, and thank you for sharing some 'internal' info.

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vijayaggarwal
Very useful service and a nicely written documentation too.

There's a typo you should correct: > Since installing BillForward, Wifinity
has _seens_ (should be _seen_ ).

Also, consider increasing font size in the docs. 12px is a bit too small to
read comfortably. Otherwise this section is very good and comprehensive.

As an entrepreneur myself, I love the fact that there is a relevant call-to-
action at every scroll level on every important page. Except just one -
Customers page. Perhaps you should put one there also. Guiding visitors to
appropriate next action is extremely important for conversions, this I can
tell from my experience of running an A/B testing service.

~~~
lostpixel
Thanks for feedback. Will fix typo :)

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samcrawford
Really, really nice UI once you get into the main app. A little laggy from
London, but I'm sure they'll solve that as they expand.

It's a nice touch that they've explicitly called out using ISO8601 for all
datetimes and store everything in UTC.

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stefanobernardi
How is this different than Recurly, Chargify and the dozen other SaaS billing
systems?

~~~
lostpixel
Hey Stefano, OP here. Our goal is to enable any company to bill how they want
without hassle or constraints of building out a full subscription stack.
Billing models such as tiered/volume pricing and usage billing can get complex
but we make them very simple to use. You can often implement these features in
places such as Stripe et al but often the minutiae becomes complex. We built
the product that can scale from a simple flat price all the way to composite
price plans with tiered/volume pricing.

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krunalashar
It's a pleasure to watch the billforward grow at such a great pace with
powerpacked scalable design and slick UI.

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mastersk3
Does this target a specific niche or another version of Recurly, Chargify or
ChargeBee?

~~~
billforward
Similar to those services mentioned with a lot fewer constraints, built in
metrics and best of breed approach to usage based billing

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mandyx777
Hmmm this seems interesthing i wonder if they solve my subscritpion upgrade
problem :)

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lostpixel
drop me a message offline and we can discuss! cheers

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sangeetav
Love the UI. Very snappy design, especially the mobile version.
Congratulations, Ian!

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danielglh
Looks like a nice service. How is it different from other services like
Stripe?

~~~
lostpixel
OP here: Good question. We sit one layer above Stripe in the payments stack -
we are payment gateway agnostics. When you need to manage many different
pricing plans/upgrades our goal is to help you scale your subscriptions.

For example if you have a Stripe plan where you charge $5 a seat, but want to
reduce the cost as the volume increases or you want to diversify the way you
sell, maybe the subscriptions includes a usage charge billed monthly.

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lana987
Great mobile version, very useful service!

