
Zuora S-1 - louis-paul
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1423774/000119312518085792/d481302ds1.htm
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trjordan
My experience with Zuora is that it's a feature-complete payments subscription
that's an unholy pain to work with. We chose them over Stripe before Stripe
has ACH.

My favorite part is that 25% of their revenue is professional services, and
their professional services are sold essentially at-cost. You're going to need
somebody to help you get set up, but at least the pricing on that extra
headcount is fair :)

They're after large customers, and this is what they get.

"As a substantial portion of our sales efforts are increasingly targeted at
large enterprise customers, our sales cycle may become increasingly lengthy
and more expensive, we may encounter still greater pricing pressure and
deployment and customization challenges, and we may have to delay revenue
recognition for more complicated transactions, all of which could adversely
impact our business and operating results."

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Boxbot
Not gonna argue that integrating with their platform is a gigantic pain in the
ass, but I feel that part of it is the flexibility (and complexity) of their
subscription model. Would you say different? Not too familiar with the other
players in the field so I don't know how they compare really.

Definitely some reliability and performance concerns, though. I feel like half
the pain is just having to shove so much defensive programming in our
integration.

~~~
xfour
Stripe specifically has a great subscription model. When Zuora was getting
started and gaining momentum they didn't. We've recently onboarded a Stripe
Subscription with their connect accounts even and it's been extremely smooth.

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pg_bot
I have never heard of this company before and if you told me their website was
a parody of an enterprise software company I would believe you. It shouldn't
take more than 10 seconds for me to understand what you do.

"ZUORA BRINGS FREEDOM TO THE SUBSCRIPTION ECONOMY" What the fuck does that
mean!

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mgazzer
Website has words, words that don't make sense.

Case in the point, this fucking title tag: Zuora is unifying order-to-cash for
a dynamic subscription world

What the fack is order-to-cash and a dynamic subscription world???

Someone needs to put down the dictionary and put their copy through a
"grading" tool ([https://readable.io/](https://readable.io/))

~~~
unepipe
It means what it says. They simplify how a company can take an order and get
the money. It’s a product for businesses.

And dynamic subscriptions means they have a way to change elements of a
subscription (term length, renewal period). Dynamic means it’s something that
changes.

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tdumitrescu
Numbers for the lazy: "For fiscal 2016, fiscal 2017, and fiscal 2018, our
total revenue was $92.2 million, $113.0 million, and $167.9 million,
respectively. We have made significant investments to grow our business,
including in sales and marketing, infrastructure, operations, and headcount.
As a result, we incurred net losses for fiscal 2016, fiscal 2017, and fiscal
2018 of $48.2 million, $39.1 million, and $47.2 million, respectively."

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mikikian
For those wondering like me what the UI looks like, here's a video:

[https://youtu.be/9Vca8JBIiUY](https://youtu.be/9Vca8JBIiUY)

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thelevante
That video and therefore the UI is not current.

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yladiz
What do you mean? Besides the color, the UI looks essentially identical to the
UI I'm used to working with when I've previously worked with Zuora.

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KLVTZ
I would say more than color. Here is an example:

[https://files.mtstatic.com/site_5921/2761/0?Expires=15214353...](https://files.mtstatic.com/site_5921/2761/0?Expires=1521435349&Signature=uKQtPhbCoEeFv8zjihhd-
hz6I~~IP0F76HhjpU00rdlErl-Xn3xdfz4VPurDJaXRueP4iKed-klmqbUrgAuUmus1qVn-
uq3asOw5QQ7yoibr-
RWePtzoSyVs8N92-cuyi7Kzwe6J-jEWIb47-ynt5QFBvePwnk8DFjYBs5l9-pg_&Key-Pair-
Id=APKAJ5Y6AV4GI7A555NA)

But the way they organize data is similar.

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gobluebackstage
I'm a former Zuora customer who transitioned to Stripe last year. Zuora is a
good product for B2B businesses only. Their product roadmap and more
importantly their data model for B2C businesses is beyond terrible. Their
definition of an active subscriber was a clear mistake almost a decade ago
that they have stubbornly stuck to.

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atak1
Agreed. I was the engineering lead on our company's integration a couple years
back, and we wound up cutting ties and sticking with our own solution.

The biggest pain points during the integration were:

* Zuora is run on a legacy tech stack (SOAP interfaces, inflexible and inextensible WSDL), and will continue to do so b/c a substantial part of the architecture & coding were outsourced overseas (as told to me by an integration consultant)

* Getting data in and out of their platform is very difficult, error-prone, time-consuming, and does not meet the high-volume demands of a digital subscription business

* ZOM (Zuora Object Model) is monolithic and hard to evolve your business around

* You need someone at your company (possibly 1+ engineering resources) to deeply understand and keep up to date with Zuora's platform. For engineers who want to learn and grow, this project is a potential de-motivator.

To be fair, we did this transition back in 2015, when Zuora was in its early
stages with their REST api. Not sure how far they've come in that department
since then.

Zuora appears best for transitioning brick-and-mortar shops to a digital
business via their UI. If you're running an online-subscription-based
business, I'd recommend:

* Stripe + keeping your data models in-housed * checking out a modern / extensible platform like Recurly * checking out an open-source solution like Killbill and see if it meets your set of needs

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deathtrader666
Can anybody chime in on how they are different from ChargeBee for subscription
businesses?

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abakker
Enterprise focused, aiming at integrating with big, complex, multinational,
multi currency ERP kinds of projects.

