

Show HN: Subscription Billing for Developers and Startups - billforward
http://www.billforward.net

======
owenversteeg
Aside from one major flaw [0], I really liked the website. Great use of humor,
great pricing, cleanly designed, and I can see clear benefits over other
products.

Then I went to sign up and it all came apart. Firstly, I didn't get the email
that I was supposed to (even after waiting a while.) Then, I went to sign in,
figuring that I didn't need the email anyway. Once I did this, I was greeted
with a confusing screen: what the heck is a Unit of Measure? I couldn't find
any information on what it was anywhere, including with Google, so I went back
and tried to set up a payment gateway. I chose PayPal. For that, I apparently
have to email the help account to "discuss integration". So I tried Braintree,
Balanced, CyberSource, Authorize.Net - all the same story. Boom, I've already
hit several major roadblocks.

Contrast this with [https://snappycheckout.com/](https://snappycheckout.com/),
which was really easy to set up, and I've had a great experience overall with
it.

[0] The only flaw I saw was that I didn't know what my users would see. Would
they see a standard form, as with Snappy Checkout or Stripe, or would I pass
credit card details to your service with my own form and you handle the rest?

[edit] Still no email, two hours after signing up.

~~~
nacs
I had a similar experience after signup.

First, Billforward tells you to check your email after you signup which I
waited a few minutes for then found it contained no activation link or
anything (it just contains some "see our docs" type message). So you let me
signup successfully then have me exit your site to read an email that is not
required to then come back to the site to login? Why not just log the user in
right after signup? Or at least send the user to the login page after signup.
This round trip from signup to useless email to login was a waste of time.

I then logged in to see a message telling me to setup a unit of measure. What
that is supposed to be I have no idea. The tooltips on the units of measure
modal offer no real help. Why not just do a "Create a billing plan" wizard or
something similar. Also on the sidebar, there is a link that says "Dunning"
that contains no helpful text and just another empty table. If I have to
Google a word and read a wikipedia entry to figure out what it's for, you've
failed in your mission to 'simplify'.

For a site that is supposed to make billing easier the site is incredibly
confusing and unintuitive.

~~~
billforward
Thanks for the feedback, there was a minor glitch with our DNS config which
caused a few of our outgoing signup emails to bounce... All fixed now and you
should have received your welcome email.

~~~
nacs
I received the email with no problem within a few minutes. The problem is that
it was virtually useless and not required to login (no activation link).

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dan_bk
If I understand correctly, the deal here is "get a higher level 'Stripe', pay
an additional 1% transaction fee" (above $10K+ total transactions).

~~~
billforward
thats correct, BillForward offers a deeper subscription stack making it easier
and faster to start billing and handling upgrades, downgrades, switch plans
etc....

~~~
diminish
I m currently trying to integrate stripe subscription api, for my soon to be
launched service. Could you tell me why I should consider you instead of them?

~~~
lostpixel
As pointed out by dan_bk we provide a bunch of features above the plan based
subscriptions Stripe offer.

If you think you are going to be selling your product with usage based
pricing, or want to use tiered pricing then we can add value from what you get
with Stripe. Feel free to drop me an e-mail at ian AT billforward . net and
can talk through you use-case.

~~~
nfm
It could be valuable to have a feature grid kind of page where you compare
your platform to the built-in subscriptions in Braintree and Stripe, to
provide an explicit list of the things you can handle that they can't.

~~~
subsection1h
Yeah, for example, see MailChimp's feature table for their Mandrill service
that allows prospective customers to compare Mandrill to SendGrid (the market
leader?):

[https://www.mandrill.com/features/](https://www.mandrill.com/features/)

I definitely prefer pages like that.

------
nfm
Your pricing looks extremely generous, especially because you only take a
percentage fee. This could be good (an edge over the competition when signing
up new companies) or bad (unsustainable). I expect your lead time for new
customers growing from $0/month to > $10k/month will be _long_ (ballpark 12 -
24 months), which could be problematic depending on the distribution of new vs
established companies you end up with.

------
joshmlewis
What does it do? I'm confused. Do I get a form or do I still have to build
that? You should answer these questions.

~~~
billforward
Hey, we provide a hosted out of the box subscription checkout for users who do
not want to build. We also support you building your own checkout via our API

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valar_m
You should redirect HTTP requests to HTTPS.

------
KC963
Hey, this looks pretty slick. I like the targeted coupons and progressive
discounting, I'm hoping to extend the latter over multiple product lines. I
agree this could use a wizard or more explanation for us non technical types,
but otherwise it looks very start up friendly. Thanks.

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webmaven
So, other than having a free tier, how is this different from ChargeBee,
Recurly, or Peakium?

~~~
lostpixel
Hey there, one of the BillForward founders 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 up to composite price plans with
tiered/volume pricing.

------
scolson
This looks interesting! Was there a video demo somewhere though? I have a
vague idea of what you are trying to do, but I'd love to see the interface
(our admin and our customer side) before creating an account to see what we
think.

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jv22222
Nicely executed, but as a developer I don't understand the value proposition.
Especially when it's so easy to do all this stuff. Maybe it's for non
developers?

~~~
lostpixel
Hi, thanks for the feedback on messaging.

What we are trying to do is enable companies to have a single billing platform
that grows with them from simple flat priced subscriptions all the way up to
subscriptions which have multiple components and pricing strategies.

For example some of our customers sell their subscriptions with 3 or 4
components, for example international calls, local calls, 4g usage, 3g usage
etc. Inside each of these units they give discounts the more you use. For
example up to 100 minutes of X is $1 a minute, whereas anything above 100
minutes X is charged at 75c a minute.

------
billforward
Hey Guys...

Docs are fixed! Thanks for letting us know...
[http://docs.billforward.net](http://docs.billforward.net)

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blackdogie
Is 10k in USD / EUR or any currency ? Looks great, and very competitive price
there. I just hope that you can make money out of it to keep it going.

~~~
billforward
We should improve that on the website, 10k - USD, GBP, EUR

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notduncansmith
[https://docs.billforward.net/](https://docs.billforward.net/) was unavailable
for me (Chrome on OS X)

~~~
uniacid
Had the same issue, you have to be logged in...

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hidden-markov
You totally should use billforward platform to manage plans and billing for
billforward platform itself. Meta.

~~~
lostpixel
we do :)

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fblp
Looks interesting! How easy is it to switch between stripe and braintree?

~~~
commonside
Stripe and Braintree are both payment gateways so in theory this should be
feasible.

