
Ask HN: What do you use for recurring billing? - tamalsaha001
I am looking for a simple solution for recurring billing. My requirements are:<p>- Per user per month. New users can be added or removed any time. Support for initial 14 day trial.<p>- Per user billing for annual subscription. New users can be added during the year.<p>I am looking for something that supports True Up accounting model. I have looked into Braintree and Stripe api. None of them seem to support anything beyond simple recurring billing.<p>What have you used for this type of common billing patterns in SAAS apps?
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dangrossman
Roll your own. Start with a subscription table with a paid_through column, and
a payment table for recordkeeping. Your billing code is a daily cron job
running a single simple script, that selects all rows with paid_through less
than current date, charges each user's card on file, and updates the two
tables. Discounts, different subscription terms, receipts, dunning mails are
all simple additions to the daily billing script that you can add as you grow.

This has worked for me with tens of thousands of customers and millions in
billings, and I've never had to worry about being locked into some payment
company's proprietary system. Whatever pricing scheme you initially come up
with for your app probably won't be right. You might have 6 plans when you
only need 2. You might find out you were charging a flat monthly rate when you
really need to be charging per widget or per user or per server. The more you
rely on someone else running your billing, the harder it will be to experiment
and find the right way to do billing for your customers.

You can avoid being locked in to a payment processor for storing and charging
payment info too. I use Spreedly
([https://www.spreedly.com](https://www.spreedly.com)) which provides payment
card tokenization and a single unified API for over 100 payment gateways. I
can use Braintree today, Stripe tomorrow and ShinyPaymentStartup next year
without changing any code or re-collecting billing info from customers.

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pcglue
This means you actually store customer credit card numbers and have to deal
with PCI compliance? Is ensuring PCI compliance very onerous?

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dangrossman
Nope, I don't store credit card numbers, payment info never touches my servers
at all. I mentioned that I use Spreedly. Spreedly works exactly like Stripe
Checkout if you've ever used that. You only store a token referring to payment
info they're storing, and pass that token to the API to make charges against
it as needed.

~~~
brianwawok
That's at least $200 to use Spreedly. What benefit have you gotten with it so
far? Do you find yourself switching gateways to get lower rates, or do you
just stick with one gateway?

~~~
dangrossman
Actually $150/mo for up to 5000 stored cards. The benefit is mostly peace of
mind: a "PayPal horror story" type situation (frozen account), processor
raising rates, or payment gateway having an extended downtime event are non-
issues instead of major headaches or potential company-enders.

~~~
brianwawok
Is there reason example of a gateway that was down more than a day or 7? A big
player like stripe just vanishing in the night?

Would rather spend $150 on some AdWords or something that has a more realistic
chance to do something.

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Urgo
Not thrilled with it but we use paypal for our reoccurring payments. Users
trust it and don't have to fork over their credit cards, but I get scared
every time someone lies and says they didn't authorize the charge and having
to prove to paypal that they indeed did get what they ordered fearing they'll
freeze our account or something. Also it does cause confusion where the
subscription is managed at paypal instead of on our site. That said, it does
work 99% of the time.

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alexgaribay
Chargebee works on top of payment gateways like Stripe or Braintree. They give
you more flexibility around subscriptions than those payment gateways support
out of the box. Plus they don't charge you a fee (excluding payment gateway
standard fees) until you make your first $50k in revenue with them.

Your other best bet is Recurly. They have lots of options for subscriptions
but it may not make sense if you don't have any revenue yet.

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ramsr
Check out these guys [https://www.chargebee.com/](https://www.chargebee.com/)

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dhendo
Yup, we've been using chargebee for about 4 years, can confirm they're great.

Get in touch with
[https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=skrish](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=skrish)

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nitai
I've looked at all the providers and couldn't find one that was flexible
enough and also isnt overcharging, I.e. paying for the service, credit card
charges, payment gateway, etc.

That said, I've found cheddargetter to work quite nice. Has an API, includes
the payment gateway, and provides enough flexibility for custom prices per
subscription. So far I've implemented three startups with it.

Hope this helps.

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symisc_devel
[https://paddle.com](https://paddle.com)

~~~
ollieco
Yes, I've also had a good experience with Paddle. It is easy to setup and also
handles VAT/taxes.

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barile
Open Source [http://killbill.io/subscription-
billing/](http://killbill.io/subscription-billing/)

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adamfeber
Check out: [https://www.chargify.com/](https://www.chargify.com/)

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jlebrech
use a provider if you can integrate in a day or two, then later think of
rolling your own if you anticipate any issues. you could find a provider that
might be interested in writing certain features for you or has a decent enough
api for you to extend.

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drstewart
Recurly, Aria, Zuora

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deedubaya
Memberful.com

