

In Defense of Chargify - damoncali
http://blog.trackjumper.com/2010/10/in-defense-of-chargify.html

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podman

      Chargify was underpriced.

Unless you have some inside information, it's hard to say if they were
undercharging for their service. Without knowing what their overhead was like
I don't think it's fair to say that the service was underpriced. Just because
they can charge a lot for something doesn't mean they should.

One would hope they would have been able to sustain the free tier based on the
revenue from the paying tiers so that they could sustain the free tier in the
hopes that many of them would become paying customers.

On twitter, however, they claimed this change was a move to get rid of
accounts where users had paying customers but weren't actually paying chargify
yet. This would have been fine, but they also doubled prices for anyone who
had between 50 and 500 customers and raised the prices for the other tiers as
well. Their explanation doesn't match with their actions.

    
    
      Chargify offers great service.

In my experience it was really just mediocre service. While I give them credit
for trying, It seemed like Lance was handling a lot of the support himself and
to his own admission he's not a technical support person. There were a couple
of times he just sent my partner links to the documentation without actually
answering a question. No offense to Lance or anything, but it was clearly a
good idea to hire a technical support person. The only problem is, now that
I'm fully integrated, I don't really need help / support unless their service
goes down or something breaks.

    
    
      Chargify has been very transparent.

Only after the fact. Sure, they get a couple of points for that but I still
wouldn't consider this a good thing.

    
    
      You must do your own due diligence

Do you often ask a service if they are going to raise their prices any time
soon before you sign up? Do you think they would have said yes if I had asked
them 6 months ago? Honestly, I thought $49/month was a pretty fair price and
didn't really expect it to change any time soon. I looked at all of the
options out there and felt like chargify offered the best service at the best
price. Would you consider me foolish?

The bottom line is that they offer a great product but it still needs some
work. Doubling what I pay for it really broke my trust and if they don't fix
some of the issues with the product soon, I'll be writing my own solution.

~~~
dmix
Are there any other SaaS alternatives to Chargify?

I was planning on implementing it into my app next week but I'm having doubts
now with the price. There is no entry level option any more. For an app that
is prerevenue, the up to 50 for free account was very compelling.

Now I'm required to pay $99 upfront regardless.

I may write my own as well. There's quite a few rails frameworks.

~~~
webwright
There's a really detailed breakdown here:

[http://www.untitledstartup.com/2010/02/accepting-payments-
on...](http://www.untitledstartup.com/2010/02/accepting-payments-on-the-real-
time-web/)

------
dennisgorelik
Could it be that Chargify's troubles in finding clients are caused by lack of
demand for flexibility in payment system? It's one thing to dream about having
sophisticated and flexible payment system. It's another thing when such
flexible system is offered to paying customers.

Customers don't like to navigate across gazillion payment plans and generally
prefer simple and stable payment options.

My guess is that companies that play with pricing too much -- do not have
long-term success and therefore cannot really grow and support Chargify.

