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For simple subscription-based billing, it's somehow not this hard, you are right. It also depends on how much plans you provide to your customers, and you still need to scratch your head for upgrades and downgrades.

I truly believe in usage-based billing, so I do think pricing are getting more and more complex over time.

Taxes are a nightmare for everyone also (in Europe too...)




Dont forget price changes. Gotta deal with that. Then discounts, trials, weird durations, and a bunch of other shit I forget.

My advice for anybody thinking of building their own subscription management system is to stop and go look at something like Zuora. You do NOT want to get stuck maintaining some home grown subscription management system--it will never be better than Zuora and you'll always be playing catchup, leaving your company unable to quickly react to the market. All the time spent adding functionality you can buy from a third party is money that you could have invested in your actual product. And worse, the fact you couldn't quickly react to the market because some key feature was missing in your homebrew thing is literally leaving money on the table.


Transitioning to any non-homegrown system is not trivial either, as you'll need some process to reconcile info from current system and some external system. However powerful some external systems are, planning a migration to something non-homegrown is itself a monstrous process. Benefits of staying 'in house' can simply be you're not wasting time trying to fit your existing processes and data in to something external.

That's really great that Ford uses Zuora. But for someone trying to work with an inhouse system that doesn't map to what a system like Zuora can handle... you now have technical work and a lot of political and non-technical work, and a lot of internal coordination to get all relevant people on board to commit to a change.




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