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This part is so true: "I’ve built and sold software for the Mac and iOS. Those products all had simple billing systems. But with a SaaS, you need to handle all
by mijustin 9y ago
This part is so true:
"I’ve built and sold software for the Mac and iOS. Those products all had simple billing systems. But with a SaaS, you need to handle all of that yourself. You need to handle payments, and invoices and everything inbetween."
Edit - both Spark (Laravel) and Bullet Train (Rails) will help with a bunch of this stuff:
https://spark.laravel.com/ https://spark.laravel.com/
https://bullettrain.co/ https://bullettrain.co/
- wgerard 9y ago> You need to handle payments, and invoices and everything inbetween Isn't this pretty much why companies like Stripe exist?
- mijustin 9y agoStripe just does the processing. But for SaaS, you really need something like https://bullettrain.co/ https://bullettrain.co/. It does pricing pages, subscription and user management (which is what takes most of the time to implement).
- baxtr 9y agoDon’t forget the topic of revenue recognition in SaaS. Basically, you need to allocate your revenues per month if you accept yearly payments. Also, you need to consider up/cross-sells and cancellations, that drive up complexity. I have seen SaaS companies using excel for this...
- konschubert 9y agoThis looks really interesting. Are there alternatives that are built on other frameworks?
- johns 9y agoIt does a lot of the heavy lifting for credit cards, but is nowhere near a full billing system for SaaS. It’s why things like Churnbuster and BareMetrics exist. About 20% of our customers need to pay with something other than a CC, which complicates billing even further.
- unclebucknasty 9y agoYes, but they require integration, which is no small feat. You'll have to wrap their fairly low-level payment processing services into your own business logic. So, it's far from flipping a switch. There is Webhook integration, state management, notifying users, etc.
- mstank 9y agoUnless you have a low cost SaaS product (monthly credit card billing) Stripe is a pain. If you have anything resembling an enterprise sales process juggling dozens of invoices, discounts, payment terms, etc., becomes a hassle. Is there an Enterprise Sales ready billing / invoicing solution? We're using Quickbooks - it leaves much to be desired.
- aidos 9y agoChargebee. It does pretty much everything you can think of and bunch of stuff you can’t ... but will suddenly need one day.
- foxylion 9y agoWe use ChargeBee for our SaaS product. Really great offering! They give you a customer portal where the customer can cancel, update, upgrade, ... his subscription. We have a custom checkout page where all options are listed. Then one API call and the user is forwarded and can fill out billing address, payment information, etc. on a ChargeBee page. They will handle taxes, issue invoice and everything else for you. They have also an extensive API and webhooks.
- homero 9y agoHey same here. The portal feature is incredible
- bacheson1293 9y agosame here....went from rolling our own to Chargebee...so glad we did
- nickjj 9y agoYep but if you want to support other payment types, such as paypal then you need to deal with that too. Suddenly you need to write payment abstractions on your back-end to handle both and most pre-written libraries that try to do this fail because they don't handle cases you may need. That only handles the mechanics of accepting a payment too.
- skrish 9y agoThank you @foxylion and @homero for mentioning Chargebee. Krish, Cofounder of Chargebee here. A lot of our customers use Stripe + Chargebee combination as we complement them by leveraging the best features of Stripe. We like the way Stripe.Js, radar and auto card updater etc is beautifully built. (ex: you can pass Stripe token to create a subscription in Chargebee). We continue to build in a way that we let you use those features while providing a full fledged billing system that integrates all the way from CRM, helpdesk /intercom to accounting. Your finance or sales can collect non card, PayPal payments without any changes to the code. Enabling those business users post implementation with support is our core value prop, so that developers don't have to worry about giving internal solutions afterwards. Give it a spin and for the idea launch stage we have a freemium tier for first $50k usd. If you have any feedback please write to me at Krish at Chargebee.
- aidos 9y agoThank you, Krish! Chargbee has been an awesome experience all round for us and one of my most recommended products. The team have always been ready to jump on a call to deal with the murkier migrations over the years — I'm looking at you, merging our single currency sites into a single multi-currency site... It's nice to see you guys getting a lot of love in all the threads about billing on HN these days. You absolutely deserve it.
- skrish 9y agoThank you, Aiden. I am very happy to see our longtime customers like yourself recommending us in HN. We know there is so much more to do to make things easier and better. I look at Shopify for inspiration to see how long it has taken for them to get their product right by polishing every aspect, feature-by-feature. :) I am sharing this thread with the team. They will be thrilled to read the feedback. Cheers.
- Fredej 9y agoI'm in the process of building a SaaS and looked briefly at Chargebee. Right now I'm trying to stay as lean as possible so I quickly wrote of Chargebee as something that would cost money. The fact that you have a freemium tier completely changes my perspective on that. Guess I didn't spend enough time looking :) I'll check it out!
- trevz 9y agoWe use Stripe, and it's been great. But now we need to start providing invoices and charging different tax rates for different countries ... and suddenly the low-level processing of Stripe just isn't enough.
- tarstarr 9y ago(I work at Stripe) We're actually beta testing a new product for invoicing. Shoot me a note (tara@stripe.com) if you're interested and I can get you into the beta.
- paulie_a 9y agoThat is not Enterprise saas in my experience. That is someone signing up for a 20-100 dollar a month service. A 40k a year contract is a bit different
- PeterisP 9y agoIf you sell 40k a year contracts, can't you just have a sales assistant maintain the custom terms&conditions&discounts and draft personalized invoices manually until you have many such contracts and automation starts to make sense?
- hbcondo714 9y agoThanks for updating with these SaaS providers. We are on the Microsoft stack and have been using AspNet Zero[1]. It would be interesting to see a more comprehensive list on here of SaaS providers and which languages they are built-on. [1] https://aspnetzero.com/ https://aspnetzero.com/
- yread 9y agoLooks really interesting! Will definitely keep it in my mind for the next app... It seems it's a bit more expensive (and does more) than Laravel. Can you talk about your experience with it?
- hbcondo714 9y agoThey recently hiked up their prices b/c now it includes a Xamarin mobile app but their back-end and middle-tier is free & open source[1]. We opted for the paid version because our team is small and we are building a new multi-tenant SaaS. It's going well but the primary challenges we have are porting our existing data into their data model which right now uses SQL Server and some Redis. The paid version comes with descent support via their premium forum[2] but they have their own tag on StackOverflow[3] [1] https://github.com/aspnetboilerplate/aspnetboilerplate https://github.com/aspnetboilerplate/aspnetboilerplate [2] https://forum.aspnetboilerplate.com/viewforum.php?f=5 https://forum.aspnetboilerplate.com/viewforum.php?f=5 [3] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/aspnetboilerplate?sort=newest https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/aspnetboilerplate...
- yread 9y agothanks!
- rkuykendall-com 9y agoThis is really cool. Do you know if there's something similar for Python/Django?
- slig 9y agoAny recommendations for a Django alternative to Spark?