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This is why I always scratch my head when I hear about early stage startups say "Oh, yeah, we built our MVP and put it out there and got thousands of sign ups,

This is why I always scratch my head when I hear about early stage startups say "Oh, yeah, we built our MVP and put it out there and got thousands of sign ups, then we started figuring out how to build a billing system to handle subscriptions..." I call total BS on that. Trying to shoehorn even something like Stripe into an app that has existing tables for users and companies, and ensuring it WORKS (including handling webhooks for payment confirmation, invoice generation, failed payments etc.) in less than 3 or 4 weeks is setting your developers (and accounts department) up for failure. If you are selling an enterprise level SaaS, then things like billing history, generation of invoices for your customer's accounts department, handling lapsed subscriptions gracefully, handling changing of credit card details, giving the option of purchase orders or using other forms of payment etc. ALL have to be factored in and built before you even sign up your first customer. (Yep, we even lost a customer during the trial once because we didn't have the ability to generate a PDF invoice for them 'in app').

aidos 9y ago
To counter; we did the billing system after, when we needed it. In fact, the first Saas sale, my business partner phoned up excitedly and said, "I've just sold a licence! Any chance you could hack together a page to securely take this guys details through Stripe", which is just what we did. We winged it for quite a while with that. It was only after the billing side started to take too much time that we needed to switch to Chargebee to take away all the pain. Sure, it's manual work doing the invoices etc through Xero, but it's not impossible. It's pretty manual with enterprise customers anyway as the billing process is going to involve a bunch of back and forth with purchase orders etc.
- cyberferret 9y ago
  I applaud what you did, because you are essentially being honest here with how you went about it. The only way to accommodate shoe horning in a billing system in that amount of time is, as you said, to 'hack' a rudimentary system together, and to do some of it manually. That is perfectly understandable. You would also be aware of the technical debt that you built up by doing it this way - debt that will have to be paid off later with either a complete redesign, or else major functionality addition to keep pace with all your customer requirements. My issue was with those who intimate that they deliberately left off any form of payment functionality, then managed to get a fully working engine up and running perfectly in a couple of weeks.
  - aidos 9y ago
    It depends a little on how deep the integration goes, but certainly, building a billing system from scratch is a load of work (I've done it a couple of times myself), and you'll do a rubbish job of it. The sort of billing engine that you need to fully handle saas requirements, and especially enterprise as you say, is definitely not the sort of thing you knock up in a couple of weeks. Just ask the guys and Chargebee to find out how much work it really is. You probably couldn't even build the coupon component of it in a couple of weeks. Having said that, integrating something like Chargebee's offering into your own product shouldn't take that long and I'd argue that if you're building a company, there are plenty of more important things to focus on before you need to even look at billing systems — Xero will get you a long way.
mritchie712 9y ago
I set up the payment page of my app in under a day with Stripe Elements and just didn't worry about invoices. If someone needs them I just send them thru the Stripe UI. I have been getting more requests for them recently, but I think it's going to be a while before it's worth building myself.
- cyberferret 9y ago
  Most consumers would be happy with just the Stripe payment receipt as proof, but Enterprise level businesses want a formal invoice. Australian businesses for example, would want a formal "Tax Invoice" with GST (Goods and Services Tax) breakdown, plus our ABN (Australian Business Number) quoted on it to meet legal requirements. Other countries have similar legal requirements for the actual invoice document. My point was specifically for B2B SaaS companies (especially those that operate internationally), as opposed to B2C where the requirements are a lot less stringent.
  - tinodb 9y ago
    Our experience is quite the opposite. With B2B you have less customers, and especially enterprises have a designate email address where they want the invoice to go. They don’t care about any of that in-app. And for us with just under a 100 customers it’s easy enough to generate them through our accounting software and send with mailmerge or something like that (don’t know what our financial guy uses :). We talked about building invoicing to make things less time consuming, turned out that a better overview of the plans and usage was enough for now!
welder 9y ago
I setup Stripe using their API not the Checkout widget and it only took a weekend including receipts. Yes, there's a long tail of work needed for cancellations, refunds, non-credit card providers, multiple subscription plans, multiple billing periods, automated periodic auditing, etc. However, I totally believe a lot of devs can setup stripe in their MVP in a day especially if they only use Checkout and Webhook Events.

aidos 9y ago

To counter; we did the billing system after, when we needed it. In fact, the first Saas sale, my business partner phoned up excitedly and said, "I've just sold a licence! Any chance you could hack together a page to securely take this guys details through Stripe", which is just what we did. We winged it for quite a while with that. It was only after the billing side started to take too much time that we needed to switch to Chargebee to take away all the pain. Sure, it's manual work doing the invoices etc through Xero, but it's not impossible. It's pretty manual with enterprise customers anyway as the billing process is going to involve a bunch of back and forth with purchase orders etc.

cyberferret 9y ago
I applaud what you did, because you are essentially being honest here with how you went about it. The only way to accommodate shoe horning in a billing system in that amount of time is, as you said, to 'hack' a rudimentary system together, and to do some of it manually. That is perfectly understandable. You would also be aware of the technical debt that you built up by doing it this way - debt that will have to be paid off later with either a complete redesign, or else major functionality addition to keep pace with all your customer requirements. My issue was with those who intimate that they deliberately left off any form of payment functionality, then managed to get a fully working engine up and running perfectly in a couple of weeks.
- aidos 9y ago
  It depends a little on how deep the integration goes, but certainly, building a billing system from scratch is a load of work (I've done it a couple of times myself), and you'll do a rubbish job of it. The sort of billing engine that you need to fully handle saas requirements, and especially enterprise as you say, is definitely not the sort of thing you knock up in a couple of weeks. Just ask the guys and Chargebee to find out how much work it really is. You probably couldn't even build the coupon component of it in a couple of weeks. Having said that, integrating something like Chargebee's offering into your own product shouldn't take that long and I'd argue that if you're building a company, there are plenty of more important things to focus on before you need to even look at billing systems — Xero will get you a long way.

mritchie712 9y ago

I set up the payment page of my app in under a day with Stripe Elements and just didn't worry about invoices. If someone needs them I just send them thru the Stripe UI. I have been getting more requests for them recently, but I think it's going to be a while before it's worth building myself.

cyberferret 9y ago
Most consumers would be happy with just the Stripe payment receipt as proof, but Enterprise level businesses want a formal invoice. Australian businesses for example, would want a formal "Tax Invoice" with GST (Goods and Services Tax) breakdown, plus our ABN (Australian Business Number) quoted on it to meet legal requirements. Other countries have similar legal requirements for the actual invoice document. My point was specifically for B2B SaaS companies (especially those that operate internationally), as opposed to B2C where the requirements are a lot less stringent.
- tinodb 9y ago
  Our experience is quite the opposite. With B2B you have less customers, and especially enterprises have a designate email address where they want the invoice to go. They don’t care about any of that in-app. And for us with just under a 100 customers it’s easy enough to generate them through our accounting software and send with mailmerge or something like that (don’t know what our financial guy uses :). We talked about building invoicing to make things less time consuming, turned out that a better overview of the plans and usage was enough for now!

welder 9y ago

I setup Stripe using their API not the Checkout widget and it only took a weekend including receipts. Yes, there's a long tail of work needed for cancellations, refunds, non-credit card providers, multiple subscription plans, multiple billing periods, automated periodic auditing, etc. However, I totally believe a lot of devs can setup stripe in their MVP in a day especially if they only use Checkout and Webhook Events.