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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

by 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.

by aidos 9y ago

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.