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What's the general feeling here on using only Stripe for recurring/subscriptions vs adding something like ChargeBee on top of Stripe?

silverlight 12y ago
We've been using Stripe for about two years now. We love it, but the one thing we're running into now is that we want to start adding support for additional payment options besides just Credit Card (e.g. PayPal). The problem then becomes that all your subscription logic is handled via Stripe, so at that point you have to move your data to something like ChargeBee, or you have to set up your own in-house solution that handles working with PayPal's own recurring payments authorizations for some accounts, or Stripe's subscription features on the other. We honestly haven't gotten far enough to decide what we're going to do about this yet. Moving to something like ChargeBee would make things simpler, but it adds an additional cost on top of what we're already paying Stripe/PayPal, plus we have to migrate all of the thousands of customer's data out of Stripe and into something else...
sanityinc 12y ago
The Chargebee guys in particular are lovely, but for a recent project I went with plain old Stripe for a few reasons. Firstly, I wanted to bill in multiple currencies according to where customers come from, and Chargebee required multiple API accounts, so that there could be no unified reporting of activity. Stripe, on the other hand, is perfectly happy with USD plans/subscriptions living alongside those in EUR or GBP. Secondly, if you start with just Stripe, you can add other added-value providers like Chargebee on top later, but once you're committed to managing everything through those providers, it's hard to go back. And finally, it would be easy to assume that you will need all that fancy Dunning process and workflow magic, but setting it up is an additional up-front time & complexity cost which might never pay for itself. Better IMO to start off simple, write a little code to track failed payments and expiring cards, and email the customers directly the old-fashioned way. This way, you're also connecting personally with your customers.
tokenizerrr 12y ago
Credit Cards are rather uncommon outside of Europe so you will be limiting yourself there, though Google Wallet also restricts themselves to CCs in my country. In fact, the only reason I now have a CC is because I wanted to sell on the play store and needed to pay a registration fee. I would not have acquired a CC (which has a recurring cost) just to pay for a service if that service wouldn't have paid me back.
- eric_bullington 12y ago
  >Credit Cards are rather uncommon outside of Europe And the U.S., where they are ubiquitous.

silverlight 12y ago

We've been using Stripe for about two years now. We love it, but the one thing we're running into now is that we want to start adding support for additional payment options besides just Credit Card (e.g. PayPal). The problem then becomes that all your subscription logic is handled via Stripe, so at that point you have to move your data to something like ChargeBee, or you have to set up your own in-house solution that handles working with PayPal's own recurring payments authorizations for some accounts, or Stripe's subscription features on the other. We honestly haven't gotten far enough to decide what we're going to do about this yet. Moving to something like ChargeBee would make things simpler, but it adds an additional cost on top of what we're already paying Stripe/PayPal, plus we have to migrate all of the thousands of customer's data out of Stripe and into something else...

sanityinc 12y ago

The Chargebee guys in particular are lovely, but for a recent project I went with plain old Stripe for a few reasons. Firstly, I wanted to bill in multiple currencies according to where customers come from, and Chargebee required multiple API accounts, so that there could be no unified reporting of activity. Stripe, on the other hand, is perfectly happy with USD plans/subscriptions living alongside those in EUR or GBP. Secondly, if you start with just Stripe, you can add other added-value providers like Chargebee on top later, but once you're committed to managing everything through those providers, it's hard to go back. And finally, it would be easy to assume that you will need all that fancy Dunning process and workflow magic, but setting it up is an additional up-front time & complexity cost which might never pay for itself. Better IMO to start off simple, write a little code to track failed payments and expiring cards, and email the customers directly the old-fashioned way. This way, you're also connecting personally with your customers.

tokenizerrr 12y ago

Credit Cards are rather uncommon outside of Europe so you will be limiting yourself there, though Google Wallet also restricts themselves to CCs in my country. In fact, the only reason I now have a CC is because I wanted to sell on the play store and needed to pay a registration fee. I would not have acquired a CC (which has a recurring cost) just to pay for a service if that service wouldn't have paid me back.

eric_bullington 12y ago
>Credit Cards are rather uncommon outside of Europe And the U.S., where they are ubiquitous.