The subscription business tends to expand all over the world. This leads to the need for businesses receiving periodic payments to look for options for managing various billing use-cases. One of the most popular options right now is Chargebee.
What is Chargebee?
Chargebee is a cloud based subscription billing and recurring payment software solution. The ChargeBee platform is a multifunctional tool for creating and managing subscriptions, accepting and collecting payments in various business areas from SaaS to E-Learning.
Chargebee is created with a focus on providing the best possible experience to ensure flexible and seamless recurring billing and customer subscription management. The platform provides customers with a comprehensive experience by automating payment processes. Additionally, Chargebee offers plans tailored for businesses of any size and scalability as they grow. The platform supports hybrid business models.
Distinctive features are the ability to use custom fields, custom domain support with mobile compatible check-out pages, apart from a highly stable REST API for extended flexibility.
Chargebee core functionality, products and features
General business settings include payment gateways, currencies, taxes, revenue recovery (dunning) settings, API keys, web-hooks, integrations and users.
- Hosted Checkout
Chargebee gives its customers the opportunity to set up mobile-friendly, customizable hosted payment pages for integration. Responsive web-pages are included by default. The deployment of checkout pages is simplified as much as possible and consists of copying a few lines of code and pasting it onto your site.
Guest Checkout identifies existing customers from their email addresses and saves them from having to sign in each time.
- RESTful API with language libraries
Chargebee provides its customers with well-documented API library for establishing integrations, as their businesses continue to scale up.
- Customizable Plans & Discounts
Chargebee subscription billing allows businesses to fully customize its plans. This includes the size, frequency, currency, duration of the payment cycle, automatic billing. It is also possible to connect a trial period for new users using trial management.
Beyond that, Chargebee provides the ability to change prices, give discounts and run promotions without the need for a developer. This feature acts as marketing and attracts new customers.
- Product Catalogue
Catalogue is used to create or clone a subscription plan, and also to manage subscription plans, add-ons and coupons. Add-ons help businesses take advantage of upsell opportunities. Coupons allow you to offer a range of promotional discounts, so Chargebee even offers Coupon Sets option. All this helps to launch new pricing plans and strategies.
- Customer Portal
Chargebee offers its customers the self-service portal to manage their accounts. Thus, through the portal, customers can update their information and shipping details, card details, changes to existing plans, add-ons, and upgrades. They can also view or download their past invoices and manage their own subscriptions, which means to cancel, pause, delete, upgrade, or downgrade them. The portal is equipped with two-factor authentication for easy and secure access to accounts.
- Integrations
Chargebee supports 30+ integrations with payment gateways, including the most famous ones, such as, Stripe, PayPal Express Checkout, Amazon payments, Checkout.com, Braintree. The platform also makes it possible to have about 20 integrations with various accounting systems, for example, Xero, Salesforce, etc. It integrates with plugins (BigCommerce, Shopify) and tax accounting systems (Avalara, TaxJar и т.д.).
Integrations with payment gateways allow you to expand global footprint, working in many countries and supporting 100+ currencies. In addition, Chargebee process credit, debit, and prepaid cards of all international and many local payment systems. Customers can also pay offline in cash, checks, and via bank transfers.
- Subscriptions
Chargebee provides its customers with full subscription lifecycle management. The business receives complete information about customers, subscriptions, invoices and credit notes. In addition, the platform provides businesses with complete freedom regarding subscriptions. You can create, oversee, pause, cancel, reactivate, and extend customer subscriptions.
Over and above basic subscription functions, Chargebee provides the possibility of a referral program using gift subscriptions. Customers can donate a subscription to a service or product, even adding discounts and coupons.
- Invoicing
Chargebee offers the option of automated regular (single term) and advanced invoices. Advanced payments are more popular because ofthe option to add more than one payment. Businesses can use Chargebee to combine usage-based, one-time, and recurring pricing models.
Each generated invoice includes the corresponding taxes by default, for example, EU VAT. This feature is called Customize Tax Compliant Invoices.
In addition to standard billing, Chargebee provides the ability to send quotes and credit notes to customers.
- Email management
You can use editable email notification templates to issue invoices to customers. Customization options allow you to create different pre-configured notifications for different clients or completely exclude them.
- Dunning management
This feature is for solving problems with payment failure. Dunning offers business to set up and send kindly reminders to customers to update payment details. Moreover, there are additional options, such as smart retry, which performs up to 12 retries for failed payments.
- Reports
CRM and accounting tool integrations dashboard that summarizes the state of the business.
RevenueStory is a tool to track and monitor key performance metrics. Comprehensive reporting suite lets to apply custom ranges and advanced filters to understand the business performance. Analytical insights allow business to dive deeper into MRR and ARR, new sales, churn, payments collected, and so on all categorized by plans, geographical territories, and verticals.
Chargebee also offers reporting options. So, for instance, abandoned cart tracking helps measure how many visitors leave checkout page without completing their purchase.
- Security
The Chargebee data model is SCA and GDP compliant. Also Chargebee is PCI DSS Level 1 certified, so the customer data protection from data breaches and frauds is at the highest level.
Furthermore, Chargebee uses Amazon AWS to store data, which ensures physical and online security of customers.
- Support
Chargebee has chatbot, which helps to solve the problem or redirects to the support team. You can also schedule support calls in business hours and if necessary get an engineer involved.
For different plans, the platform offers a different amount of access to technical support via chat, email or telephone support.
Pricing and fees
ChargeBee offers service packages that vary in price, features, and inherent business opportunities.
The free plan is suitable for those whose revenue does not exceed $90k, and provides access to basic features. As soon as the income exceeds the established limit, user will be auto-converted to $99 per month pricing. And if your month revenue exceeds $25k, you’ll also have to pay an additional 0.5% overage fee. A free plan may be good at the initial stage, but it doesn’t always have all the functionality necessary for a business.
Other three plans differ in the amounts of revenue and the features provided. To each successive plan are added the functions of the previous one and a few new ones. The Rise Plan is $249 per month, The Scale Plan – $449/month, and The Enterprise Plan. For the latter, a fixed cost is not set, but varies depending on the package of services.
Is ChargeBee right for your business?
Chargebee is a medium technology company. The platform is most optimal for SMBs Saas and SaaS-like businesses. The solution has already established itself as a high-quality tool for managing customers, their accounts, reports, taxes and ensuring secure payments.
As in any other company, Chargebee has a number of shortcomings in features that lead to their weaker performance.
So, many users of the platform are dissatisfied with customer support. In most cases, this is due to receiving misleading information about pricing and issues with cancellation.
Difficulties also arise when trying to use a more advanced implementation using Chargebee API.
Periodic bugs also complicate the process of using the platform. Most often, users mention in a negative way email automation, reporting feature, landing pages, code update, offline payments.
We can help
Choosing a billing platform is a responsible decision that can help your business grow and scale. Before integrating with any system, you need to analyze how this or that platform really suits your business. Starting from whether the platform is suitable for your field of activity and geography of sales and ending with each individual feature.
It is worth considering all options. Including startups with a more personal approach to each client and each client’s needs than in large corporations.
Rainex is a billing and subscription management platform that will allow you to manage payments and subscriptions in one tool. We offer you flexible configuration of tariff plans with any frequency and in any currencies, integration with several payment gateways at the same time, full control of your customers and their subscriptions, multilingual notifications and invoices, and much more.
To learn more, sign up for a product demonstration. We will be happy to tell you about us and answer any questions.
