Item — HN Reader

We use Chargebee backed by Stripe.

We've been quite happy with Chargebee overall and would recommend them. The only downside is their customer support is very bizarre sometimes and a bit frustrating.

For example, they limit API access to my own (events) data to the last N months. I contacted and asked them to remove the restriction, and they said that wasn't possible because the data was "archived". I pointed out that their UI allowed me to see all the data and their page loaded quickly so clearly the data is close at hand. They then said they'd give me access to all my data over the API for one week. I told them I'm not going to build a script that will be broken in a week and instead will just have to scrape their website - they seemed happy with that resolution.

3 comments

What value do you get from a middle man between you and the raw Stripe API? Why recommend them?

From what you describe it just seems like a hassle with them acting as gatekeeper to your own historical transaction records.

Customers need invoices, A/R tracking, recurring payments, line items on an invoice, billing for multiple entities, adhoc products/add-ons - a billing system and a way to process payments are separate things.

I believe Stripe does more and more of this stuff, but it isn't cheap and in our experience Chargebee has perfected a lot of that functionality.

Exactly. I find myself wondering why Stripe is still in the picture, seems like they're doing the easy part.

We use the above-mentioned things, and they also take care of providing a UI where customers can change their plan, cancel it, download PDF invoices. Upon plan changes, they deal with proration. They send dunning emails for failed charges and cancel the plan after N retries. You can set up coupons, discounts, trials, credit, refunds, welcome emails, etc. through them.

+ VAT management, self-serve portal etc. Chargebee is really great

same here

Stripe only allows access to the last 30 days of events, it sounds like this 3rd party is offering a service of collecting that for longer (probably among other things).

What do you mean last 30 days of events? I use Stripe's API's daily and you can go back much further than that.

https://stripe.com/docs/api/events/list

> List events, going back up to 30 days.

If you're able to go further than that you may be paying extra for it.

Now, if you have the event id then you'll be able to pull it, but you can't simply list them out unless that documentation is lying.

Founder of Chargebee here. Thanks for the feedback and this broken experience doesn't make sense. Will check with the team. We will take it up to fix it. Sorry!

Sounds good! Chargebee and Heroku are the 2 paid services that have saved us the most time. I'm a champion of your service.

While I have your attention, some unsolicited feedback: Chargebee's core is great (and that's what we care most about), but a lot of the UX is kind of whacky and the new redesign of the Customer Portal and Signout flow was also a bit whacky and we won't be upgrading.

Last thing, small pet-peeve of mine: password rotation is annoying and is an outdated practice. Both Microsoft[1] and the FTC[2] are encouraging people to stop using it. It ends up wasting my time because I can never remember what I've incremented the last digit to (I now track it in a file). I've given your support that feedback, but doubt anything will happen unless you give the order.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/06/micro...

[2] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/blogs/techftc/2016/03/time-r...

Thank you. Noted. Shared feedback with the team to review the password policy. Could you please give some specific feedback on the UX for customer portal and signout flow? We can setup a 15 min zoom call with you to understand your challenges. I will reach out to you via email if that's OK with you.

For sure! Just emailed you.

Please clarify whether Chargebee supports custom hybrid plans (e.g., Per Seat + Usage models in Stripe terminology, which, correspondingly, would approximately be equal to a combination of Per Unit + Volume + Tiered models [1]). If Yes, please create or point to relevant documentation; if No, do you have plans for implementing such capability?

[1] https://www.chargebee.com/docs/plans.html#pricing-attributes

Chargebee looks really promising but the pricing of minimum $250 per month feels way too steep for bootstrapped businesses that are just getting started, and a billing system feels like something I'd want to decide on at the beginning and have it scale with my business rather than starting with something basic and then have to refactor to something else later once the business starts gaining steam.

Anyone have recommendations for similar services that have a lower price of entry?

Looks like they have a free tier for the first 50k in revenue: https://www.chargebee.com/launch/

They have a free tier up to $50k in revenue that I’ve used successfully. Hosted checkout, strong API, etc.