I never got around getting the true value prop of recurring solutions such as chargebee etc when used on top of stripe. Stripe already provides excellent recurring subscription payments api out of the box, so why use any of these services. Am I missing something ?
We transitioned from Stripe to Chargebee importing our Stripe stuff. It was a solid 2 man-months of engineering (of our 4-person company) and we questioned the cost through the process, but it has really paid off. Stripe was a great starting point for us to collect direct payments, but as we grew Chargebee has proven very worthwhile.
The main value is central customer and subscription database, which muxes multiple payment methods: Credit Card (via Stripe), Amazon payments, and Paypal. This alone has doubled our monthly paying customer growth.
Next it allows us to create invoices, subscriptions and customers data to put in the same database for customers from other channels -- mostly this is our iOS users who have to subscribe via iTunes (due to Apple TOS) -- now we can manage their data in the same place.
It is also an integrated coupon management system, hosts custom styled payment/subscription management pages (as opposed to just a tiny payment widget like Stripe), supports more flexibility like trial periods, switching between subscription plans, adding credits to a user's account.
We've moved all our non-iOS customers to Chargebee for about 6 months now, and really happy with it.
Have you done any formal ROI on the move to Chargebee?
I moved from Chargify to Stripe about a year ago (to save on cost) and the biggest challenge was getting customers to re-enter their card details for Stripe.
I offered a coupon for 50% off a month's subscription to entice them to do so but still resulted in a couple of months of paying both Chargify and Stripe while I chased the errant customers.
Chargebee had a one-time free customer database import process from Stripe, does Chargify/Stripe not support any kind of customer import/transfer?
I can't give numbers for our ROI, but we spend far less time providing payment/subscription support, and pay a flat extra cost to Chargebee for the added abstraction layer they provide so it's easy to evaluate -- worth roughly 100 subscribers/month, and since shifting to Chargebee we gained more than that number within the first month beyond our regular month/month growth.
The idea is that you are not locked in by one specific payment provider. Stripe is awesome but I only want to use it for processing actual charges. The business logic for subscriptions, invoices etc. should be managed by my own system (chargebee etc) so that I can switch to another provider tomorrow if needed.
