Show HN: BillForward – Subscription billing platform for startups and developers

http://www.billforward.net/

by lostpixel • 12 years ago

13 17 12 years ago

billforward.net

mandyx777• 12 years ago

Hmmm this seems interesthing i wonder if they solve my subscritpion upgrade problem :)

lostpixel5• 12 years ago

drop me a message offline and we can discuss! cheers

vijayaggarwal• 12 years ago

Very useful service and a nicely written documentation too.

There's a typo you should correct: > Since installing BillForward, Wifinity has seens (should be seen).

Also, consider increasing font size in the docs. 12px is a bit too small to read comfortably. Otherwise this section is very good and comprehensive.

As an entrepreneur myself, I love the fact that there is a relevant call-to-action at every scroll level on every important page. Except just one - Customers page. Perhaps you should put one there also. Guiding visitors to appropriate next action is extremely important for conversions, this I can tell from my experience of running an A/B testing service.

lostpixel5• 12 years ago

Thanks for feedback. Will fix typo :)

stefanobernardi• 12 years ago

How is this different than Recurly, Chargify and the dozen other SaaS billing systems?

lostpixel5• 12 years ago

Hey Stefano, OP here. Our goal is to enable any company to bill how they want without hassle or constraints of building out a full subscription stack. Billing models such as tiered/volume pricing and usage billing can get complex but we make them very simple to use. You can often implement these features in places such as Stripe et al but often the minutiae becomes complex. We built the product that can scale from a simple flat price all the way to composite price plans with tiered/volume pricing.

danielglh• 12 years ago

Looks like a nice service. How is it different from other services like Stripe?

lostpixel5• 12 years ago

OP here: Good question. We sit one layer above Stripe in the payments stack - we are payment gateway agnostics. When you need to manage many different pricing plans/upgrades our goal is to help you scale your subscriptions.

For example if you have a Stripe plan where you charge $5 a seat, but want to reduce the cost as the volume increases or you want to diversify the way you sell, maybe the subscriptions includes a usage charge billed monthly.

mastersk3• 12 years ago

Does this target a specific niche or another version of Recurly, Chargify or ChargeBee?

billforward• 12 years ago

Similar to those services mentioned with a lot fewer constraints, built in metrics and best of breed approach to usage based billing

alandarev2• 12 years ago

Hello Ian. I am glad to see fruition of your ideas. (We had an interview, I was a guy with Russian accent, Jevgenij).

The site looks great, I enjoyed viewing it on mobile even mroe than on Desktop. Now to the observations:

1. I would try to reach billforward.com domain owner to purchase it, if you have not tried. .net, while it is popular and the purpose somehow fits (.net - network infrastructure services), I fear 1-5% of customers will be lost due to accidentally typing .com, or simply feeling that if a company is on .net, it might not be as credible as it claims.

2. http://imgur.com/g6KQ3FP - it is zoomed out, initially the background would fit the screen, but the "Tiered, tiered volume ..." phrase was cut.

3. Pricing choice shall attract enough customers to further improve the product. Great idea for fast expansion, but is risky in terms of revenue. I assume, your bet is that many startups going for free, will eventually cross the bracket and start paying 1%.

4. Lack of application screenshots, some would like to look at the product itself before trying.

5. Billing services are obviously critical for any business, some statements and justifications of uptime, robustness and integrity would be very much welcoming.

Great job on explaining what the product is about right in the beginning. And as vijayaggarwal mentioned, call to action is well placed indeed, reminding that there is essentially no risk to try out.

Out of personal curiosity, do you mind sharing what technologies the product is built on?

lostpixel5• 12 years ago

Hey! nice to hear from you again :) Thanks for the great feedback...

Good call on the mission critical aspect, we spent a lot of time of that side of things - so even more reason to highlight.

I think we have a few blogs posts lined up which discuss technology, as you can imagine we use quite a few things. As a quick overview we use some relational and no-SQL dbs, a bunch of Java with some Hadoop and Cassandra thrown into the mix :). Node.JS and AngularJS for the front-end servers.

alandarev2• 12 years ago

Glad to help, and thank you for sharing some 'internal' info.

samcrawford• 12 years ago

Really, really nice UI once you get into the main app. A little laggy from London, but I'm sure they'll solve that as they expand.

It's a nice touch that they've explicitly called out using ISO8601 for all datetimes and store everything in UTC.

sangeetav• 12 years ago

Love the UI. Very snappy design, especially the mobile version. Congratulations, Ian!

krunalashar• 12 years ago

It's a pleasure to watch the billforward grow at such a great pace with powerpacked scalable design and slick UI.

lana987• 12 years ago

Great mobile version, very useful service!

Show HN: BillForward – Subscription billing platform for startups and developers

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