Show HN: Subscription Billing for Developers and Startups

http://www.billforward.net

by billforward • 12 years ago

73 30 12 years ago

billforward.net

webmaven• 12 years ago

So, other than having a free tier, how is this different from ChargeBee, Recurly, or Peakium?

lostpixel4• 12 years ago

Hey there, one of the BillForward founders 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 up to composite price plans with tiered/volume pricing.

zura• 12 years ago

How they are different from each other? :)

dan_bk• 12 years ago

If I understand correctly, the deal here is "get a higher level 'Stripe', pay an additional 1% transaction fee" (above $10K+ total transactions).

billforward5• 12 years ago

thats correct, BillForward offers a deeper subscription stack making it easier and faster to start billing and handling upgrades, downgrades, switch plans etc....

diminish• 12 years ago

I m currently trying to integrate stripe subscription api, for my soon to be launched service. Could you tell me why I should consider you instead of them?

notduncansmith• 12 years ago

https://docs.billforward.net/ was unavailable for me (Chrome on OS X)

uniacid• 12 years ago

Had the same issue, you have to be logged in...

jv22222• 12 years ago

Nicely executed, but as a developer I don't understand the value proposition. Especially when it's so easy to do all this stuff. Maybe it's for non developers?

lostpixel4• 12 years ago

Hi, thanks for the feedback on messaging.

What we are trying to do is enable companies to have a single billing platform that grows with them from simple flat priced subscriptions all the way up to subscriptions which have multiple components and pricing strategies.

For example some of our customers sell their subscriptions with 3 or 4 components, for example international calls, local calls, 4g usage, 3g usage etc. Inside each of these units they give discounts the more you use. For example up to 100 minutes of X is $1 a minute, whereas anything above 100 minutes X is charged at 75c a minute.

owenversteeg• 12 years ago

Aside from one major flaw [0], I really liked the website. Great use of humor, great pricing, cleanly designed, and I can see clear benefits over other products.

Then I went to sign up and it all came apart. Firstly, I didn't get the email that I was supposed to (even after waiting a while.) Then, I went to sign in, figuring that I didn't need the email anyway. Once I did this, I was greeted with a confusing screen: what the heck is a Unit of Measure? I couldn't find any information on what it was anywhere, including with Google, so I went back and tried to set up a payment gateway. I chose PayPal. For that, I apparently have to email the help account to "discuss integration". So I tried Braintree, Balanced, CyberSource, Authorize.Net - all the same story. Boom, I've already hit several major roadblocks.

Contrast this with https://snappycheckout.com/, which was really easy to set up, and I've had a great experience overall with it.

[0] The only flaw I saw was that I didn't know what my users would see. Would they see a standard form, as with Snappy Checkout or Stripe, or would I pass credit card details to your service with my own form and you handle the rest?

[edit] Still no email, two hours after signing up.

nacs2• 12 years ago

I had a similar experience after signup.

First, Billforward tells you to check your email after you signup which I waited a few minutes for then found it contained no activation link or anything (it just contains some "see our docs" type message). So you let me signup successfully then have me exit your site to read an email that is not required to then come back to the site to login? Why not just log the user in right after signup? Or at least send the user to the login page after signup. This round trip from signup to useless email to login was a waste of time.

I then logged in to see a message telling me to setup a unit of measure. What that is supposed to be I have no idea. The tooltips on the units of measure modal offer no real help. Why not just do a "Create a billing plan" wizard or something similar. Also on the sidebar, there is a link that says "Dunning" that contains no helpful text and just another empty table. If I have to Google a word and read a wikipedia entry to figure out what it's for, you've failed in your mission to 'simplify'.

For a site that is supposed to make billing easier the site is incredibly confusing and unintuitive.

billforward5• 12 years ago

Thanks for the feedback, there was a minor glitch with our DNS config which caused a few of our outgoing signup emails to bounce... All fixed now and you should have received your welcome email.

joshmlewis• 12 years ago

What does it do? I'm confused. Do I get a form or do I still have to build that? You should answer these questions.

billforward5• 12 years ago

Hey, we provide a hosted out of the box subscription checkout for users who do not want to build. We also support you building your own checkout via our API

scolson• 12 years ago

This looks interesting! Was there a video demo somewhere though? I have a vague idea of what you are trying to do, but I'd love to see the interface (our admin and our customer side) before creating an account to see what we think.

fblp• 12 years ago

Looks interesting! How easy is it to switch between stripe and braintree?

commonside• 12 years ago

Stripe and Braintree are both payment gateways so in theory this should be feasible.

billforward5• 12 years ago

Hey Guys...

Docs are fixed! Thanks for letting us know... http://docs.billforward.net

blackdogie• 12 years ago

Is 10k in USD / EUR or any currency ? Looks great, and very competitive price there. I just hope that you can make money out of it to keep it going.

billforward5• 12 years ago

We should improve that on the website, 10k - USD, GBP, EUR

hidden-markov• 12 years ago

You totally should use billforward platform to manage plans and billing for billforward platform itself. Meta.

lostpixel4• 12 years ago

we do :)

KC963• 12 years ago

Hey, this looks pretty slick. I like the targeted coupons and progressive discounting, I'm hoping to extend the latter over multiple product lines. I agree this could use a wizard or more explanation for us non technical types, but otherwise it looks very start up friendly. Thanks.

valar_m• 12 years ago

You should redirect HTTP requests to HTTPS.

nfm2• 12 years ago

Your pricing looks extremely generous, especially because you only take a percentage fee. This could be good (an edge over the competition when signing up new companies) or bad (unsustainable). I expect your lead time for new customers growing from $0/month to > $10k/month will be _long_ (ballpark 12 - 24 months), which could be problematic depending on the distribution of new vs established companies you end up with.

Show HN: Subscription Billing for Developers and Startups

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