Sunday, February 7, 2010

billing systems in the cloud

We've been surveying billing systems in the cloud. Due to limited time, we're restricting our study to aria, monexa, chargify, & recurly.

cost

  • #customers: chargify, recurly. Both cap at ~$30K/yr after one reaches ~15K customers. Equivalent to $30K / 2% = $1.5M in revenue at a 2% split.
  • %revenue: recurly (3-2%), aria (2%), monexa (1.9%). aria charges a setup fee & monthly minimum.

In other words, chargify charges #customers, aria & monexa charge %revenue, & recurly offers choice.

Features they all offer:

  • dunning
  • PCI compliant payment & self-service pages (recurly: alpha; chargify: designing; monexa: prefers not to host but provides php app)
  • account management portal including revenue & volume reports
  • API including notification for real-time sync (chargify: json & xml, recurly: xml, aria: soap & xml/wddx)
  • recurring billing
  • ad hoc billing (chargify: 2wks)
  • usage-based billing (recurly/chargify: soon)
  • salesforce.com sync (monexa: soon, aria: now, chargify: long term, recurly: unknown)

aria/monexa require their professional services to configure while recurly/chargify is self-service.

Features which aria/monexa offer but chargify/recurly lack:

  • localization of UI
  • quickbooks sync
  • netsuite sync
  • reseller support (monexa doesn't pay splits--need to check on aria)

chargify is working on the following:

but lacks:

  • foreign currency

Features none of the vendors have:

  • historical event feed to overlay on charts

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