usability testing tool

http://www.loop11.com/home/
looks useful based on the demo. Sometimes product managers & interaction designers cling too strongly to their ideas. A tool like this could help bring objectivity to the change order process.

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:

• multiple gateways: authorize.net only
• gateway-independent cardholder profiles (beta uses authorize.net profiles)

but lacks:

• foreign currency

Features none of the vendors have:

• historical event feed to overlay on charts