Best way to implement subscription payment system for a new product?

Question

With limited engineering resources and potential complexity of subscription payments, how would you guys suggest to implement such a system in an efficient and robust manner? Typical needs include:
- upgrades/downgrades/cancellations/refunds
- recurring subscription handling
- invoicing
- email notifications
- customer portal/dashboard
- reporting

Any products or services to recommend (either paid or open source)? Or is building in-house the best way?

Richard Shepherd · Accepted Answer

Check out https://paddle.com/  (nothing to do with me, just good product)

Masoud Fatemi · Answer

@richardesigns @elvin_lkh @masoudfatemi Yes; handling tax worldwide is really painful and only seasoned accountants and financial managers can handle it. Paddle will remove all of that obstacles. Also at the later stages of a company, maybe they'll be willing to negotiate on custom pricing tariffs.

Pian Istien · Answer

Stripe Commonly used for SaaS Business.

Richard Shepherd · Answer

@elvin_lkh  easy to use as a customer, pretty easy to use as a business.  There are tricky parts to the implementation, however, I feel it is worth pushing through.  I like the regional pricing feature but I mainly like how it handles all the regional tax compliance.  I literally never want to ever have to think about that, I just want to pay someone and know it's done right.

You have to get a quote from them but the pricing is transaction value based.  No fixed monthly fee.  It's obviously going to be higher than say, Stripe, because they layer in the additional services on top of the basic payment processing.  Worth it in my view.

Masoud Fatemi · Answer

@richardesigns @elvin_lkh I'm also a Paddle customer, the pricing is 50 cents + 5% flat per transaction. 
Their fee is higher than Stripe, but they'll handle taxes and they even provide support to your customers about payment issues.

Elvin Lee · Answer

@richardesigns great! Thanks for the good insights 👍 Will get in touch with them to learn more about the pricing

Elvin Lee · Answer

@alejandro_cantarero1 thanks for the suggestions! I haven't look at Piano before so will check them out. Which one among those would you recommend?

Alejandro Cantarero · Answer

Some options on the subscription management side, especially for web-based products.
- Recurly (https://recurly.com/)
- Piano (https://piano.io/)
- Chargebee (https://www.chargebee.com/)
- Zuora (https://www.zuora.com/)

Elvin Lee · Answer

@masoudfatemi thanks for the insight on their pricing! Good for doing some comparison across the board - we're also looking at Chargebee currently (since they have a free plan for first $50k)

Elvin Lee · Answer

@pian_istien I always only see them as a payment gateway like Braintree or AdYen, but not for stuff like subscription management. Will check it out more!

Richard Shepherd · Answer

@richardesigns @elvin_lkh @masoudfatemi yea, it's a no brainer in the early days of a company. 5% is a small price to pay for these services.

Elvin Lee · Answer

@richardesigns thanks! Yeah they were one of the options I looked at. Was it easy to set up and use? Also didn't manage to get any pricing info from their website - anything you can share from your experience?

Alejandro Cantarero · Answer

@elvin_lkh A lot of these vendors are the "usual suspects" that media companies use for their subscription management platforms.

At my last company we evaluated most of them.  We ended up selecting Recurly.

Piano is particularly interesting if you need a paywall for a web-based product.  They provide everything from the paywall through the subscription management platform.

Best way to implement subscription payment system for a new product?

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