Chargify requires that you setup both a payment gateway and a merchant account. Why would you use them instead of just integrating with the gateway directly?
Chargify New Pricing
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Re: Chargify New Pricing
#12I've been slowly integrating Chargify into my app for the last several weeks and was blown away to read about this just now. One of the big selling points for me was the fact that it was free for up to 50 customers. I thought this was brilliant on their part because neither Recurly or Spreedly offer this. It got you locked into using their service, which is huge.
That being said, I bet that 95% of their users are under the 50 users/month threshold and it must cost a bit to support them all. They must have calculated that it just wasn't worth it.
I wish they would offer a cheaper plan for up to, say, 100 users. I think that would a great middle ground for new apps.
I wrote a blog post a few weeks ago comparing the costs of Recurly, Spreedly, and Chargify and concluded Chargify was way in front [1]. I think they're way behind now.
[1] http://www.mattmazur.com/2010/08/comparing-recurly-spreedly-...
Re: Chargify New Pricing
#13Chargify can charge what it wants, but the pricing change was abrupt and BIG. Apps on the ground floor went from FREE to $1200/year. No grandfathering, 30 days to accept. For a service that needs to be integrated, that's a terrible move that shows no respect for startups.
What's worse is that if you're already using them, you basically have no choice in the matter since the alternative is trying to get all of your customers to sign up again, which is basically a non-starter. Note that they also doubled prices for their first tier of paid customers from $600 to $1200.
Re: Chargify New Pricing
#14I'm not sure I understand - what does the free developer option give you? Just the ability to integrate with your site (but not actually charge anyone)?
Re: Chargify New Pricing
#15We have about 35 customers in Chargify, and growing steadily, but $99/month will eat almost half our monthly revenue. Really disappointed.
Re: Chargify New Pricing
#16That's a pretty huge price increase. With all the competition in this space (Recurly, CheddarGetter, Spreedly, many others), I would assume the prices would be going down, not skyrocketing up.
They obviously are banking on the fact that their customers are already tied up with their API, so it would be difficult to switch. This is pretty sketchy, and it's going to make me very suspicious of these guys in the future. Also.. no grandfathering clause for existing paid clients?
Re: Chargify New Pricing
#17> we do need to migrate everyone to the new pricing
You can't change your pricing upwards for existing customers, ever.
You can change your price to anything you want for new customers.
You can decrease your prices for anybody at any point in time.
Something like chargify is the basis for the business models of other parties, if you made a deal in the past you have to honor it, so that your customers can honor the deals that they made.
Re: Chargify New Pricing
#18Wow.
I'm about to launch a pretty involved startup, and we're bootstrapping. Chargify, you just DOUBLED our monthly expenses.
Thanks a lot.
Re: Chargify New Pricing
#19I've been slowly integrating Chargify into my app for the last several weeks and was blown away to read about this just now. One of the big selling points for me was the fact that it was free for up to 50 customers. I thought this was brilliant on their part because neither Recurly or Spreedly offer this. It got you locked into using their service, which is huge. That being said, I bet that 95% of their users are und…
This seems like a big shoot-self-in-foot moment. To get to 50+ users you have to start at zero. Cut out all your 50 customers. Seems blatantly obvious to me. I guess I must be missing something.
Re: Chargify New Pricing
#20I'm not sure I understand - what does the free developer option give you? Just the ability to integrate with your site (but not actually charge anyone)?
Until today they offered a plan that let you use their service for free until you reached 50 customers.
Now there's no free plan that you can use after you've launched your site. And for existing apps that use Chargify and have less than 50 customers, they're going to have to start paying $99/month to keep using the service.
Edit: I understand your question now. Yes, the current free plan lets you integrate it into your site, but you can't actually start charging customers until you upgrade to the $99/mo plan.