Chargify New Pricing

I was blown away by the newsletter earlier today. It felt like I got punched in the stomach by Rocky Balboa himself.

In the beginning I considered the same billing service providers that I'm sure every other Chargify customer has considered (Spreedly, Cheddargetter, Recurly, etc). The main differentiator was your pricing model. It was the fact that I could launch my product and see if I could get to those first 50 customers before I had to pay you. You made it almost a no-brainer because of your pricing, it was perfect for people like me just starting out. It was inspiring that you were putting trust and hope in your customers. 10 months later, I'm completely integrated with Chargify, have an app in the wild with real users, and boom... All of a sudden Spreedly, Cheddargetter, Recurly, etc are looking a lot better.

Aside from the massive price increase, I (like many of your beta users) spent a year testing out your application and giving you a lot of feedback to improve your product. I have also responded to several of the "[name] is looking at Chargify, can anyone help us out?" tweets and have said nothing but great things about Chargify since day one. I have helped several of your customers via email, support forums, blogs, and twitter with integration issues, and more-or-less evangelized your product. And I'm happy to do that for great services, and I'm guessing I wasn't the only one. But this was all under the impression that what I signed up for was what I was, well, signing up for.

Receiving that newsletter made me feel like I was (we all were) being used to help establish Chargify as a viable option, only to get shit on in the end... and that sucks. It's a horrible feeling.

I understand your needs for a price increase and that you can't support freemium at a massive scale, but to be honest, even $39/month is $39 more than what I signed up for considering the first 50 customers were free. I never have needed (and probably never will need) to call you on the phone, so I'd be happy to be on a plan where 24/7 phone support isn't an option.

It seems like your early beta testers and customers, who shouted to the world how great Chargify was, should if nothing else at least be given exactly what they signed up for. Now I'm just getting started, so I don't know the ins and outs of business, but that seems like an obvious play to me.

Unfortunately, there's now a big lack of trust in Chargify... what will happen to its customers in 2 or 3 years from now when we're even more locked in? After this move, that's a little scary, and potential grounds for departure.

This is a truly despicable and irresponsible business decision. Not only did Chargify pull a bait-and-switch but they completely pulled the rug out from under both developers and merchants by providing virtually no warning on this price change. Unfortunately, we launched with Chargify just a few months ago. Big mistake!

Ning.com did this not long ago but did it in entirely responsible manner but providing many, many months of notice.

Yeah, not to pile on... but I have to believe that pricing, at least on the lower end might be out of whack with what I still think is your target clientele - a group that likely all have some inhouse development resources. Faced with the reality that at least some integration is likely to be needed, I'm not sure Chargify would even get on my radar given the new pricing structure. To me, I always thought Chargify was "get full fledged service up and running quick, by the time we're rolling along, why mess with a good thing".

The PCI compliance bit is somewhat misleading, as at least for integrated solutions, just because Chargify is PCI compliant, doesn't let us off the hook. So if we have to be PCI compliant(integrated solution), we are basically paying for dunning management? I'm being facetious but hopefully that illustrates what others are probably thinking. My approach will now be, build out simple customer management system, tie into a payment gateway and build out related services as site/business grows.

Sucks for me... I spent a decent amount of time integrating/understanding how Chargify works and now I realize that Chargify is simply not an option(trial users were actually my biggest draw).

Anyway, you have guys have built a great service. Wish you the best.

I still feel like it was a bait-and-switch to me, after having written an integration for one of our apps that was supposed to go live TODAY, only to find out that we had to reevaluate all the billing solutions... again. Good lesson for companies that buy these solutions - make sure your agreement does not let the vendor change their price on you whenever they want with no notice, especially when you are integrated like this. Having one more comment saying that we didn't like the pricing change probably won't change anything - but it sucked to get ready for a go-live today and then have to put on the breaks. I spent my weekend finishing up the integration and Monday find out that that time was spent integrating with a company that has basically no regard for the smaller users. This $39/month plan doesn't restore our faith in you - we're more likely to build something home-grown at this point just so nobody can do that to us in the future. After all, you make us buy authorize.net, then customer information manager... so we could build basically the same thing integrating to authorize.net's ARB (automated recurring billing) system for $10/month. I still am not getting my weekend back, or the stress from getting burned by you guys today.

Very thoughtful response and love the passion. We are in a very limited segment of Chargify customers that actually have many freeium customers and we would love to work with you to make sure pricing works for you.

There is much talk about freemium but over 12 months of data show that companies actually doing this that are using are system are under 2% of our customers. Feel free to email me, send me a twitter message, anything you want and we will figure out something that will work for you.