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Chargify New Pricing

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Re: Chargify New Pricing

#141

Post by alttext »

youmon wrote: post #118
dh wrote: post #114

My name is David Hauser (@dh) and I am a founder at Chargify as well as the Grasshopper Group where I have spent the last 7 years serving hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs and helping them to succeed. I want to respond directly here and invite anyone to reach out to me personally on Twitter or email to talk about this or anything else. We made a mistake with how we implemented and communicated a massive price in…

Respect your desire and need to price accordingly. I also believe you need to respect the need for current clients that had certain expectations (a bootstrappable billing service that starts at $0). If you are not going to grandfather the old prices, at lease give a long transition period. I would suggest six months given that this is a service that requires integration and customer interaction.

100% agreement. Our small team has spent the better part of 2 months getting ready to rollout subscription pricing for two separate apps with Chargify's model in mind. We cannot roll them out faster and loved the option to grow slowly. Once we had 50 customers we knew there would be no hardship in paying for Chargify. It was great that these guys "got it" and really understood what bootstrappers go thru. Now it does feel like we got "punched in the gut" as another user said.

Re: Chargify New Pricing

#142

Post by jon_dahl »

podman wrote: post #25

This was very disappointing to read. If their product were rock solid I wouldn't have minded as much but it's far from being a complete solution. Unfortunately, a lot of chargify needs a lot of work. I'm especially unhappy with the metered components as they enforce integer cent prices for the components and only allow integer usages on those components. It's impossible to charge fractional usages. I guess it's time…

Agreed on the metered components. Chargify's metered billing system is not ready for primetime.

I love the idea of a subscription management services, but this is still a very young space, unfortunately.

Re: Chargify New Pricing

#143

Post by seanharper »

akira410 wrote: post #131
steveklabnik wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I haven't worked with CheddarGetter or BrainTree directly. Let me put a big +1 in for BrainTree, then. Especially when coupled with something like their Ruby gem ( http://rubygems.org/gems/braintree , written by them, not even someone else's implementation) or ActiveMerchant, it's really, really easy to integrate. Plus, since when does your card processor have articles about their git process? ( http://www.braintre…

Do you have any experience with Braintree's subscription payment service? How does it compare?

The recurring payments capabilities of gateways, such as Braintree, Auth.net, etc. typically are not as robust as the recurring payments capabilities of the companies that specifically focused on that capability such as Chargify, Recurly, Zuora, etc.

If you just need to charge the same customers exactly the same amount on exactly the same timeframe, then the capabilities of gateways such as Braintree may be ok for you.

But typically SaaS companies and others with multiple plans, additions, features, extra one time payments, etc. need an additional layer of logic on top of those capabilities. You can either buy that logic or pay Chargify, et al for it.

Re: Chargify New Pricing

#144

Post by steveklabnik »

akira410 wrote: post #131
steveklabnik wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I haven't worked with CheddarGetter or BrainTree directly. Let me put a big +1 in for BrainTree, then. Especially when coupled with something like their Ruby gem ( http://rubygems.org/gems/braintree , written by them, not even someone else's implementation) or ActiveMerchant, it's really, really easy to integrate. Plus, since when does your card processor have articles about their git process? ( http://www.braintre…

Do you have any experience with Braintree's subscription payment service? How does it compare?

I don't have experience with Chargify's, so...

Basically, braintree has a 'vault' feature where I just add a 'vault_id' attribute to my user model, then call 'response = GATEWAY.store(credit_card, :email => current_user.email)' to send their info off to braintree. Later, that lets me send a charge with their vault_id, and it charges their card.

It's probably just slightly lower-level than Chargify's...

Re: Chargify New Pricing

#145

Post by pjscott »

workhorse wrote: post #28

Moral of the story is, it is OK to offer a free plan to gain traction, and then remove it once you have it. This decision worries me on so many levels. I am so glad I went with Braintree Payment Solutions instead of Chargify. Chalk up another victory for my gut instinct paying off!

I think the real moral of the story is that it's not okay to offer a free plan and then suddenly remove it and jack everybody's prices up. Your customers will feel betrayed, and it'll be a PR disaster. I'm not sure if people will ever trust Chargify again.

Re: Chargify New Pricing

#146

Post by rpheath »

alttext wrote: post #141
youmon wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Respect your desire and need to price accordingly. I also believe you need to respect the need for current clients that had certain expectations (a bootstrappable billing service that starts at $0). If you are not going to grandfather the old prices, at lease give a long transition period. I would suggest six months given that this is a service that requires integration and customer interaction.

100% agreement. Our small team has spent the better part of 2 months getting ready to rollout subscription pricing for two separate apps with Chargify's model in mind. We cannot roll them out faster and loved the option to grow slowly. Once we had 50 customers we knew there would be no hardship in paying for Chargify. It was great that these guys "got it" and really understood what bootstrappers go thru. Now it does…

Yes, exactly. I thought the same thing. "Finally, there's someone out there who understands the needs of a bootstrapping, young business". But apparently it was a scam. If it's too good to be true, it probably is.

There's no way Chargify would have the customer base they have now having launched with these pricing plans from day one. With the several other options out there, someone starting out with nothing would NOT choose to pay $100/month right off the bat, without even considering hosting costs and merchant/gateway costs, knowing there are other options out there for $19/month. I'm happy for them that their "too good to be true" pricing sucked in some customers, but it sure does suck for us.

The attitude that "there will always be cheaper options out there, but we won't be one of them" is a far cry from how it was early on. It used to be "we understand, and offer the best pricing around". It was so relaxing to know that $50/month would get you up to 500 customers, with 49 of them being at no charge (even 10-15 at no charge would be great). Coming from that, no, $39/month for as little as 1 customer does not feel like a good deal, unfortunately. Downgraded from $100, maybe, upgraded from $0, no.

I'm truly shocked the old prices aren't going to be grandfathered in.

I think I'm going to bite the bullet and (re-)integrate with someone else. Ugh.

Re: Chargify New Pricing

#147

Post by CharlieZhao »

dh wrote: post #114

My name is David Hauser (@dh) and I am a founder at Chargify as well as the Grasshopper Group where I have spent the last 7 years serving hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs and helping them to succeed. I want to respond directly here and invite anyone to reach out to me personally on Twitter or email to talk about this or anything else. We made a mistake with how we implemented and communicated a massive price in…

I am so lucky because I just started to shop around for payment system. I will have to switch to CheddarGetter which at least provide 20 free users. For those who stuck with Chargify, well, you have my sympathy.

Re: Chargify New Pricing

#148

Post by ericd »

As a side note, rolling your own subscription code using Authorize.net's CIM service (where they hold on to the CC numbers for you) is cheap and not really that hard, and it gives you the ability to do whatever custom stuff you want at lower cost. The API is a bit annoying, but I don't think I spent more than a day integrating it.

Re: Chargify New Pricing

#149

Post by brockf »

carbocation wrote: post #49
proee wrote: post #46

Bypass the SAAS model altogether and check out http://www.opengateway.net One-time fee for the script and you get all the power of chargify on your own host.

Am not well versed in this, but wouldn't the onus be on you to be PCI compliant then?

If you have a hosted order form with Chargify, there's no difference between OpenGateway and Chargify when it comes to PCI compliance. VISA and MasterCard say you should be PCI compliant either way.

Also, OpenGateway doesn't store credit card information which is always good.

Re: Chargify New Pricing

#150

Post by hudarsono »

dh wrote: post #114

My name is David Hauser (@dh) and I am a founder at Chargify as well as the Grasshopper Group where I have spent the last 7 years serving hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs and helping them to succeed. I want to respond directly here and invite anyone to reach out to me personally on Twitter or email to talk about this or anything else. We made a mistake with how we implemented and communicated a massive price in…

I am surprised with so many concern towards new pricing, and they do let you know and they try hard to let you know. I believe this means people are loving your service.

But this way, you could kill that love and may effect chargify future. With a tons of similar services from quite establish provider, there will be no more reason for people to use chargify.

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