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SaaS business

Freemium Pricing: Customer Acquisition Hero or Revenue Killer?

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For free or not for free...If you're reading this article, I guess you've been ruminating on this dilemma for a while and still haven't come to a decision. It's no wonder. Since the early 2000s freemium pricing model, which turned to be successful for some famous freemium practitioners, including Evernote, Dropbox, Spotify, and other billion dollars companies, has been gaining traction and giving hope for stellar success to many SaaS startups.

But is freemium pricing a magic pill for a SaaS company to ensure its dramatic growth (spoiler - no)? Unfortunately, you can't just google the answer or follow the advice your best friend, a successful SaaS founder, gives you. Just because what worked for him will not necessarily work for you.

Actually, in the headline, I put the rhetoric question. Yet, I hope you'll get a bit of insight if the freemium pricing may work for your business by the end of this article.

What does freemium mean?

Freemium, being a combination of the words "free" and "premium", is a business pricing model that offers customers both free and paid versions of a company's product. The free option typically has fewer features than the paid one. Free users have limited access to product functionality or lack of customer support unit they upgrade to the paid account.

The freemium pricing model's core objective is to get the users hooked to the free product, encouraging them to subscribe to the paid plan later. 

Whereas the conventional customer acquisition strategy requires significant marketing expenses to move leads through the SaaS sales funnel, freemium pricing can reduce costs, saving on advertising and engagement. The users self-educate themselves through the actual product usage, so your main goal is to make their user experience as great as possible, improving your product's "stickiness".

As a go-to-market strategy, the freemium pricing model can be justified by the quick customer base growth. However, this approach has some pitfalls I'll uncover in the next paragraphs.

Just a few examples of freemium pricing in action.

It can be:

  • A service with limited features on a free plan and additional functionality on the paid ones (MailChimp)
  • An online magazine that sets a monthly free articles limit and requires customers to upgrade to get unlimited access to the publications (Harvard Business Review)
  • A free app with advertisements, which users can get rid of by paying for the premium plan (well, I'm sure you have at least one such app on your phone)

In the ideal world, after the users fall in love with your product, they reach the limits of the free account and decide to upgrade to experience the best value your product can ever provide. However, in reality, only around 2%-5% of free customers convert into the paid ones.

Before we dive deeper into the freemium pricing peculiarities, I'd like to stop for a minute to emphasize the difference between freemium and free trial models (as they're close, but not the same).

Freemium vs. free trial

Like freemium, free trials help lower the customer acquisition cost by letting the product and onboarding do the main job of converting leads into customers. Yet, these two pricing models have significant differences:

Freemium products are forever-free, whereas free trials grant access to the product only for a limited period.

Free trials provide users complete access to all (or most) product's features; freemium customers enjoy only basic functionality and can unlock additional features by going premium.

The most obvious free trial benefit is that you don't need to support users who never generate any profit for your business. Once their free period expires, they have to either sign up for the service or churn.

As a pricing model, a free trial is generally more effective at converting leads into paying customers.

The first reason, during the free trial, the users experience the full product functionality and are aware of what they need to pay for. Another thing, in most cases, requiring the credit card to sign up for the free trial, you may account for more qualified (read - ready to pay) though fewer leads.

As for the freemium pricing benefits, this pricing model is definitely easier for the customers as it doesn't make pressure up-front, requiring the credit card to sign up. And, for the SaaS business, there is a possibility to eventually convert the free users when (if) their needs will evolve. This scenario depends much on successful product integration into the users' workflow. At the end of the day, it'll be much more painful for them to switch to something else than change from freemium to premium within your app.

Getting a bit clear whether you should go with freemium pricing or not?

I guess, no, as I haven't told you yet...

What is wrong with freemium pricing?

"Freemium is like a Samurai sword: unless you’re a master at using it, you can cut your arm off." - Rob Walling, Founder, Drip.

Personally, I'm not against freemium pricing, say more, as a user of dozens of free apps, I love zero price! However, if I were a SaaS business owner, I'd think twice before going into this gamble.

Why?

Let's look at freemium from another angle.

Image credit: ABTasty.com

Problem 1 - Freemium attracts freeloaders

The biggest problem with freemium pricing that it attracts the wrong customers. Offer something for free, and you will attract people who like the free stuff. As a business, you need to make money to ensure sustainable growth, and here is where the problem roots. You may get a huge customer base, but the question is how many users you'll persuade to pay for the product or service they used to have for free.

Just note, around 7% only of Evernote users switch to premium. We'll come back to Evernote later to see their freemium story, though.

By the way, do you use Evernote? If yes, do you pay for it?

Freemium pricing allows to quickly expand the user base, but the fact is the majority of the customers will never go premium.

How to overcome

Firstly, you can limit the free version and make the paid version truly valuable. More cloud space (as Dropbox did), unlimited marketing emails (as Mailchimp), ad-free music, playing offline (as Spotify).

Then, don't hesitate to add advertising and paid promotions to your free product. Some people will be freakingly annoyed with the ads, and they will leave. So what? They don't pay you anyway. Some of them will take the ads as a necessary evil and stay. And some customers will opt for the premium.

Problem 2 - Freemium cost is high

While most users will not help you make a profit, you will have to spend money to let them use your product. Along with your user base growth, you may face capacities limitation.

For example, you will need to pay for the servers to host your product or invest in the development team who will maintain it. Sooner or later, you'll have to expend your customer service, put more money in the product updates, and whatever else may happen as a business is a living creature. That's why many freemium pricing startups try to raise money from investors - they know they will need money to survive.

How to Overcome

One "unpopular" solution may be to learn users' behavior and sell the intelligence to other industry players. And again, the advertising and paid promotions will help. At the beginning stage of your SaaS, you can put aside the idea of getting immediate profit. However, one day you'll have to tackle this task, so better to prepare the plan.

Problem 3 - Freemium makes validation questionable

This problem is not that obvious, but I consider it critical for the early-staged companies. When you have a new product idea, you need to test it and get market feedback. It's crucial to define if the idea is worth your efforts and determine whether people are ready to pay for the solution you offer.

The point here, offering the product for free, you'll definitely find people who are eager to try. But there will be no confidence they would have paid for it as for something valuable and irreplaceable.

How to Overcome

To validate your idea (of course, when you have an MVP ready), you may track daily and weekly product usage. The statistics will give you an understanding of whether people enjoy your product or just downloaded it and keep it on the last home screen page of their phones. The more the customers interact with your product, the higher the chances they won't leave it easily.

Despite all the problems you may face with freemium, it is still a very effective short-term customer acquisition strategy. And to understand more if freemium pricing will work for your business, let's turn the kaleidoscope to see another picture.

How to decide if freemium pricing is your "good-to-go"

Running a SaaS business is an exciting journey and, minding this journey is not a one-day trip, it's crucial to have a road map and prepare for the adventure.

Before putting everything on the table and going freemium, assume what strategy will lead you to success.

Choose your market entry strategy

If you are serious about business, you know that the right go-to-market strategy is at the core of success. Tony Ulwick, in his job-to-be-done growth matrix, distinguishes the five most common growth strategies that will work for your SaaS business if you want to grow fast. I'll highlight here the three of them - the differentiated, disruptive, and dominant strategies - so you can think over what may be the best strategy for you.

Dominant, differentiated, or disruptive?

The dominant growth strategy works great if you perform better and charge less than the rest of your niche market players.

Uber, Netflix, Shopify - these companies employed dominant strategy and didn't mistake. This strategy can help you seize a big market share with one important condition - the market should be big. Jason Benkins, the SaaStr founder, claims that you need 50 million users to make the freemium pricing model work.

Well, maybe, not 50 million, but it wouldn't hurt to think whether your market is big enough, the product is significantly better, and the audience is price sensitive and needs a lower price.

If you have a narrow-niche product, the dominant strategy may not be the right choice.

The differentiated strategy works well with the underserved market segment in a particular niche. If there is no strong competition and you do a job much better than competitors, you can charge more. However, due to the specifics and small market size, the freemium most likely will not work in this environment.

And for the disruptive strategy, the freemium pricing may work.

Don't be confused, looking at the graph above, that disruptors really do their job bad so that they charge less. No, they just may create simpler and accessible by many people products on the overserved market.

For example, Canva is a simple custom graphic tool and can't compete with Photoshop by its functionality. But, due to the product's simplicity, Canva gained huge popularity with those who need to quickly create social media graphics.

With an understanding of whether your market is big and you have enough resources to support free product usage, you can go ahead making freemium work.

What else?

Work out your tactical plan

To make a long story short, just try answering the following questions before deciding to use the freemium pricing.

Why do I want to offer the product for free? If you have any doubts you'll get customers, then, is there really a market?

What benefits will you get by offering freemium? Are you going to improve your customer acquisition? Increase your market share? Any other reason?

Do you have a plan for how to shift customers from a free to a paid version? Unless the premium features have irresistible value, the customers may not have the right incentive to upgrade to a paid account.

How are you going to monetize the users if they do not convert? Placing the advertising inside of your free product? Selling customer's behavior insights to other industry players?

Before I leave you with these questions, let's see two different freemium pricing success stories. I promised to come back to Evernote's business model, so here we go.

Notable cases to learn from

Besides Evernote, the second hero we'll talk about is Mailchimp. I found the stories of these two skyrocketed companies in "The Freemium Manifesto" ProfitWell's e-book, so I will briefly cover the essence.

Evernote, the struggling giant

Image credit: Evernote

When Evernote was launched as the first cloud-based notes app in 2008, they didn’t raise much venture capital. In 2011, the CEO Phil Libin said, “The easiest way to get a million people to pay for non scarcity product may be to make 100 million people fall in love with it.” And this was done.

Having relied on word of mouth referrals, the App Store, and freemium pricing, Evernote rapidly grew to 75 million users and a $1 billion valuation by 2013. In 2014, they hit 100 million customers. However, the conversion rate was around 1% only - millions of people just didn't see any point in upgrading. Instead of improving its core note app, Evernote released a bunch of new products and focused on partnerships with Post-it Notes and Moleskine. The main product became secondary.

With 150 million users, Evernote laid off 18% of the workforce and closed ten offices to save costs. In fact, Evernote's strategy to upsell other products along with the core one was great. They just failed to do two things:

  • Continue offering the app's high value to loyal users
  • Understand their customers and what really makes them use Evernote

To give more value to the note app, they could use, for example, machine learning to predict what users might want to write. In a nutshell, Evernote might not have struggled with revenue, providing a more valuable product to the customers.

MailChimp, the product perfectionist

Image credit: Mailchimp

MailChimp's business model also used freemium pricing, but their approach differed from that of Evernote. MailChimp had been working for years with customer data to ensure they built the product everyone needed.

When they implemented freemium pricing in 2009, the core email product was affordable and profitable. They had saved server costs by switching to the cloud.

A year after launching their free plan "Forever Free", MailChimp grew from 85,000 users in 2009 to 450,000 users in 2010. The "Forever Free" still is a perfect match for startups, non-profit organizations, and small businesses if you’re not sending a large volume of emails.

During 2009-2010, MailChimp's profit grew by 650% (!), and CAC (customer acquisition cost) decreased by 8% (this was the main reason for the company's profit growth).

MailChimp not only created more value for more people but also increased their profit.

Closing thoughts

The freemium pricing is rather an effective marketing strategy aimed to boost growth through quick customer acquisition and user base growth than a revenue model. Before going freemium, it's crucial to work out the right go-to-market strategy and choose appropriate monetization options. However, you have all chances for success if you make sure your product has a huge market, delivers irresistible value, and can become an indispensable part of customers' lives. And to learn how to stop guessing and start growing, read SaaS pricing strategies article.

Well, we at Eleken can't decide instead of you what pricing strategy will be effective for your SaaS, but we can work with you on designing a great SaaS product that provides the value your customers are looking for. 


Natalia Borysko

Author

Table of contents

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SaaS business
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min read

Rule of 40 for SaaS: Tips and Tricks for Healthy SaaS Development 

SaaS companies need some metrics, such as customer and revenue churn, customer health score, and lead-to-customer rate to analyze their success. Just like any other product, the software relies on statistics and various economic indicators to define their place and role in both the market and economy. Such an analysis is a reliable way to check if your SaaS solution is healthy or whether it requires changes.

The first people to talk about and discuss the rule of 40 back in 2015 were Brad Feld, Techstar’s founder, and Tomasz Tunguz, a famous venture capitalist. As for now, the larger part of SaaS companies has adopted it even though it was introduced only a few years ago.

Tunguz and Feld claim that a simple formula for the evaluation of the SaaS business should be used. This rule of thumb includes only 2 parts: growth percentage added to the profit percentage of your company should make up 40% in total. For example, when generating a profit of 30%, your growth ratio can be 10% but they will still add up to 40%. 

But why is this principle so important? Does anything else have to be considered apart from profit and growth? As a SaaS design agency, we know very well how much product managers care about metrics.

Growth vs Profit

At first, let's get into growth and profit ratios and how to calculate them. With different ways to measure these numbers, each enterprise has to decide on its own way of calculations. 

The growth rate is defined as the percentage change from one time period to another. It is most often measured by year-over-year (YoY) or by monthly recurring revenue (MRR). However, some companies consider by growth the increasing number of employees or even market share. 

The profit margin percentage is the amount by which sales revenue exceeds your business costs. To calculate it, you should use EBIDTA which can be deciphered as earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization. Currently, most software companies rely on this principle to find out their net margin without considering taxes.

Don't worry if all these metrics sound overly complicated: it is hard to explain all in one article. That is why we made a list of top books on SaaS metrics.

The rule of 40 is quite a challenge for enterprises that are in the game for a few years already. Their growth ratio might fall down but they remain profitable. 

The most successful companies rock this principle due to high profitability. For example, Adobe, a computer software corporation, was founded almost 40 years ago. Adobe balances its growth and profit, with the last one reaching 23,71% as of 2019. Such figures demonstrate the enterprise’s steady development and progress year after year. 

rule of 40 for SaaS, an example of Adobe

At the same time, startups, in most cases, have no revenue right after the launch and throughout the whole introduction stage of the SaaS solution life cycle. Nevertheless, they still have all the chances to fit in within a 40% margin as the growth rate of prosperous new products tends to be constantly rising.

CultureIQ, a startup that allows employers to receive feedback from their employees, showed unbelievable results. Founded in 2013, this company reached a 165% growth ratio during the first half of 2019. Thus, despite no revenue, their economic indicators still satisfied the rule of 40 SaaS. 

CultureIQ the rule of 40 SaaS

Now, let’s talk about the very formula of the rule of 40 SaaS, which is quite simple.

the rule of 40 SaaS formula

The best thing about this financial framework is balancing the percentage of both growth and profit. For instance, the growth ratio can be 10% while the net margin 30%. It can even happen that the profit makes up 50%, which allows you to have -10% in growth.

In the picture below, we can see the graph showing the profit and growth ratios of SaaS businesses as of 2019. Additionally, there is a line separating the projects that “hacked” the rule of 40 (marked with green) from the ones that didn’t manage to do it (red).

graph showing the profit and growth ratios of SaaS businesses as of 2019
Image credit: Sampford Advisors.

It is evident that in the formula of the rule of 40, both components are interconnected variables. Even with minus profit, your SaaS application can have a huge growth percentage and vice versa. 

A clear advantage of this rule is more space for creativity and a variety of strategies for your SaaS product development. For instance, you can choose the time to focus on leveling up the growth ratio, while the net margin will remain stable enough to stick to this principle. 

When to start counting and what time periods to count

This is the question that remains quite complicated for many software companies. Right after launching your project, it may be unnecessary to apply the rule of 40 because things may turn either splendid or terrible at any minute. So, you better take it easy and start getting into this financial framework a few years after you’ve launched your product. 

An additional formula to be applied here is known as the T2D3 approach. Within this framework, the annual recurring revenue (ARR) should be tripled for two years and then doubled for the next three years. Most software companies use this formula, and only after the first 5-6 years, they start applying the rule of 40 for SaaS. 

T2D3: 

how to apply the rule of 40


During all this time, your product will likely be passing the first stage of the product life cycle — the introduction stage with no profit and moving to the next phase — the growth stage. Even though it can be a challenging and unstable period, you will finally be making some revenue, so that you can evaluate the prospects of your software business properly by applying the rule of 40 for SaaS. 

Why do we need the rule of 40?

At first sight, this principle for SaaS aims at comparing the service to the other ones in the market. By such observation, you can double-check if your business is profitable or whether it needs improvements. However, this rule of thumb goes much deeper than just a brief analysis and, in fact, each SaaS company should use it to maintain steady development.

Despite getting deeper into financial risks and prospects, the rule of 40 aids with preparing a plan for future development. By analyzing growth rate and net margin, you can map the strategies for the next years or even come up with new methods for your business development.  

Why does the rule of 40 apply mostly to SaaS products? 

The answer is simple: it best describes and fits the dynamics of SaaS product development. Unlike many subscription services, the software is probably the only product that can both grow and decline incredibly fast. That is, both the net margin and growth ratio can surpass even 100%.

Of course, you can analyze even non-digital products using the same formula, but the eventual figures will probably be irrelevant as these projects grow slower. Even if they fail to reach 40% as per the rule, it does not necessarily mean that they are loss-making or will have to be closed soon.

Two main components of the rule of 40 are the company’s net margin and growth. With many popular software products skyrocketing within the first few years, 40, as the sum of these indicators, is a totally achievable figure to strive for. 

Is the rule of 40 for SaaS enough?

Without a doubt, there are many ways and opinions on how to evaluate and measure your SaaS solution. The software’s rule of 40 has become the ultimate most common framework for this. By applying this formula, you do not only compare and contrast the service to the other ones but also check if your business is in perfect condition.

Similarly, it is quite difficult to move forward without any plan or directions. The rule of 40 for SaaS also makes a certain guideline on how to run your SaaS company and make both short and long-term growth plans.

When it comes to economics and financial success, the rule of 40 is the main indicator of a robust developing company. Still, if you want to get a full picture of your SaaS application’s position on the market, its prospects, and earnings, you can also take notice of other metrics and the tools to keep track of them in our blog-post about SaaS dashboard.

SaaS business
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0
min read

Top 7 SaaS Payment Processing Services Comparison

You came up with a mindblowing idea for a SaaS startup. After sleepless nights, you’re almost ready to introduce your brainchild to the world. The only question left is how do you process payments?

In the good old days, it was no more difficult to buy a piece of software than a bag of bagels. You pay for your CD with a program, you get your CD with a program. 

old-school payment processing

And then the SaaS subscription model emerged, allowing us to sell software in exciting, whizz-bangy, granular ways. 

Rather than selling a single unit, you sell a month-to-month service. Now you need to charge recurring payments for multiple pricing tiers, work with bank cards from numerous countries and currencies. A ton of new things happen between the point where a customer is paying you money and the point you are getting the money. 

SaaS subscription payment processing

Let’s examine how payment processing works for SaaS so that we can better understand what features we’re looking for in our best subscription billing systems.

Components of SaaS payment processing

The bulk of payment takes a few seconds that cover a lot of drama and a long list of actors involved. Let’s name them shortly.

  • Customer, a.k.a. the person who believes that a product deserves its price tag and hits the “buy now” button.
  • SaaS company. That’s you and your business that sells the product worth buying.
  • Website or app, where UX/UX designers placed the “buy now” button on a pricing page.
  • Merchant account — a bank account your customers’ transactions go into as they pay for a subscription.
  • An acquiring bank is a bank that provides you with a merchant account and processes transactions on your behalf.
  • An issuing bank is a bank of your customer that provides them with a payment card and runs transactions on their behalf.
  • Payment gateway is the bridge between, customer, yourself, and your banks.
  • Subscription management system. From the moment of the first purchase, it automatically invoices customers on a regular basis and manages all the fine tunes of your complex tiered billing.

Let's assume that the customer and the merchant are in place, and the issuing bank is a customer’s concern. So we need to find an acquiring bank that will equip us with the merchant account, find a SaaS payment gateway and a subscription management system to make things rolling.

Components of SaaS payment processing

How to choose payment processor for SaaS

Looks like SaaS payment processing is a complicated business process. A new complicated business process being on fire is a sure sign of a new B2B market that will emerge to get these fires out. 

Dozens of recurring payment processing services popped up in the past 15 years. That many possible solutions to a billing problem created an all new kind of problem.

The problem of choosing a payment processor.

You stare at Google Search results. Countless competitors staring back at you from their landing pages designed to guide your choice in diametrically opposed directions. Your heart is racing, your hands are sweating and colorful logos flash before your eyes. 

How to choose payment processor for SaaS

It is tempting to grab the closest payment processing app thinking that we’ll just migrate later. But it’s hard, risky and costly to move between billing systems, which contain all the subscription data bank cards and unpaid invoices. 

We at Eleken are familiar with all the billing stuff — for our clients we cover one of the payment processing layers, the UI/UX design of billing. So we’ve picked billing solutions that are commonly used by SaaS startups, analyzed them, and made a comparison table for you to help you make a thoughtful choice. 

Online payment processing services comparison chart

Online payment processing services comparison chart

Аs you can see from the table above, the list of payment processing services can be broadly divided into two categories:

  • All-in-one services that help with a payment gateway, merchant account, and a some degree of subscription management;
  • Services that run SaaS subscription management exclusively and fully.

Full-stack services as Stripe or Braintree work fine for startups firmly off the ground with simple recurring billing and a few pricing tiers. But as your SaaS pricing strategy develops, so does its billing system. Universal apps often become insufficient as you start working with new market segments, expanding into new regions, and experimenting with plans, upgrading and billing frequency.

In cases when SaaS companies feel their all-in-one payment processing system is holding them back, they put a dedicated SaaS subscription platform like Recurly or Chargebee on top of services that provide them with a merchant account and SaaS payment gateway. 

The benefit they gain is better reporting, full-on subscription management and more flexibility for different pricing strategies. For example, if you offer usage-based pricing, user-based pricing or numerous hybrid tiers, a dedicated SaaS subscription management platform will help billing for any of them.

Stripe recurring payments: simpler than ever

Stripe recurring payments

Stripe is the leader on the market of SaaS billing systems, thanks to its simplified setup process and integrations available for almost everything under the sun. It works as a payment gateway, merchant account, and subscription management system. Moreover, it has some analytics tools built on top, so that you can control your MRR, churn, and other SaaS metrics.

Stripe charges  2.9% + $0,3 per transaction, +1% extra for international cards and currency conversion, and that’s what annoys people in Stripe. Pricing may sound okay for startups, and the pricing is well aligned with the industry, but as you scale, the fees add up quickly.

Braintree payment processing as an alternative

Braintree payment processing

Braintree is PayPal’s project grown to compete with Stripe and equipped with quite similar feature set. Just like Stripe, Braintree charges 2.9% + $0,3 per transaction, +1% extra for international cards and currency conversion. Unlike Stripe though, Braintree (all of sudden) offers PayPal for payments. 

Another unique feature — Braintree allows you to use their gateway services even if you’re already locked into another payment processing account. 

Flexibility with Authorize.Net payment gateway

Authorize.Net payment gateway

Authorize.Net is a payment gateway solution by Visa that doesn’t provide a merchant account as a part of its service, so you can integrate Authorize.Net with your existing merchant account if you already have one. With Stripe, for instance, you don’t have such flexibility.

But in case if you need help with a merchant account, Authorize.Net can provide you with one through one of their resellers for an extra penny — the cost per transaction will rise to 2.9% + $0.3, plus $25 per month as a gateway fee.

2Checkout recurring payments for global business

2Checkout recurring payments

Although all companies in our list work for international transactions, 2Checkout (now Verifone) excelled in its ability to accept payments globally. It is active in over 200+ countries and supports over 45 payment methods ranging from the most popular bank cards, online wallets, and PayPal to regional payment methods. 

If you’re an international brand looking for a payment processing service with the highest global reach, consider this option. 

Chargebee subscription management for B2B SaaS

Chargebee subscription management for B2B SaaS

Chargebee is a SaaS subscription platform that provides no merchant account or payment gateway. It’s a narrow tool for SaaS that gives you more features for managing recurring billing than all-in-one tools, like Stripe or Braintree.Chargebee is famous for numerous options for price optimization, upselling, revenue recognition, trials management and other SaaS-specific features. 

The only in our list, Chargebee offers a kind of freemium pricing — for your first $100K in revenue, you pay nothing. After, you’d pay $299 per month for up to $50K monthly revenue. You won’t be charged a percentage of your revenue unless you break your revenue limit.

Chargify recurring billing for B2B SaaS

Chargify recurring billing for B2B SaaS

Chargify is a SaaS subscription management tool that helps to automate recurring billing and provides no merchant account or payment gateway, just like Chargebee. However, you can use gateways of Stripe, Authorize.Net, and a dozen of other providers from inside of Chargify. 

The company positions itself as a SaaS-specific service and offers great flexibility in terms of billing scenarios. It suits for any trials, billing frequencies, targeted promotions and one-time charges. “If you can imagine it, we can bill it”, the Chargify’s webpage says. 

The service has a free trial and the most expensive pricing on our list — the monthly subscription starts at $599 for revenue up to $75K per month. For comparison, Chargebee charges only $299 per month.

Recurly subscription management for churn reduction

Recurly subscription management for churn reduction

Recurly is another subscription management and billing platform with features more or less similar to Chargify and Chargebee that is targeting SaaS, mobile, content and publishing businesses worldwide. 

The company’s dunning system and churn reduction features tend to be outstanding — Recurly says its decline management capabilities can increase monthly revenue by an average of 12%. Recurly offers a free trial and charges $149 plus 0.9% of revenue for the Core pricing tier.

When you’ve chosen your perfect payment processing service

We’d like to summarize this SaaS payment processing services article in a way some may call a design agency professional deformation. 

Put effort into your checkout design to make it pixel-perfect. Or you could consider evaluating an Eleken design agency that can help you with that.

Eleken on its way to a pixel-perfect checkout page for TextMagic
Eleken on its way to a pixel-perfect checkout page for TextMagic

Indeed, if you’re holding a UI/UX hammer, all problems look like nails that need to be designed properly. But if you only knew how many people leave in the middle of checkout due to one extra step or a little payment hiccup! 

That’s the very last step of the buyer’s journey, and if your customers are unable to input their payment information quickly and correctly, all your previous marketing and sales efforts are for naught.

The second-to-last step of the buyer’s journey happens on your pricing page. And there happens to be a killer guide to SaaS pricing page design here at Eleken. Just thought you might be interested.

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