The right subscription management platform can greatly aid your subscription-based business, whether you’re just starting up or growing your existing offering. It can take care of recurring billing, reduce churn, and recover fees from failed transactions. It can also offer countless benefits such as analytics, simplifying the process of creating promotions and coupons, generating invoices and receipts, and crucially, aiding with tax compliance.
With so many options available, finding the right packages to support your Software as a Service can get confusing. Each platform comes with its own benefits and costs.
I’ve put together an overview of my top 3 subscription management platforms available to SaaS companies in 2022.
Top 3 Subscription Management Platforms
The layers of a subscription management platform, from top to bottom, consist of:
- A payment gateway,
- merchant account, and
- subscription management.
Some platforms also offer analytics, dunning, and revenue recognition, reducing the need to buy more tools.
Companies often stack several pieces of software in order to get all of these features. Fortunately, some platforms now offer all, or most of these features, and they are easy to integrate, with well documented APIs.
Chargebee
Chargebee make it easy to use their platform regardless of where your company or your customers are based, supporting multiple tax profiles and global revenue compliance.
Chargebee is a popular subscription billing and revenue management platform with up and coming SaaS offerings such as YC-backed UpCodes, and Rise Vision.
Features and Benefits
When it comes to subscription management, Chargebee offers flexible payment plans and customizable pricing structures, as well as enabling the use of coupons, sales, discounts, and gift subscriptions.
Trials are a known conversion tactic, and with Chargebee’s user friendly interface, you can manage them without fuss or pain.
Chargebee comes with comprehensive billing and invoicing, a customizable checkout, and smart dunning. It can accept over 100 currencies, and aids with tax compliance. Chargebee make it easy to use their platform regardless of where your company or your customers are based, supporting multiple tax profiles and global revenue compliance.
Reporting and analytics allow businesses to take a high-level view of their financial health, MRR, churn, and more.
It is important to note that Chargebee does not have its own payment gateway, rather it integrates with over 23 payment processors, including Stripe and PayPal.
Initial Pricing
There are three plans available at present via Chargebee, starting from the lowest tier – the Launch plan.
Aimed at early-stage startups, the Launch plan comes with Chargebee’s basic features, and will have zero costs until your company reaches $100K in revenue. When it does, you will automatically be switched to a $99/month pricing.
Paddle
Paddle is also globally tax compliant from day one. They take on sales tax liability for all payments, giving users that added peace of mind.
Paddle is a payment infrastructure platform specialising in supporting Software as a Service products. Their full stack service starts from the payment gateway level all the way through to analytics and global sales tax compliance. In fact, the only thing missing from Paddle is revenue recognition, but their API and support makes it possible to integrate with revenue a recognition software.
Features and Benefits
On the payment processing layer, Paddle offers a secure, customizable, and seamless checkout. Their checkout accepts multiple payment methods including PayPal, and global currencies can be added by simply choosing them from a dropdown menu. This, combined with global languages at the checkout, make Paddle a true contender for companies who want to be available worldwide.
Paddle is also globally tax compliant from day one. They take on sales tax liability for all payments, giving users that added peace of mind.
As well as customizable billing and invoicing, Paddle makes analytics simple with a user-friendly, easy to navigate dashboard that gives a high-level view of the business’s financial health. With Paddle’s Upsell Insights feature, it is easy to spot upsell opportunities, churn, and grouped business data.
Paddle’s subscription management hosts a plethora of payment plans to choose from, with the option to create custom plans, add discounts, coupons, and more.
Initial Pricing
Paddle offer a simple, transparent, pay as you go pricing system. There’s one plan for everyone, and all the features are included.
Paddle charge 5% + 50¢ per transaction. This could become costly for businesses with a higher volume of transactions, which is why Paddle recommend contacting their sales team to discuss a custom package that fits, if you feel your SaaS might generate sufficient sales.
Stripe Billing
With Stripe, it’s easy to pick and choose which parts to use and integrate. For example, the payment processor could be used with Chargebee’s subscription management system, or an analytics application.
Stripe is available globally. It boasts a complete package of APIs for payment infrastructure, from payment processing, through subscription management.
Features and Benefits
The commerce layer in Stripe is fully customizable, allowing businesses to carry their branding through the seamless checkout experience. Invoices can be generated using Stripe’s invoicing, these can also be customized.
Recurring payments are easy to set up, and offer flexibility, with options for creating plans, discounts, trial periods, refunds, and more.
Stripe also offers analytics, reporting, dunning, revenue recovery, and revenue recognition. One of Stripe’s biggest advantages is the easy to integrate APIs on offer, and the extensive documentation available for developers.
With Stripe, it’s easy to pick and choose which parts to use and integrate. For example, the payment processor could be used with Chargebee’s subscription management system, or an analytics application.
Initial Pricing
Stripe also uses a pay as you go pricing model. They give you access to the entire suite of APIs, and it’s up to you to decide which components to use.
Stripe costs 2.9% + 30¢ per transaction, however they also offer customizable packages to fit businesses with larger payment volumes, as well as companies with unique business models.
Knowing Your Business Needs
It is important to know your business needs before settling on one platform or another. Stripe requires a developer to spend time setting everything up, whereas paddle works out of the box. Chargebee is great, but it’s not a complete solution – a payment gateway would be needed.
Luckily, in 2022, with so many comprehensive, and mix and match solutions available, there’s guaranteed to be a perfect subscription management platform for every SaaS company out there.