Outsource Your Subscription Billing
We’ve written before about the difficulties that independent web workers have creating and supporting useful (and salable) products by themselves. One key is to outsource as much as you economically can. Now Z-Billing, from Zuora, offers a custom billing service designed to hit the sweet spot of “Web 2.0″ companies. Their key strength is in handling the sort of multiple-service-level, monthly-billed subscriptions that are everywhere these days, from Basecamp to Flickr Pro.
Z-Billing takes care of a bunch of things that would take you forever to code: multi-currency support, metered charges, reporting, Salesforce and QuickBooks integration, canceling and re-starting service, and more. They’ll take 2% off the top of your revenue for all this – which is cheap compared to the months you would lose writing code to do the same. Worth a look if you’re thinking of an online product launch.
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Why would you use this instead of PayPal?
I’m confused, does this actually accept payment (gateway), or is it just to “manage” accounts. The web site really doesn’t provide a clear description of what this service offers.
If you have a rails site, would like a bit more control than this, and would prefer a front-loaded fixed price rather than giving up 2%, you should look at RailsKits:
http://railskits.com/saas/
I don’t get it. What exactly does this give me that a credit-card based or paypal based payment approach doesn’t?
Why would I pay 2% to these fellows to collect money for a service that a) I sell, b) I create and maintain, and c) I deliver?
Nimish Mehta
@Jeffrey: I see it does a few things PayPal subscriptions currently don’t, like the ability to restart a subscription, changing rate plans, etc. And as someone who has used PayPal subscriptions for our business since 2002, I can tell you their product (and customer service) have some serious failings. That being said, I still don’t really get what z-billing does, whether they’re a payment gateway, etc? I agree with J Lane that their site doesn’t exactly explain the service well.
I’d love to know if this is any good–there really isn’t another realistic competitor to PayPal out there and I wouldn’t mind considering another option for our business, particularly given the problems we’ve experienced with PayPal this week alone!
I wouldn’t consider Z-billing to be an alternative to PayPal. Their target is to take care of a fairly complex piece of development that is not the core competence of many application developers. They’re hoping people would rather buy a fullblown system off the shelf, than try to grow something organic starting from minimal features.
The service sounds useful for an ISP and/or web host that could charge based on metered usage of bandwidth. Or number of hours used on a software-as-a-service.
Considering 2.0% is the fee, it doesn’t sound like payment gateway is included. Even card present retailers pay more than 2.0% on average for transaction processing. To me, this sounds like a revenue share arrangement. Sorry, but I’m not paying you to run a bunch of web servers after the initial code development.
Other competitors are:
Paypal
Google Checkout
AuthorizeNet (Automated Recurring Billing ARB)
@Mike: thanks for the clarification!
@sun kist: I’ve used AuthorizeNet Automated Recurring Billing ARB (with their provided Ruby API which smells like Java), and would NOT use it again. It’s crap IMHO. They send all subscription update info by email, and it’s not XML so you have to write code to parse the emails, which they don’t even provide good examples of.
I contacted them and the price STARTS at $2000/month. A bit steep for a web worker.
Also, the system does not accept credit cards.