> we do need to migrate everyone to the new pricing<p>You can't change your pricing upwards for existing customers, ever.<p>You can change your price to anything you want for new customers.<p>You can decrease your prices for anybody at any point in time.<p>Something like chargify is the basis for the business models of other parties, if you made a deal in the past you have to honor it, so that your customers can honor the deals that they made.
Wow, really? Chargify just lost its position as the best choice for subscription management. Extremely glad we didn't launch yet with Chargify...<p>Here are some Chargify alternatives that we are looking at: Recurly, <a href="http://recurly.com/pricing/" rel="nofollow">http://recurly.com/pricing/</a> at 200 transactions and 500 users $29/m - Spreedly, <a href="http://spreedly.com/info/pricing/" rel="nofollow">http://spreedly.com/info/pricing/</a> at $19/m + $0.20/transaction or 2% per transaction if less - CheddarGetter, <a href="https://cheddargetter.com/pricing" rel="nofollow">https://cheddargetter.com/pricing</a> at $39/m -> 1000 customers, $0 per transaction.<p>At the moment, we're probably going to switch to Spreedly, since the rates look good and they've been around for a while. Depends on what kind of dunning management they have.<p>Correct me if I'm wrong, but it's pretty ironic that it was part of the lean startup bundle.
I've been slowly integrating Chargify into my app for the last several weeks and was blown away to read about this just now. One of the big selling points for me was the fact that it was free for up to 50 customers. I thought this was brilliant on their part because neither Recurly or Spreedly offer this. It got you locked into using their service, which is huge.<p>That being said, I bet that 95% of their users are under the 50 users/month threshold and it must cost a bit to support them all. They must have calculated that it just wasn't worth it.<p>I wish they would offer a cheaper plan for up to, say, 100 users. I think that would a great middle ground for new apps.<p>I wrote a blog post a few weeks ago comparing the costs of Recurly, Spreedly, and Chargify and concluded Chargify was way in front [1]. I think they're way behind now.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.mattmazur.com/2010/08/comparing-recurly-spreedly-and-chargify/" rel="nofollow">http://www.mattmazur.com/2010/08/comparing-recurly-spreedly-...</a>
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.<p>We made a mistake with how we implemented and communicated a massive price increase and in doing so totally ignored our loyal and amazing customers that spent the time to integrate with Chargify. After starting many companies with NO outside capital I understand the struggles of a bootstraping company or lean startup so we should have done better with this.<p>Listening to the feedback here and via many other channels this was very clear and we wanted to make a quick change. We have released a $39/month plan that supports 100 customers for anyone that has signed up for an account, does not matter if you never used or have not started to integrate. Some important points.<p>- Only active customers are ever counted in your customer count<p>- $39/month plan will be available for anyone that has a Chargify account now. Do not worry that you will miss signing up, it will be available for you<p>- Offering the type of support that we want to is not cheap, and it is how we do business<p>- PCI Level 1 is both expensive and valuable and we want to provide that to our customers<p>While we firmly believe that Chargify and many competitors provide great value to a company that wants to do recurring billing we realize the mistake that was made. We will not go back to free as it will not allow us to support our customers the way we want to. There will always be a "cheap" or cheaper competitor out there but we are not that one.
Chargify can charge what it wants, but the pricing change was abrupt and BIG. Apps on the ground floor went from FREE to $1200/year. No grandfathering, 30 days to accept. For a service that needs to be integrated, that's a terrible move that shows no respect for startups.
Spreedly: $20/month + $0.20 per transaction.
.. and I'm using it on 2 apps.<p>I was considering trying out Chargify, but not anymore. Unlike Spreedly, Chargify apparently wants me to pay a lot more up front for users I don't even have yet.
This spooks me a bit. I'm a big fan of Chargify, but for their prices to jump like this and totally remove the free plan is scary. That will make it much less attractive to brand new web apps that don't have a proven business model.<p>With the new pricing scheme your setup cost for accepting credit cards are merchant account, gateway (ie. Authorize.net), and $99/mo for Chargify. For most brand new web apps that's going to be significantly more than you pay for server/hosting costs. That's a bitter pill to swallow when you're not even sure if anyone will actually pay for your service.
Wow. What a kick in the nuts.<p>UsabilityHub has just shy of 10,000 users. The VAST majority of those are free users, and a fair percentage of those are inactive. My Chargify bill would've just gone from $50p/month to $999p/month! And pretty soon I'd be looking at having to NEGOTIATE my pricing. What the fuck chargify?<p>Fortunately for us, we saw the potential for asshole acts from Chargify and never registered our free users with them. If we had...well...we'd be royally screwed. $50 to $1000 with one newsletter.<p>I feel like a moron the number of times I pointed to Chargify as a great way to do business. They were startup friendly, they helped you grow your business to the point where you'd be happy when you start paying them. I know we were! Most of all, Chargify were the beacon of freemium pricing. Not only were THEY freemium, they were very freemium friendly.<p>In one swoop they've gone from the cheapest part of setting up your billing to being BY FAR the most expensive part. What a bunch of suckers all your customers are...us included.<p>Chargify, you will NEVER under the hate you've just brought on yourselves.
I was piloting Chargify with about dozen customers to see if I wanted to make it the default platform for all of my customers. Now, definitely not. This bait and switch shows a complete lack of respect for everyone who has invested in the platform.<p>Chargify, I'm sure you'll be laughing all the way to the bank, but not with my money.<p>Does anyone sell an installable non-SaaS replacement for Chargify that integrates with Authorize.net CIM?
I spent the last two days porting our code from paypal web payments pro over to chargify... and then they just jacked up their prices for starter level from 0 to $1,200 a year, and you still have to subscribe to authorize and the customer information manager - so they're just providing the gateway for $100/month. Ruined my afternoon, and probably tomorrow as I look at the other options like recurly.com , spreedly.com , cheddargetter.com , etc.
You can predict the response based on a similar move made by Zendesk back in May (<a href="http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/18/zendesk-pricing/" rel="nofollow">http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/18/zendesk-pricing/</a>). Spoiler alert: there will be backlash.<p>It also strikes me as a dangerous strategic move. The reason I originally selected Chargify over competitors like Spreedly and CheddarGetter is because they had the lowest entry cost. I can experiment and find product market fit. By that point, I don't care so much about the monthly cost (and I'm locked in to a product that I like, which helped me reach my goals). The new pricing model is extreme enough to make me revisit the decision. I'm sure I'm not alone.<p>I find their product and support to be great, and I'd like to see them keep a similar model. Maybe they should lower the thresholds (free up to 10 paying customers, for example). I'm sure there are other models that will work for them and their customers.
Question, since this is getting a lot of discussion right now and it's relevant for anyone this impacts:<p>If you run a subscription-based web app and you determine that you need to increase your prices, what's the best way to do it?<p>Grandfathering existing customers obviously makes sense, but what if that's not an option? What if you need to charge them more to survive?
I find the new pricing chart to be misleading. By listing the free account next to their customer-enabled plans, at first glance I expect it to allow me to serve customers.<p><a href="http://chargify.com/pricing-and-signup/" rel="nofollow">http://chargify.com/pricing-and-signup/</a><p>Took me a minute to realize I get nothing (except the ability to integrate... SCORE!) by signing up. Smart to drive signups this way, but I think expectations are being set incorrectly.
Full disclosure: I run Spreedly, an earlier to market but much less funded competitor to Chargify.<p>Here's the dirty little secret that Spreedly discovered about 18 months ago, and that I'm sure Chargify - like Recurly before them - has now found out for themselves: there are plenty of people who want to start subscription businesses, and out of those, the <i>vast</i> majority will not succeed and will actually end up costing more than they ever bring in. That leaves businesses in this space two options: either focus on successful startups and actively filter out the "losers" (by charging a minimum of $99/month, for instance), or minimize costs for "low probability" businesses - and they're all low probability early on! - and use "cheap to try things out" as a star search for the few businesses that will end up getting big.<p>Note that Chargify paired this price increase announcement with two other significant announcements that have largely been overshadowed by the hullabaloo: PCI Level 1 compliance, and 24/7 phone support. This pairing is not coincidence - I'm pretty confident that the pricing change is very firmly tied internally to these two new "features". PCI Level 1 compliance is a hefty upfront cost <i>plus</i> a large ongoing price tag. Good 24/7 phone support is crazy expensive to provide, and means that free customers would eat their lunch since so much of the support needs for one of these businesses is on the front end.<p>The <i></i>ridiculously huge<i></i> mistake I think Chargify made here was something I thought was just a given these days: they should've unilaterally grandfathered all of their existing clients, and quietly given the grandfathered plan to anyone who was already integrating but not yet launched as well. When Spreedly made our last pricing change - from percent of transaction fee to flat per transaction fee - it was a price drop for most of our customers. But not all: anyone with super low prices would've ended up paying us more, so we explicitly made it the minimum of $0.20 or 2% of the transaction. There's just no excuse for ticking off existing customers - it makes you look like a cell phone company. Even if you absolutely have to raise prices across the board, I think three months of warning is the absolute minimum amount of time to give a customer base before you hit them with the increase.<p>So, that's my $0.02 - hope it helps folks understand why I think this is happening. Questions, feedback, etc., welcome.<p>P.S. I think in some areas Chargify's definitely ahead of Spreedly Subscriptions in terms of functionality - all of that extra capital definitely shows in the end product. But that's because we've been focused on "what's next" after you figure out the naive business model doesn't work in this space. I said above that there are two options. That's a lie - we're working on a third option. If there are any angels reading this that would like to invest in a team that's been thinking deeply about this space since before Chargify and Recurly were a twinkle in their founder's eye, drop me a line.
I just joined Chargify Oct. 7th after the AppSumo bundle offered a $200 credit. 4 days later, they've raised their prices. I'm going to scrap the work I've done and go out of my way to use other services. The money isn't an issue. $99/month is fine, but I wouldn't pay it to get started.
I feel like I'm missing something, because going by these pricing charts -- <a href="http://chargify.com/pricing-and-signup" rel="nofollow">http://chargify.com/pricing-and-signup</a> -- it seems like if you're a Chargify customer, "freemium" is no longer possible.<p>We (<a href="http://mocksup.com" rel="nofollow">http://mocksup.com</a>) happily use Spreedly and only send customers to them when they're upgrading to a paid account. Can you not do this with Chargify? And if you can, what do they count as a "free" user?
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 to start writing my own billing system.
We just launched globalfolders.com using Chargify (on a very slim budget), thinking we could justify their costs once we graduated to a larger plan. This change erases that idea.<p>It hurts more than just Chargify and their customers, it hurts anyone running such a service as people will be more likely to avoid services that they can't trust to keep their pricing stable (or at least give plenty of advance notice, 6 months to a year).<p>These kind of changes definitely make me think much harder about outsourcing a service. How can we trust the current pricing? Do we have to change our pricing every time they change theirs? How many customers do we lose based on their bad business decisions?<p>Chargify knows that people have spent time integrating with their service. They hope that this will give them a percentage of paying customers, knowing full well that they will lose a lot of customers. This is definitely a bad move for Chargify and a good decision for their competitors.
We appreciate the feedback from all of our loyal Chargify customers and we will have an update shortly to show we understand this support. A plan only available to those that already have accounts that will be much less and have a smaller number of customers.<p>We are very sorry that we did not show this understanding in our announcement and pricing. No excuses.
If you are bootstrapped and need low cost recurring payments capabilities here are a few fully outsourced and PCI compliant services you could consider:<p>PayPal Website Payments Standard: 2.9% + $0.30/trans
<a href="https://merchant.paypal.com/cgi-bin/marketingweb?cmd=_render-content&content_ID=merchant/wp_standard" rel="nofollow">https://merchant.paypal.com/cgi-bin/marketingweb?cmd=_render...</a><p>Google Subscription Payments (experimental): 2.9% + $0.30/trans
<a href="http://code.google.com/apis/checkout/developer/Google_Checkout_Beta_Subscriptions.html" rel="nofollow">http://code.google.com/apis/checkout/developer/Google_Checko...</a><p>Aria SubscriptionPlus (via PayPal partnership): Free trial, then $40/mo
<a href="https://merchant.paypal.com/cgi-bin/marketingweb?cmd=_render-content&content_ID=merchant/subscriptionsplus" rel="nofollow">https://merchant.paypal.com/cgi-bin/marketingweb?cmd=_render...</a>
Chargify requires that you setup both a payment gateway and a merchant account. Why would you use them instead of just integrating with the gateway directly?
It's clear that none of these services have quite figured out how to best price their service but it seems that CheddarGetter is the only reasonably priced option.<p>Why is it that they seem to be perceived as also-rans? With Chargify, you'd have to bring in $60,000/yr before they would begin to be reasonably priced. Completely unreasonable for a bootstrapper seeing if they have something that will stick.
Chargify just sent an email offering existing customers a "Bootstrapping" plan. $39/mo for up to 100 customers.<p><a href="http://grasshopper.com/email_assets/chargify-bootstrapper.html" rel="nofollow">http://grasshopper.com/email_assets/chargify-bootstrapper.ht...</a>
Update on the Chargify support forum:<p><i>We appreciate the feedback and will make something available to anyone that built their business around this. It will not be free but we will give a large discount for a smaller plan. More information to come shortly.</i><p><a href="http://support.chargify.com/discussions/support/3987-new-price-plans-very-concerned-feedback" rel="nofollow">http://support.chargify.com/discussions/support/3987-new-pri...</a><p>I wonder how it will work for someone like myself, who has spent a month integrating Chargify into my app but who hasn't launched yet. Discounted plan or $99/month?
Moral of the story is, it is OK to offer a free plan to gain traction, and then remove it once you have it.<p>This decision worries me on so many levels.<p>I am so glad I went with Braintree Payment Solutions instead of Chargify. Chalk up another victory for my gut instinct paying off!
Wow thats a real bummer, I was about to integrate it into an app, but I certainly don't want to blow $99/mo on something that may or may not earn me a small fraction of that<p>Has anyone used Spreedly or CheddarGetter etc? Thoughts?<p>Are there any robust open source self-hosted solutions? (For Django, Rails, PHP?) Considering its just a subscription management wrapper for Authorize.net, shouldn't be too hard to cut out the middleman
It seems very clear that the free pricing was a great incentive for customers to sign up, allowing Chargify to get their business off the ground.<p>Now that their business is running and they have paying customers, they have little need for keeping the free accounts and helping other businesses get off the ground.<p>In my opinion, a really poor move and completely opposite of the mindset and spirit of their initial offering.
From their support site:<p>All,<p>We appreciate the feedback and will make something available to anyone that built their business around this. It will not be free but we will give a large discount for a smaller plan. More information to come shortly.
Bummer. I just integrated this into a client's app... Wouldn't have done so with this pricing.<p>Also, the price increase is <i>possibly</i> a sign of a problematical revenue model at Chargify. Probably not, but there's a chance that they really <i>need</i> to improve revenue and that gives me other doubts about whether to integrate with them.
I got this e-mail today and was totally floored.<p>This is going to turn into a marketing/PR disaster for Chargify. They even sent out another e-mail to try and make up for their initial "mistake".<p>Customers are very sensitive to pricing changes. The minute you decide to change pricing you should be thinking about it long and hard. While you are doing it you should be communicating to customers that you are <i>thinking</i> about a pricing change and solicit feedback. You need to be gently breaking the news to them.<p>I signed up for Chargify to check out their pricing. I liked the fact that you could have 0-50 without paying anything. Considering development for a specific platform is not free this sudden pricing change has forced me to consider alternatives.<p>As a customer who was just considering using them I feel kind of violated.
They need to include 50-100 customers for the free developer plan. If I was bootstrapping a service, I wouldn't pay $99 a month for customers I don't have yet.
I fail to see how this could possibly be a good business decision for them.<p>Seems pretty plain to me that they need to be going for the low end of the market — new startups with 0-100 customers — rather than the high end.
Bypass the SAAS model altogether and check out <a href="http://www.opengateway.net" rel="nofollow">http://www.opengateway.net</a><p>One-time fee for the script and you get all the power of chargify on your own host.
That's a pretty huge price increase. With all the competition in this space (Recurly, CheddarGetter, Spreedly, many others), I would assume the prices would be going <i>down</i>, not skyrocketing up.<p>They obviously are banking on the fact that their customers are already tied up with their API, so it would be difficult to switch. This is pretty sketchy, and it's going to make me very suspicious of these guys in the future. Also.. no grandfathering clause for existing paid clients?
Your pricing page does not look right in Chrome 6.0.472.63 on Mac (latest current). Screen cap: <a href="http://i.imgur.com/ffxIy.png" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/ffxIy.png</a><p>As someone who will be looking for this type of service in the near future, I agree with Michah that the pricing for a start up, <i>especially</i> one that's bootstrapping is not attractive at all. At this pricing it makes more sense to build my billing system and use Authorize.net.
As a Chargify customer from very early on & having been in a paying position since early March (we launched in mid-January & it took a month & a half to hit a paying level) would we have used Chargify from the get-go if we had to pay for it? I can't say for certain but it's quite likely as it still would've been cheaper than moving development cycles into building a billing system (as it is we're still backlogged in that dept).<p>If I was running a business that relied on a lot of freemium customers I might think twice, but then unless you're asking for credit cards up-front just don't put them into Chargify until they upgrade and give you their CC details. We handle gift subscriptions this way, unless they convert to a 'real' subscription when their gift is up they never go through Chargify.<p>For what it's worth, it's safe to say after using Chargify for almost a year and having an active site using it for 9-10 months, the level of service and support we've received has been more than worth what we're paying — our development backlog is already a pain-point, I can't imagine what it'd be like if we were rolling our own billing system.
Their justification on Twitter seems to be that they needed to get rid of their free tier. That makes some sense, but that doesn't really explain why they double the price for their lowest tier and increased the pricing on their other tiers as well. It's unfortunate that they're increasing their price without adding any extra value to the product.
Here's the feedback I just submitted to Chargify:<p>While I entirely understand the need to charge and make money, I find the sudden and significant change in pricing jarring. Many people just went from 0 to $1200 per year.<p>I'm guessing the cost of supporting the formerly free (0-50 customers) tier is close to zero from a technical/infrastructure perspective, but relatively high from a support/feedback perpective.<p>People in the free tier will either grow or go out of business. For those that grow, your cost is the same - you'll have the same questions whether you charge them day 1 or day 100.<p>So the real issue is the cost of support for those who signup for the free tier and either flake out or go out of business.<p>In my opinion, the rate of customer growth you'll get from having a free tier is worth the extra support cost. With no barrier in place, people will try Chargify, see that it's a high quality product, and if they have a viable business, will use it. That was our experience.<p>With a barrier in place ($100/month from day 1), they'll do a lot of research and probably try the cheaper options before trying Chargify.<p>For our particular case, I'm quite happy with Chargify as a product, but quite unhappy about the way the pricing was handled. With the former pricing tier we had the luxury of growing in cost as we grew in revenue. With the new pricing structure we have an immediate unexpected cost.<p>Now we have to go and investigate the other recurring payment options, which bums me out entirely, since I was hoping we were well past that.<p>You should, at the very least, grandfather the old users into the old plan. In my opinion you should keep the free tier around, but find ways to reduce your support costs. For my business, we treat support questions as the leading indicator for where we need to make the product more intuitive. We invest in improving the product, thereby also reducing costs.<p>Of course that's just my opinion.
Hey all, we've gotten a ton of feedback through Twitter, emails, tickets, and a few phone calls. Plus we interacted with a lot of people over the past couple of months.<p>All of these inputs are coming together in a smaller plan we're releasing for existing merchants. Details will be out soon on our blog, via Twitter, etc.
I was seriously considering Chargify, but now... I just hope they take a leaf out of GitHub's book - remember this?<p><a href="http://github.com/blog/675-organizations-for-small-businesses" rel="nofollow">http://github.com/blog/675-organizations-for-small-businesse...</a>
Ironically, we just wrote a blog post (<a href="http://blog.quplo.com/2010/10/the-payment-provider-shortlist-part-2-chargify/" rel="nofollow">http://blog.quplo.com/2010/10/the-payment-provider-shortlist...</a>) about Chargify as it was in our "shortlist" of 3 remaining (subscription) payment providers that don't give European businesses a hard time. Chargify got a pretty good end of the stick, short of a couple of weird things like charging for free users.<p>But with this pricing change, they're off the list. Sorry. So far it looks like Spreedly will be getting our money.
I found out about the change of pricing friday and I was really bummed about it. 50 free users were the perfect amount of user to guarantee some steady income before tackling the expense. It's also true that with a $25/mo you would need 7 clients to at least cover the billing costs (chargify/gateway/merchant acc.). Maybe instead they could have just change the free plan to 10 customers + no support.<p>I looked at Spreedly, I loved their simplicity, but at the same time I feel they are missing some important features like discount and coupons management.
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!<p>Ning.com did this not long ago but did it in entirely responsible manner but providing many, many months of notice.
With Patrick, I guess I understand the screams of pain on the unlooked-for price hike, but, even at the lowest non-developer level, you're only paying $0.20/month per customer. Assuming you're charging your customers at least $5/month, that's only $.04/customer/month, or less than 1%.<p>Seems like a reasonable amount to pay for removing all the pain of recurring billing.
So the 2001st customer costs you $650 - how much they're paying.
Still, that's probably > $600 for most startups, especially when you include trialing or 0-cost plan customers.<p>I'd much prefer a graduated system, with different overall price deltas for each subsection (Dev/Start/Grow/Max) per member.<p>For comparison:<p>The first customer costs you $100-$price,<p>The 501st customer costs you $250-$price,<p>The 2001st costs you $650-$price
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.
Deja vu. This is exactly what Recurly did to its users a few months ago. It was a bad move, with negative effects for their company that were serious and lasting enough that they had to backpedal with new pricing a few months later.
What I like about this is that Web Apps are now starting to remove the free plan. Makes it more exciting. People need to get used to pay, and not get everything for free. That way we can make money!
I'm not sure I understand - what does the free developer option give you? Just the ability to integrate with your site (but not actually charge anyone)?
Did they learn nothing from the Recurly debacle a few months back?<p>I don't think their pricing is bad but they need a starter plan that's less than $99/month.<p>Also, why are both Chargify and Recurly doing "bucket" plans with such high starting price points? Why not charge based on actual usage? If you have 500 paying customers you can justify $99/month no problem, but most people are going to take a while to build up to that size of customer base. These people can't start off with a $99/month plan. At least give maybe the first 10 customers for free, or charge on actual usage, e.g. $X per 10 customers or something like that.<p>One thing's clear at least, if I ever go into the recurring payment business, Chargify and Recurly are both very good examples of what NOT to do to win customer loyalty.