Selling your product or service on a subscription basis is an excellent way to create a consistent and predictable revenue stream to power the growth of your business.
For businesses, allowing customers to purchase via subscription helps to increase lifetime customer value.
If your subscription business is to continue to succeed ( it likely is already if you’re a fast-growing business!), you need a robust subscription billing platform that makes reporting easy and provides an outstanding experience to your customers too.
We’ve handpicked 7 of the best subscription billing services out there, perfect for fast-growing businesses.
1. Chargebee
Chargebee is designed for subscription based B2B SaaS and eCommerce businesses and integrates with all the major payment gateways. It’s a fully automated subscription payment platform and provides notifications for missed payments as well as offering advice on how to plug revenue leaks.
What do they do well?
Chargebee is the recurring billing world’s king of user interface. It streamlines everything to give you a view of all your metrics at a glance, but packs plenty of horsepower under the hood for reporting and analysing.
What could they do better?
Their customer support has been criticized for being slow to respond.
Why are they great for fast-growing businesses?
You can migrate all your customer and product information and be up and running very quickly with Chargebee, making it a great choice for agile, high-growth SaaS businesses.
2. Zuora
Winner of multiple awards, and deservedly so, Zuora is living up to their tagline of “powering the subscription economy”. They boast some high-profile clients including Dell, The Guardian and DocuSign.
What do they do well?
Zuora makes it super easy for any business to launch subscription-based products, even if they don’t currently operate a subscription business model. Their platform allows you to manage the entire order to revenue process in one place.
What could they do better?
The user interface can be clunky, and the setup process is complex, meaning businesses with little experience of subscription billing may struggle.
Why are they great for fast-growing businesses?
Fast-growing businesses could benefit from having everything in one place with Zuora if they have the expertise to manage it internally.
3. SaasOptics
One of the most popular subscription billing services among rapidly growing startups, SaaSOptics automates your entire subscription selling and management process.
What do they do well?
The number of native integrations in SaaSOptics is very impressive, as is the sheer length of the feature list – revenue recognition, order management, invoices, payments, renewals, not to mention reporting and analytics.
What could they do better?
There’s little in the way of customisation available with SaaSOptics, but if you’re happy using an off the shelf product then that shouldn’t worry you.
Why are they great for fast-growing businesses?
SaaS Optics is, unsurprisingly, built for SaaS companies. This should suit many fast-growing businesses just fine, giving them an incredibly powerful subscription management platform with which they can scale.
4. Recurly
Aimed squarely at general eCommerce businesses rather than specifically SaaS companies, Recurly offers a unique credit card payment platform with distinct advantages for fast-growing businesses.
What do they do well?
Recurly position themselves as “the top subscription platform for maximising revenue”. They do this by incorporating machine learning to reduce the risk of payment declines and therefore reduce customer churn.
What could they do better?
The platform is slightly cumbersome and takes a while to navigate thanks to long page loading times. The revenue insights are a little lacking too, with figures sometimes taking a few hours or even a day to update.
Why are they great for fast-growing businesses?
Customer churn is one of the leading causes of last revenue and any business that can take steps to reduce churn will see profits soar.
5. Paddle
An all-in-one solution that covers recurring billing, invoicing, tax, compliance, fraud, and more. Aside from Stripe, they’re the only tax-compliant billing platform for US-based SaaS companies.
What do they do well?
Paddle is great at supporting businesses with global ambitions, with multiple currencies, and different payment gateways configurable in just a couple of clicks.
They also take customer support very seriously, with a dedicated account manager helping you get the maximum possible ROI from using Paddle.
What could they do better?
The only glaring omission from the feature list is revenue recognition, so you’ll need to find an integration for this yourself.
Why are they great for fast-growing businesses?
Paddle sets you up with everything you need to sell subscription services around the world, with many of their customers citing just how easy it was to access new markets and sign new customers after using Paddle.
Finally, we’ll take a brief look at two payment gateways with integrated subscription management support.
6. Stripe Billing
A global leader in payments, Stripe also offers support for subscriptions and recurring payments and invoices.
What do they do well?
Stripe Billing supports many integrations including POS and packs a lot of features into a very user-friendly, reliable platform.
What could they do better?
The platform does suffer from a lack of flexibility so may not suit more dynamic fast-growing businesses.
Why are they great for fast-growing businesses?
Reliability, security, and a name you can trust – there’s a lot that Stripe Billing can offer businesses who are growing rapidly.
7. eCurring
From mobile payment powerhouse Mollie, eCurring offers an out-of-the-box payment and subscription platform for WordPress that takes all the hassle out of managing your recurring sales.
What do they do well?
Simplicity and powerful integration options are the main advantages of eCurring and you can get up and running in no time with zero development resources required.
What could they do better?
There have been reports that setting the plugin up on your website is not straightforward, so you may need support for this.
Why are they great for fast-growing businesses?
The ease of eCurring’s plug-in-and-play model means that any business looking to offer subscriptions can be up and running in no time.
For more help deciding which subscription payment platform is right for your fast-growing business get in touch with 2knowlab today.
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