Recurly, Chargebee, Zuora and Paddle, and Who Actually Owns Your Pricing

You work out your own numbers first, then price against them. Take your monthly billing value, your transaction count and the countries you sell into. Chargebee is zero point eight percent of billing value, or ninety nine a month plus zero point six five percent on a commitment. Recurly is two hundred and forty nine plus zero point nine percent above the first forty thousand. Paddle is five percent plus fifty cents a transaction and includes your payment processing and your tax in that. Zuora will not tell you. Price each against your real numbers and compare the totals rather than the headlines.

Almost never on the software, and almost always on ownership. The platform gets chosen carefully, configured well, and then belongs to nobody. Two years on, the retry schedule is still the one that shipped, a handful of customers sit on prices that no longer exist anywhere, and a tier nobody has bought since spring is still on the pricing page. Nothing broke. Nobody was running it.

You do, entirely. You hold your own Zoho Billing subscription in your own name and pay Zoho directly for it, and your payment gateway settles into your own bank account. We work inside it as administrators and never sit between you and your money. End this tomorrow and every plan, every live subscription, the whole invoice history and all the reporting stay exactly where they are.

For a lot of businesses, yes, and we would rather say it here than after you have signed. Under about sixty two thousand a month billed, Chargebee costs less than our fee and does the job perfectly well. If you sell into many countries and nobody wants to own tax compliance, Paddle is the right answer and we cannot match it. Come back when nobody in the building can name who owns the pricing.

Chargebee at low volume, and it is not close, because there is no platform fee underneath the percentage. Above roughly sixty six thousand a month billed their commitment plan beats their pay as you go one. Above sixty two thousand five hundred their percentage passes our flat fee. Recurly is cheaper than us under about sixty eight thousand billed. Paddle looks dearest and is not, once you account for the payment processing and the tax work it replaces. We are the most expensive on a naive reading and the flattest as you grow.

First somebody has to notice, and that is the part that fails, because nothing is broken. No support tier covers it. Recurly puts churn tooling in a separate subscription from sixteen hundred a month. Chargebee gates its growth product on remaining a Billing customer. Zuora sells technical account managers on premium support. Paddle offers advisory services to its larger accounts. All of that helps your people work the tool. With us, reading the numbers every cycle is part of the fee, so the noticing is ours rather than yours.

No, and it usually goes better if you do not. The normal order is the plans carrying most of your revenue, then anything tied to a pricing change you are making now, then the long tail of retired rates and one off arrangements. Most of the value sits in the first group and most of the tidying sits in the last.

Often, and it is real work rather than a tidy up. We read what is configured, find the two plans doing almost the same thing at different prices, identify the customers sitting on rates that appear nowhere in the catalog, and settle which version wins. Expect that last part to be the bulk of it. Inherited billing is usually accurate about what was charged and completely silent about why.

Four to eight weeks for most businesses, and longer where prices were agreed individually and never written down anywhere. Configuring the platform is a couple of days. The time goes on agreeing what the plans should be, on finding every customer sitting on a non standard rate, and on the first live billing cycle, which has to run and be read line by line before anybody relaxes.

Possibly nothing, and that is a fine answer. Somebody who owns this properly will do it better than a monthly retainer, because they are there every day and they know the business. The question is whether it is actually on their list. Reviewing the price book in a month where every invoice went out correctly is the work that is always reasonable to postpone until next quarter.

Two cases, and both are common. If you bill under about forty thousand a month, Chargebee costs a couple of hundred dollars, the configuration is small enough for one person to hold in their head, and the money is better spent elsewhere. And if you sell into a lot of countries with nobody willing to own tax compliance, Paddle is a better answer than we are, and we will say so on the first call.

We will say so before you pay us anything, because the fit review exists to catch exactly that. Often the real problem is that the pricing is fine and the product is not converting, or that finance and sales have never agreed which number is the real one, or that the churn is a support problem rather than a billing one. Each of those is worth settling first, and no amount of billing configuration fixes any of them.

Five hundred dollars a month, per organization. That figure sits on the Managed Zoho Billing service page, and neither your headcount nor your revenue moves it. You buy the Zoho Billing license from Zoho and hold it in your name. Payment processing is yours as well, settling into your own account.

Thirty days’ notice ends it. Everything stays exactly where it is, because the subscription and the merchant account were always yours. We hand back the administrator seat, write up what every plan is for and why the proration and dunning rules are set the way they are so the next person is not guessing, and list what we would change next.

Your current price book, a list of any customers on terms that differ from it, and an honest account of what you actually sell today rather than what the website still says. Neither list is ever complete and neither needs to be. They tell us the shape of the problem, and the fit review finds the rest.