ChargeBee is an all in one subscription billing solution designed to handle all the complexity of recurring billing. The product integrates with a range of other SaaS applications including SalesForce, accounting, and order fulfillment systems. Some key features include: Managed Subscription Billing, Flexible Billing Support and Automated Notifications.
$599
per month for up to USD 100K of billing per month; 0.75% on billing thereafter
Recharge
Score 5.1 out of 10
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ReCharge, the eponymous subscription management software solution from ReCharge Payments headquartered in Santa Monica, is said by the vendor to have helped over 15,000 merchants launch and scale their subscription business. Be it a curated monthly box, recurring necessities or access to exclusive perks, they state ReCharge drives billions of dollars in annual processing for nearly 30 million consumers.
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Pricing
Chargebee
Recharge
Editions & Modules
Scale
$599
per month for up to USD 100K of billing per month; 0.75% on billing thereafter
Chargebee is also one of the best platform in order to provide proper billing management to the customers by providing their configuration needs to be corrected in order to deploy and made the connection relevant to the specific position which is one of the best usecase.It also provides support in order to rectifying issues.
Recharge's entry level subscription plans are cheap, allowing small brands to spin up a subscription program and get started. But at scale, Recharge gets expensive compared to much of the competition and runs into many limitations around subscription acquisition, management, and retention. We run into regular bugs and issues that are time consuming to fix. In my opinion, much of Recharge's functionality updates are adding on new features that they charge you for even though much of the subscription related functionality is clunky, sluggish, and doesn't perform incredibly well.
[I feel] customer service never actually fixes any problems. They make you gather information they easily could, write up a big report of the problem, and then tell you why it's not working (usually not even correct). [In my experience] they never actually solve a problem. Not to mention, [in my experience] you can never speak with anyone immediately and coms turnaround is usually over 24 hours.
So far, I can not get my customers to checkout online, even after hiring professional developers to help.
[I believe] QBO sync is a mess.
My account is set up to send payment tokens to Authorize.Net, and no matter how much I disable every possible security feature, I still have 100's of declined cards, that work perfectly well.
It's very easy to use once you know what you're doing. I found it very straight forward once I got the hang of things and was able to create plans easily for my business. I was also able to just charge my clients right away easily. Refunding was also easy when needed.
In my experience, Recharge is very slow loading, both for our customer facing dashboards and our internal dashboards. We regularly deal with customer complaints, having difficulty using their subscription management dashboard. Working in the Recharge admin dashboard is also slow and clunky. It can be a little bit of a battle to get stuff done and it's not uncommon for analytics dashboards to simply fail to load. All in all, working with Recharge is not an enjoyable experience for me.
In my experience, Recharge support is... quite poor. They are slow to respond and unhelpful. Even at a different brand I worked at with an Enterprise contract and guaranteed few hour response times, they would regularly take one to three days to get back to me, which is quite a bit longer than the Enterprise support response times. I've had to get into arguments with them multiple times about bugs before they would admit them to be bugs and fix them and their go to support is to usually blame Shopify. There was one time I accidentally sent an email to a different vendor asking about Recharge support, and the other vendor provided a more helpful response than Recharge support.
Chargebee is a class apart from Zoho Books - better in all aspects - better interface, more functionalities, integrations that actually work, responsive support, customisable automated reporting, more customizability. The only difference is pricing - Zoho comes at about 10% of what Chargebee costs. So for startups looking to graduate from Google Sheets and on a budget - Zoho will serve your purposes - but eventually will have to move to something like a Chargebee.
We actually surveyed over a dozen potential Shopify subscription apps before we finally decided to settle on Recharge. Recharge is definitely not the cheapest, but they also weren't the most expensive, either. For the all of the features and technology they offer versus what they are charging, we found it to be extremely fair (and now well worth the price).
Chargebee has allowed us to focus on the most important part of our business: the product, instead of cumbersome development to manage subscriptions. The time ROI that it saved allowing us to get our product to market was invaluable.
Chargebee also made sense financially. Paying the subscription was far cheaper than developing something similar (or even far inferior) ourselves
Overall it's saved us quite a bit of time, money, and allows employees to easily manage subscriptions which is extremely important to us.
