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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Stripe Billing
Score 9.1 out of 10
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Stripe Billing subscription management software is used to bill and manage customers in various ways, from simple recurring billing to usage-based billing and sales-negotiated contracts. It is used to automate revenue management workflows, and accept payments globally.
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.
If you have a small to medium sized business Stripe is most likely the perfect solution for you. It will automate almost all of your billing, freeing up your time to be used elsewhere. If you have a large business I would recommend getting in touch with the Stripe customer support team first to ensure it will be a good fit for you.
Laravel integration. Our product is written in Laravel, which supports Stripe out of the box.
Customer service. When I had questions during my integration, customer support was easily accessible, friendly and helpful.
Modern UI creates a quick, seamless purchase process for the customer.
The ability to generate one-off custom invoices (not associated with a specific product) allows us to bill for custom development services through the same payment processor.
The backend dashboard is well laid out and provides lots of great information.
Test mode makes testing purchases quick and painless.
It's pretty code-intensive to set up. You have to be a developer to get it on your site -- I feel like it should be more turnkey.
Better reporting and analytics -- why should i have to subscribe to yet another sass platform like Baremetrics to get better metrics -- feel like these should be onboard at Stripe. If a competitor came along with better metrics, we would switch.
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.
I have had no problems with Stripe support, they are prompt and it does not crash like other platforms or software. They are also great about notifying if maintenance is needed. Since the interface is so easy to use, I haven’t had to contact support that much, versus other platforms, it can be hard to be aware of certain features.
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).
Our firm switched to Stripe because it came highly recommended by our developer. Apparently Stripe APIs are easily integrated into websites to provide all sorts of billing technology. And we are fond of their ability to attempt to collect payments from individual subscribers multiple times. However, Chase Paymentech did offer personal customer service that was quite stellar. As our company grows there is simply no way we can function without the ability to talk to someone in the case of an emergency
