10 months of an onboarding nightmare
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We signed up for Maxio because we needed more billing features and flexibility. We were using QBO and SamCart (and still use them in some capacity). However, we were using QBO for our custom contracts for [...] and QBO doesn't have a PCI-compliant signup page for customers and lacks the ability to autobill customers for the duration of their contract. SamCart offers the PCI-compliant signup page but lacks the ability to create custom contracts (flexible on duration and amount) under a singular product. We also were looking for a solution for billing for our usage-based software business (...).
Pros
- The Maxio interface (excluding SaaSOptics) is clean.
- Our experience was so bad that it pushed us to find another solution and we found Chargebee. In my opinion, they have been amazing and have accomplished in 4 weeks what took Maxio 10 months.
Cons
- We are a small company and the onboarding process took over 10 months to complete.
- The Maxio billing API is a nightmare for us. We have a usage-based billing product that consistently showed issues (incorrect invoices) every single month we used Maxio. Our developer is a former Google dev and expressed that he has never been more frustrated with a company than he was with Maxio. His points below:
- No Golang API.
- He felt their API was poorly documented and things had to be guessed.
- Everyone is enrolled in everything, just use a non-zero usage to activate. In my experience, this made it impossible to indicate programmatically that there was no usage but should be a default bill, so I needed to send 1 when 0 was the usage AND I needed to remember which service the customer was using.
- Time zones never did get figured out. Eventually we abandoned recording usage on the first & last day of the month.
- Highest-day-billed is not an available feature set, which meant yet another thing our billing integration had to take care of.
- For us, there was little time to verify the bills before they went out. It did not appear configurable
- In my opinion, Consultants seemed to struggle with their own system.
- In our experience, there was effectively no way to 'dry-run' without changing all the parameters for a shorter time period which then work differently. It effectively required building an unrelated system which we had no time for.
- Negative usages horror: you can't correct something day-by-day, because if it ever goes below zero (when sending a negative usage update) then it would keep it at 0, so, for us, this required managing all usage records at once for a customer.
- In our experience, usage queries returned every record for a user forever, so filtering was a chore, especially considering the time zone mess. Queries were required to set usage to match our system because you couldn't just express a value: it was always an accumulation.
- Maxio used Guide CX for our onboarding checklist. We found it was a confusing list and the descriptions for each item were blank (zero help documentation and zero context). We were told after a month or so that the onboarding template we were using wasn't even applicable to our business and they would need to update it.
- We found it nearly impossible to get in touch with management when our implementation consultant for the first 6 months was negligent and refused to communicate. He was eventually replaced.
- With both the old and new implementation consultants, the only way we had a record of meeting notes and action items (including things that needed to be done on Maxio's end) was if WE took the notes and emailed them the action items. On many occasions, it took multiple emails from us with the same action items to get anything accomplished.
- We wanted to migrate our existing customers over in bulk (from QuickBooks and SamCart) and avoid having them re-submit credit card info and we were told in the sales call that this was both possible and easy. Three months post-sales call, we were unable to get ahold of the technical solutions consultant who promised the easy solution and had still not migrated our customers due to the implementation consultant telling us the bulk migration was difficult and cumbersome. We ended up going the exact route we didn't want to take and spent 10s of hours migrating customers manually and asking them to re-submit their credit card information via the public signup pages.
- Our product catalog was built entirely wrong at the advice of the implementation consultant and had to be completely rebuilt. We had no revenue visibility for 8 months other than the lump sum.
- In our experience, we waited weeks for responses from everyone we spoke to at Maxio.
- We weren't instructed that we needed to enable 3D Secure in Braintree, which lead to a host of client issues with the public signup pages, multiple support tickets dragged out over weeks, and thousands of dollars of lost revenue.
- We found that the only way to triage our clients' tech issues was by asking them to complete technical tasks beyond their understanding (screenshotting their browser console, for example), which left them frustrated and waiting sometimes multiple weeks for answers.
- We were told we could use the SaaSOptics / Quickbooks integration to make life easier for our accountant. After 4 months of asking about it, we were finally told that, since we had two business entities in one account, we would have to pick only one instance to connect to QuickBooks. For the other business, we would have to export an invoice CSV file and manually upload to QuickBooks. We were also advised that the QuickBooks connection was clunky and not recommended.
- SaaSOptics was a nightmare for us to use and resulted in a lot of frustration. It was difficult for us to produce even a simple revenue report. We found this out after a few weeks of Maxio debating internally on whether or not revenue reports were even included in our $600/month plan.
- The only way to customize the public signup pages was by altering the JavaScript.
- For products with components, the client has to specify a quantity of "1" for each component of the plan on the public signup page. If they screw this up, they are either overcharged (if >1 for each component is chosen) or the component has to then be manually added to their account. The only way to lock the values of components on a public signup page is by using JavaScript.
- There is no option for cash-based accounting, only accrual.
- The implementation consultant wanted to speak with our accountant regarding a QuickBooks item sync and a few other items involving monthly tasks for the accountant. We don't have a full-time accountant, meetings with outside softwares is not factored into our accounting package, and we certainly weren't factoring in the extra expense of training an accountant on a new software.
- In our experience, for more complicated products with multiple components or billing scenarios, testing was limited. With an API as complicated as Maxio's, we really needed a feature like Chargebee's "time machine" to ensure our products and components were working properly.
- Because the implementation dragged out to almost a year, one of my most talented employees was constantly tied up in communications, troubleshooting, and firefighting. This was expensive monetarily... but more importantly, it was a HUGE misallocation of her considerable talent. Other projects that she was working on dragged out because of this, in my opinion, absolute joke of a company.
Most Important Features
- Usage-based billing
- PCI-compliant signup pages and auto-billing
- Flexibility with duration and amount for contracts under a singular product
Return on Investment
- We wasted 10s of thousands of dollars on Maxio that we will never get back
- We wasted hundreds of hours of staff time that we will never get back
- We have never, as a company, had a worse experience with a software
- We have never, as a company, frustrated our clients more than with Maxio
Alternatives Considered
CheddarGetter, Chargebee, BillingPlatform and Gotransverse
Other Software Used
QuickBooks Online, Zapier, Asana, Slack, Jira Software, Chargebee
