We are using Zoho Subscriptions to organize and bill our recurring and subscription customers. This allows us to keep all of our subscriptions in one place and easily managed across our team, allowing us to see when renewals and expirations are due or upcoming. We can take good care of the customer's life cycle with Zoho Subscriptions.
Pros
Recurring billing
Organize and group subscriptions
Capture payments and send invoices
Cons
You need other Zoho tools like CRM and Books or Inventory.
When changing an email in Subscriptions it changes it in the Zoho CRM.
No notification of a failed payment.
Likelihood to Recommend
We moved from Quickbooks and integrated Zoho Subscriptions fairly easily. I believe this software is well suited for companies who find a need to manage many recurring or service add-on subscriptions. The payment portal is super easy to use and it is very easy to train others to use it fully.
We started using Zoho [Subscriptions] for the main purpose of saving money [...]. They offer great options for free or [at] low [costs] in most of their product options. We used Zoho [Subscriptions] for about three years for billing our subscription services. We would charge monthly website hosting to ongoing marketing management subscription fees. It can notify the client before we bill their card on file, [and] can integrate with a lot of credit card processors. It has a lot of functions, including: giving a login portal so clients can update their cards [and] follow up reminders to both clients and our team members, in case of either a successful or unsuccessful billing payment [occurs]. Their pricing starts [as] free, which is great when you start out so you can really get a feel for if it may [or may not] be [a] good fit [...]. [...] The interface is really simple and easy to use. [For example,] if you get stuck, [Zoho Subscriptions] [has] [...] [lots] of [documentations] to walk you through [on] how to set up a specific feature; if you get stuck, their support team is good and fairly quick to get back to you. Great software for when you are starting out and have ongoing regular fees.
Pros
Simple interface to use and set up.
Billing reminder emails prior to and upon billing.
Notifications to billing team members and customers.
Automated recurring billing.
Simple reports.
Easy to manage customer database, credit card info, etc.
Cons
[It would] be nice to have one time payment options as a [add-on]. We also develop [websites] and needed one or two time invoices, [but] had to get Zoho [Books Subscription] as well, and [we] didn't use it often.
[The customer] login portal didn't work very well. [My] customers ended up calling me most of the time to change their card info.
It would be nice to integrate with a standard credit card processing company, other than Stripe or PayPal so one can take advantage of pricing once you hit a certain amount of charges every month.
At the time, I couldn't archive a customer and delete their subscription package. It would be nice to have a way to do so.
Likelihood to Recommend
[Zoho Subscriptions is great] for startup agencies or businesses that charge monthly subscriptions of some kind. For most other [softwares,] you are paying at least $100 per month just to have the software. Zoho [Subscriptions] gives you the chance to take advantage of starting at [zero dollars,] which keeps your cost down until you understand the software before you have to upgrade. I feel like you can easily bootstrap your startup business to keep costs down. As you [are] moving forward, and are bringing in several thousand per month in revenue, it can scale up without costing a lot. [The subscriptions] [...] [start] to cost more, [...] if you have one time payments; you then need additional software from Zoho [Subscriptions] to handle the needs, and it starts adding up to typical [back- end] management software, with multiple log in points which start to drain your time budget. [At] that point, I ended up looking for a more all in one software that manages both contacts, one time and recurring invoices, reminders, etc. By the time our revenue exceeded [$5,000] per month[,] I [needed] to save time and looked for other options. [However,] I have other friends who still use it and they are generating $10k or more per month.
We rent products and we use Zoho Subscriptions to manage our rental payments automatically; set it and forget it. Our customer service set up and manage the accounts. Before we used calendar reminders to run payments for the rentals; [it was] very difficult to track, this takes the guesswork out of it.
Pros
Taking payments automatically. Once you set up your product billing cycles and assign them to a customer, it's all automatic from there.
Integrations with other Zoho products, We enter our customers in Zoho CRM and they are always updated in subscriptions and books is always showing the correct payments collected.
Cons
Declined payments, there wasn't a big alarm that went off automatically when a payment was declined. I have set up different notifications when this happens in the future though.
Likelihood to Recommend
I think they set up Zoho Subscriptions for web based subscription plans, I don't use it that way though so I can't attest to this particular scenario, but we use it to manage our rental program and billing for it. This has worked very well for us and the reporting features are good, knowing how much we are forecasting in just the rentals is a great report to view.
