> here are plenty of people who want to start subscription businesses, and out of those, the vast majority will not succeed and will actually end up costing more than they ever bring in.
That's not exactly news, that's why you try to get a good grip on the life-cycle of a cross section of your potential customers before you set a pricing scheme.
A free customer should work out at any level of scale and any life cycle that that customer can go through, the fact that there are 'many of them' or that the distribution is not what you expected points to a lack of research of your prospective customers.
Bait-and-switch by accident or by design makes no difference to your customers.
> Note that Chargify paired this price increase announcement with two other significant announcements that have largely been overshadowed by the hullabaloo: PCI Level 1 compliance, and 24/7 phone support.
Wait until they start getting in to more and riskier transaction volumes, they'll have to add up to 30 cts per transaction worth of fees for various services to help with scrubbing the bad stuff from the good stuff to keep the chargeback rates in check.
Otherwise they'll be spending a lot of money on airline tickets to warm and sunny places trying to get merchant accounts from banks that mere mortals would rather not deal with just to stay in business.
> they should've unilaterally grandfathered all of their existing clients, and quietly given the grandfathered plan to anyone who was already integrating but not yet launched as well.
100% agreed on that one, I really can't fathom with they decided to shoot themselves in to both feet at once like that.
Do you guys do segregated merchant accounts (one merchant account per customer)? If not how will you deal with a merchant account issue once your volume is larger and you start to attract 'bad apples'? (like everybody else that ever did multiplexed merchant accounts)
> Wait until they start getting in to more and riskier transaction volumes, they'll have to add up to 30 cts per transaction worth of fees for various services to help with scrubbing the bad stuff from the good stuff to keep the chargeback rates in check.
Selling a billing logic service to businesses isn't exactly high risk. Their customers' users' payments do not go through Spreedly/Chargify... they just talk to the API of the customers' payment gateways using their customers' credentials. Any end-user chargebacks related to the subscriptions are on the customers, not Spreedly/Chargify.
> Do you guys do segregated merchant accounts (one merchant account per customer)? If not how will you deal with a merchant account issue once your volume is larger and you start to attract 'bad apples'? (like everybody else that ever did multiplexed merchant accounts)
You misunderstand what these services are. They do not provide payment processing in any way. They are only selling business logic the app developer would normally have to write.
> Bait-and-switch by accident or by design makes no difference to your customers.
Not trying to justify, just inform.
> Do you guys do segregated merchant accounts (one merchant account per customer)?
We don't do merchant accounts at all - that's pretty much a constant across everyone in this space. Businesses plug in their own merchant accounts - Spreedly just handles all the billing logic.
There are companies that will use a single merchant account across all their merchants. Essentially you pay for the privilege of not having to get your own account.
Typically these services grow like mad and then explode. Happy to hear that chargify at least is not one of those.
That's not exactly news, that's why you try to get a good grip on the life-cycle of a cross section of your potential customers before you set a pricing scheme.
A free customer should work out at any level of scale and any life cycle that that customer can go through, the fact that there are 'many of them' or that the distribution is not what you expected points to a lack of research of your prospective customers.
Bait-and-switch by accident or by design makes no difference to your customers.
> Note that Chargify paired this price increase announcement with two other significant announcements that have largely been overshadowed by the hullabaloo: PCI Level 1 compliance, and 24/7 phone support.
Wait until they start getting in to more and riskier transaction volumes, they'll have to add up to 30 cts per transaction worth of fees for various services to help with scrubbing the bad stuff from the good stuff to keep the chargeback rates in check.
Otherwise they'll be spending a lot of money on airline tickets to warm and sunny places trying to get merchant accounts from banks that mere mortals would rather not deal with just to stay in business.
> they should've unilaterally grandfathered all of their existing clients, and quietly given the grandfathered plan to anyone who was already integrating but not yet launched as well.
100% agreed on that one, I really can't fathom with they decided to shoot themselves in to both feet at once like that.
Do you guys do segregated merchant accounts (one merchant account per customer)? If not how will you deal with a merchant account issue once your volume is larger and you start to attract 'bad apples'? (like everybody else that ever did multiplexed merchant accounts)