1. Flexible. An online recurring billing manager needs to accommodate a lot of different possible billing scenarios, so that you can easily make changes to your revenue model, pricing plan, customer incentives, or anything related to billing. Flexibility is especially important with start-ups who may not have worked out their exact business model yet, and need the freedom to experiment.
2. Upgradeable. A recurring billing solution needs to be able to grow with your business. If you’re just starting out, it may be useful to just get up and running quickly with Paypal instead of going through the sometimes painful merchant account application process. You may also want to use a hosted payment page instead of building a payment solution into your app. Down the road, you’ll probably (hopefully) start making enough monthly revenue that a merchant account makes sense. You need to be sure that transition is possible, and simple.
3. Powerful. Once you get to a certain level, you’re going to want some power features. Most likely, you’ll want to be able to give your customers some “added bonus” stuff now and then, with or without them paying for it. Upselling different service levels on the same pricing plan, for instance. Or maybe giving them an extra 10gb of storage for spreading the word about your company and bringing in new customers. Power features like Tracked Items, Recurring Discounts, Custom One-Time Credits, Limited Availability Pricing, Price Grandfathering, Robust Metrics and Analytics, and Data Exports may all sound like things you will never need at the beginning, but chances are you’ll need them some time down the road.
4. Reliable. If you’re going to tie all of your company’s revenue to a single point of failure, that point better be pretty damn weatherproof. You need a service that can handle server outages, database failures, and all the myriad sticks that are thrust into the spoke of the Internet on a daily basis. You want to find a service that has a huge incentive to provide high availability, so you can sleep at night.
5. Awesome. Chances are if you’re looking for a billing solution, you’re not in the business of building billing solutions. Your focus is almost definitely in another market, and you want to find something that can let you retain that focus. You want to work with a company that is absolutely committed to helping you be more awesome. Your subscription billing system needs to be easy to use, powerful, and flexible, so that you can focus all of your talent, energy, and money on making YOUR company more awesome.
So there they are: Flexible, Upgradeable, Powerful, Reliable, and Awesome. The five most important features in a subscription billing system, and the five guiding principles of all development at Cheddar. We urge you to check out our competitors with these principles in mind, compare costs, and make your own decision.
If you take the time to analyze the value we provide for your billing dollar, we’re confident you’ll sign up for a free Cheddar account and give us a shot.
(Edit: I’ll also add a sixth “feature” that should be mentioned here: Affordable. This is especially important for startups and small businesses. We’ve made it a point to keep our pricing as low as possible, by including things like a free credit card gateway with every Blowing Up account.)