I was recently talking to a friend in NYC who is getting ready to launch what should be an awesome online photo service. He was considering Cheddar, and we had a few email exchanges and one in-person meeting to talk it through.
At the end of the day, he and his partners decided against us, and would instead build their own billing system.
I’m no salesman, so I didn’t push him too hard to change his mind. Especially since I know him well, and could tell that his mind is already well past changing. However, I did want to leave him with some things to consider, and what better place to do so than a public blog‽ (← interrobang)
These are the reasons that all startups should consider using us (or any 3rd party billing system) instead of rolling their own.
You’re in the heady days of a pre-launch startup, you’re most likely spending long hours writing code, trying to get bizdev deals, and focusing on getting the MVP out the door and into the wild world wide web.
Most times this includes farming out certain tasks and systems to professionals who have already mastered it:
But for some reason, a significant number of startups decide to build their own billing system. Thus delaying launch, stealing focus from their core product offering, and teeing up a bunch of possible problems down the road. Like…
Maintaining an active billing system is difficult (trust us!). Crap hits the fan. Your developer team is going to spend time fixing little bugs with the billing system when they should be focused on developing.
Our product is awesome, let’s charge people for it! How about we keep things easy and just make a simple monthly package? $20 a month? Yeah, we can build that.
One year later:
Good thing we went with a recurring billing system that handles all that crap for us!
Derp!
And here are a few more reasons:
Our CheddarGateway is included in our pricing, and the configuration is integrated within the Cheddar setup process. Save time and money! Act now! Supplies limited! Seriously, this is big.
Our support is second to none. Ask any of our customers.
Our partners at Gravity Payments in Seattle are the best in the business. If you have a startup that needs to accept credit card payments, you should talk to them. During the setup process, if you need a merchant account, you just fill out this form (requires login) and our partners at Gravity Payments will walk you through it step by step.
Can’t get a merchant account in your country? Use our Paypal or Website Payments Pro recurring billing integration. Simple.
Did you know that our founder Marc has been building billing systems for over 10 years? He built an online rent-payment system for multi-family housing (apartments) in 2001 and scaled it to process over $3 Million of transactions per month. None of our competitors know the intricacies of online recurring billing better than us. Numbers don’t lie.
You can almost guarantee that our billing architecture will be better than whatever you come up with in-house. That’s not hyperbole, it’s just logic. We’ve been doing this for a while now, and have been proven successful. Your team is probably awesome at something else.
So why take the risk?