Chargebee Review

Are you in the subscription business?

Do you need revenue operating and accounting services?

Do you need a reliable partner to support you on your path to success?

If so, then you should definitely consider Chargebee.

Numerous positive Chargebee reviews by users suggest that this is a product worth purchasing.

We delved deep into its functionality, user interface, support, and more to find out whether the user sentiment holds true.

What Is Chargebee

Chargebee is a subscription management & recurring billing system that’s mainly intended for SaaS and SaaS-like businesses.

It assists them with revenue operations and subscription billing.

Chargebee has a unique plan tailored to fit any business regardless of its size.

If you’re looking for a partner, not only a service provider, then Chargebee is a great option.

But let’s review Chargebee’s features and functionality and see what value it can add to your business.

Features

Chargebee packs many features—from highly customizable subscriptions to top-notch security.

Let’s check out what this vendor packs in its rich offer:

Recurring Payments

Chargebee supports recurring payments across 150+ countries and 100+ currencies and it integrates with 23+ payment gateways.

This makes it easier than ever to tailor your offer to a local market. You can adjust your global business to various audiences. And above all, you don’t have to get stuck with exchange rates, which fluctuate all the time.

Chargebee software supports online and offline payments.

Some of the most famous supported online payment gateways include Stripe, Checkout.com, PayPal Express Checkout, Braintree, Amazon payments, and others. Chargebee can process credit, debit, and prepaid cards such as Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover, JCB, and Diners Club.

Customers can also pay offline in cash, checks, and via bank transfers.

With the Chargebee finance management features, you don’t have to worry about payment failure. Thanks to dunning, you can set up and send kindly reminders to your customers to update payment details. You can schedule up to 12 retriesfor failed payments with the smart retry solution.

This way, you’ll quickly take care of your revenue or change the subscription status after the final payment gets declined.

Types of Subscription

A subscription lifetime starts once a customer signs-up for a plan and ends when terminated manually or due to dunning. Once you’re subscribed for Chargebee, you’ll be able to test these options in the demo version.

There are several plan statuses: future, in trial, active, not renewing, paused, and canceled. These are pretty self-explanatory, but you can find detailed descriptions in the Chargebee knowledge base.

A great way to increase customer retention is through a gift subscription. That way, customers can give presents to their family or friends and you gain new customers.

To create a new entry, go to the Chargebee subscription section and fill in the information about the plan that your customers will buy.

From there, you can also delete or cancel the subscription, change the end date and even reactivate the subscription. As an admin, you can perform these actions in bulk.

Discounts & Custom Plans

From the Chargebee subscription billing, you can fully customize your plans. Chargebee offers everything you need to create a perfect subscription that fits your needs—from the pricing models to the trial period.

You can enable or disable the free trial and choose whether your billing cycle will be set to forever or to a fixed time period. If you want Chargebee to handle collections for you, turn on auto collect to bill your customers automatically.

You can also manage discounts by fixed amounts or percentage-based price reductions.

From creating plans to customizing the Chargebee billing features—this service does it all.

Invoicing

After fulfilling the basic plan information, you can choose whether you want this description to appear in invoices and quotes. Plans can also be subject to taxes or not.

Chargebee offers the option of regular (single term) and advanced invoices.

A regular invoice includes:

• Seller information
• Buyer information
• The number of items sold
• Taxes or discounts
• The due net amount

We noticed in Chargebee reviews that users prefer advanced invoices because of the option to add more than one payment.

Last but not least, each time you generate an invoice, taxes are applied.

The tax settings depend on whether you’re selling products that are subject to a single tax rate in a taxable country or subject to different tax rates in the same taxable country.

The configuration process is straightforward, especially with the useful Chargebee step-by-step guides.

Self-service Portal

Chargebee customers can use the self-service portal to manage their accounts.

You can pick one of two ways to give them access to the portal:

• Using a single sign-on via API—they can log in from your application/website and be redirected to the Chargebee portal without separate login credentials
• Via the portal login page—they can create their own account and login credentials

Customers can perform various actions through their account page. They can update their information, billing, and shipping details. They can also view or download their past invoices and check their subscription’s current state.

Customers can manage their own subscriptions—they can cancel, pause, delete, upgrade, or downgrade them. If they have coupons, this is the place to enter them.

Chargebee’s advanced portal is hard to compete with—many Chargebee competitors don’t offer the self-service option at all.

As part of its subscription lifecycle management service, Chargebee sends emails to customers on your behalf. This includes notifying your customers about the opportunity of using the portal. To send them an email with the necessary URL redirecting them to the customer portal, simply modify Chargebee’s template to your taste.

These are just a few of the options Chargebee offers. We’ll discuss its analytics and reporting features in the next section of this review.

Analytics & Reporting

Chargebee revenue analysis presents you with the RevenueStory—a tool to track and monitor key performance metrics.

With more than 150 reports, this data suite allows you to dive deeper into your monthly recurring revenue (MRR), churn, new sales, payments collected, and much more analytics.

In this section, we’ll take a closer look at some of the essential analytics and reports Chargebee provides, as well as security and compliances.

Customer Assessment

One of the many RevenueStory dashboards is the so-called “Sales Watch.” These Chargebee insights include revenue metrics such as new, expansion, and upgrade MRR and ARR (accounting rate of return)—all categorized by plans, geographical territories, and verticals.

With these metrics, you can easily figure out which industries, plans, and even sales reps affect the revenue the most.

Revenue is important, but customers’ privacy and safety should always come first. So, you may wonder, is Chargebee safe?

Risk Analysis

This subsection is essential for anyone with an online business. The security protocols and compliances listed here make Chargebee a great business solution.

Data loss is a real threat, so you have to protect your customers’ data and the security of the provider’s facilities.

The Chargebee data model is SCA and GDPR compliant. This is essential for companies doing business within the European Economic Area.

3DS2 goes under the SCA and it’s a multi-factor identification protocol implemented by the Card Networks. Some of the gateways supported in Chargebee for this protocol are Paypal Express Checkout, Checkout.com, and Stripe.

Customer data protection is critical, which is why Chargebee is PCI DSS Level 1 certified. The Chargebee PCI compliance means that credit card and cardholder data is safely accepted, processed, and transmitted. It’s a way to secure this extremely sensitive data from data breaches and frauds.

Chargebee uses Amazon AWS to store data. Since Amazon’s facilities are built for this purpose (among other things), its security is at an astonishing level. Besides physical security, Amazon takes care of your online security.

We did our research for this Chargebee review and we can assure you that your and your clients’ data will be accordingly encrypted and secured with Chargebee.

MRR

Chargebee takes care of many key business metrics, such as churn rates, customer lifetime value (LTV), and MRR.

The MRR report or monthly recurring revenue report includes your earnings for one month. It’s a bit more complicated than calculating recurring charges based on plan fees, add-ons, and coupon discounts.

The subscription business is usually based on a mix of recurring and one-time charges, which change dynamically.

Chargebee reporting offers you a flexible solution with the MRR report feature.

Ease of Use

Most users agree in their Chargebee reviews that the software is easy to use once you get used to it. Signing up is simple and the support team is available to help you if something goes wrong.

You can request a free demo version and try the software before subscribing.

No options are off-limits!

Still, there is space for improvement. This is a very feature-rich service and one can get lost in all the information.

But the Chargebee software feels more intuitive with every click. But in the end, it’s all worth it.

And the Chargebee knowledge base gives you the information you didn’t even know you needed.

Chargebee Pricing

Chargebee has a generous and detailed pricing structure that will scale up alongside your business.

Chargebee Free vs. Premium

With Chargebee, you can test the product in a Chargebee sandbox environment. This is separate from your live site, so no mistakes are fatal. It’s an excellent opportunity to check out the software risk-free.

Users deem the Free (Launch) plan excellent for startups that need Chargebee’s services to start gaining revenue in their Chargebee reviews.

Free (Launch)

There’s no overage revenue for the Free plan, but this only applies until you reach $100,000/month. Afterward, you’ll be redirected to a plan that costs $99/month with a 0.5% fee for earnings above $25,000.

This plan includes useful but limited features:

• Payment pages—iFrame embedded, hosted
• Full API Checkout, Stripe.js, and Chargebee checkout
• One gateway per payment method
• Six Chargebee pricing models
• Dunning management
• Customer portal or self-service portal
• Single tax region

Rise

You can get the Rise plan for $249/month billed annually if you have up to $600,000/year in revenue. Billed monthly, it costs $299/month if your earnings don’t exceed $50,000/month. In both cases, you get charged 0.6% of overage revenue monthly.

The Rise plan includes:

• Ten users
• Unlimited payment gateways
• Multiple tax regions
• SaaS Metrics
• Xero & QuickBooks integrations
• The RevenueStory option

This plan is best for rapidly developing businesses.

Scale

The Chargebee cost for the Scale plan amounts to $549/month billed annually with up to $1.2 million yearly revenue. Billed monthly, its price amounts to $599/month if you have up to $100,000/month in revenue. The overage revenue charge of 0.75% is charged monthly.

The Scale plan includes everything that the Rise plan includes, plus some extra features:

• 25 users
• Advanced invoices
• Custom user roles
• Multiple payment methods
• Multiple tax profiles
• Priority phone support

The Chargebee product catalog recommends the Scale plan for businesses that are already growing revenue. It includes advanced analytics, many integrations, and workflow automation.

Enterprise

When it comes to the Enterprise plan, you’ll have to check the pricing with the sales team.

This plan is suitable for enterprises that need more advanced revenue operations and certain compliances.

In many 2022 Chargebee reviews, advanced users praise its features, especially the following:

• It’s highly customizable
• Allows an unlimited number of users
• Complex billing operations management for teams
• Supports advanced workflows
• Support from setup to migration and beyond

Support

Chargebee support is always at your service to assist you with any queries.

Chargebee offers a comprehensive knowledge base with all the information you might need. There’s also a chatbot that works well and redirects you to the support team.

Our experience shows they answer promptly and politely. If they don’t know something, they’ll redirect you to someone who does in no time. You can schedule a call with Chargebee’s sales team during business days and sort out any issues or doubts.

The dedicated Chargebee support team is also available 24/7 via email for all plans, including the trial. If you’re subscribed to a paid plan, then you’ll also have 24/7 live chat support at your service.

The Rise and Scale Plans come with 24/5 phone support, including callback support. For the Enterprise Plan, this option is available 24/7.

The Chargebee support team sounds amazing, but many users complain about receiving misleading information and attempts to charge them more than advertised. Still, the majority of these negative reviews are outdated.

Chargebee User Reviews

Customers seem to be really satisfied with the service, according to many Chargebee reviews and Reddit threads.

They deem the service time-saving and easy to use. Many state it’s so helpful they don’t need a whole IT team. They praise the numerous features and handy integrations. Customers just love its API and the option for a Chargebee demo.

But there’s a downside to everything. Some negative user reviews mention customers’ issues, such as offline payments and inaccurate calculations.

User reviews about customer support are mixed. Some consider it more than great, but others complain about receiving misleading information about pricing and issues with cancellation.

What we discovered while preparing this Chargebee review is that it’s an ever-changing company that takes criticism as an opportunity to grow.

When to Use Chargebee

If you own a SaaS company and need a reliable solution for your subscription business, then Chargebee could be the right choice for you.

Many Chargebee reviews mention that it’s suitable for SMBs because of the simplicity and functionality of the software.

This means you don’t need to spend significant amounts of money on a huge IT team.

Chargebee is great for businesses that need to transit from another service provider.

If you’re still unsure whether you can trust it, take Chargebee for a test drive and see for yourself.

Chargebee Alternatives

In case you don’t think Chargebee is suitable for you, we have prepared some alternatives.

Feel free to take a closer look at what other vendors have to offer:

Chargebee vs Wild Apricot

Wild Apricot abounds with integrations—more than 200 of them.

It offers many plans for a wide range of organizations.

Even though it lacks dunning management and an affiliate module, it’s great for event management.

But if you need advanced analytics, then Chargebee has a better solution.

Chargebee vs Zuora

Zuora is highly customizable, but you have to contact the sales for each plan price.

It offers even more advanced analytics & reporting than Chargebee but fewer integrations.

Zuora supports businesses from their start to finish, while Chargebee is more suitable for business transitions from one platform to another.

Chargebee vs Freshbooks

Chargebee is SMB-oriented and offers a plan for enterprises.

Freshbooks is mainly intended for small businesses and is used as accounting software.

Freshbooks offers recurring billing extensions but only on premium plans.

Unlike Chargebee, it doesn’t come with a free plan, but you can try it out charge-free for 30 days.

Final Verdict

Chargebee is one of the best subscription management software out there.

It offers a wide range of services—from recurring billing and invoicing to accounting and taxes.

They could provide more accessible support with paid plans and work on offline payments, though. But this isn’t necessarily a deal-breaker.

This service is definitely worth trying due to its numerous useful features.

If you have any doubts left, go ahead and sign up for the free demo version.