[Silhouette]

I think those suggesting that this is an insignificant rise are missing the point.

These subscription billing services have close to the most powerful lock-in imaginable on your business. When you commit to one, you are trusting them with a vital part of your operations. At best, switching later is going to be disruptive to your business and potentially damaging to your customer relations.

This is the third of the most well-known recurring billing services to sharply increase prices in the not-so-distant past, after Recurly and then Chargify. In each case, that suggests they have either screwed up their projections so much that they had to grab extra money or deliberately screwed their customers over by dramatically increasing costs when they have an all-but-captive audience.

Either way, that is a serious black mark against an organisation that's asking you to trust them with something as important as your payment processing, particularly when those organisations are already relatively tiny compared to most payment-related services and therefore inherently risky to build on anyway.

BTW, blog posts from these services about how they are just trying to find a sustainable business model and hope their customers will understand aren't exactly reassuring. If they could get things so badly wrong before, why should we trust that they are doing any better now and won't see another rise next year?

This isn't newsworthy because of the amounts involved. It's newsworthy because it reflects on the competence of these payment services and illustrates a dangerous trend.

[ntalbott]

That's certainly one perspective; prescience is something I wish we were better at. Another perspective is that a startup is a search for a viable business model, and each of the subscription services in turn has realized that their entry price in to the market was decidedly unviable. We were able to sustain ours for longer than most because we (a) never offered a free plan, and (b) have kept our overhead ridiculously low. But (b) has kept us from improving the service like we need to, which in turn hampers growth, which is a nasty feedback cycle.

So it was time, and it was painful, but now we get to focus in on the fun stuff: making the service more awesome, and growing.

[Silhouette]

> Another perspective is that a startup is a search for a viable business model

Sure, and I personally have nothing against you trying to do that. It's a tough market to get into, no doubt, and any new business is going to have its share of stumbles in the early days.

On the other hand, that doesn't change the fact that it would be dangerous/irresponsible for the executives at most organisations to rely on your service for something as fundamental as accepting payments until you've got over those stumbles and you are clearly a viable partner for the long term. Nor does it change the fact that one way or another, you're clearly still stumbling at this point, even if you're stumbling with style! :-)

As the saying goes, it's not personal, it's just business. To me (as someone who runs businesses himself and would love to outsource all the payment hassles for just about all of them) I can't see the case for relying on a start-up at this stage of development for this sort of service. If your prospective client is already well-established, they can afford to do anything your start-up can do in-house to keep the costs down and get exactly the solution they want, so the reward for outsourcing isn't high. If your prospective customer is running a start-up themselves and looking to outsource, they could be betting their entire business on the abilities of other people outside their control (i.e., your team), which is a tough call to make without at least obvious financial backing and a proven track record behind you, so the risk for them is high.

I wish you luck in your quest to find that viable model. Perhaps you can bring enough similarly entrepreneurial folks along with you for now to reach the point where you do offer higher rewards with lower risks, at which point I'm guessing you've made it.

[olefoo]

Or it could be that all three of these subscription billing companies got shafted by their correspondent banks...

[timharding]

None of these guys pay the banks. Their customers are already paying a for payment gateway for that service, they sit on top providing recurring billing and subscription management.

[lclarkmichalek]

Not likely for spreedly, as you have to provide your own payment gateway i.e. paypal.