Subscriptions are fast becoming a predominant way people transact online. Just look at the number of beauty box companies emerging in Asia and the amount of software-as-a-service products around. Even Microsoft, a dinosaur of the software era, has begun charging customers by the month to use its office productivity suite.
Taking advantage of the new status quo is ChargeBee, an India-based startup that aims to make implementing subscription billing easy for businesses. With ChargeBee, users can set price plans, create promotional coupons, and generate email notifications. They can then integrate ChargeBee with a selection of over 30 payment gateways.
While Stripe and PayPal also offer subscription billing, Krish Subramanian, co-founder of ChargeBee, explains that his company’s product is a “beautiful abstraction layer” built on top of payment gateways. In plain speak, it offers users a simple-to-use API and intuitive user interface that makes the task of implementing subscription billing easier than what’s out there.
Also, its support for various payment gateways would mean that users can offer their customers more choice when it comes to transacting. In Asia, a region beset by the fragmentation of online payment infrastructure, ChargeBee could become a useful go-between that makes e-commerce more viable.
So, is ChargeBee seeing any traction so far? According to Krish, the startup, which was in beta in 2012 and launched this year, currently has 25 paying customers, another 40 that are preparing to go live and will eventually pay, and 500 registered users who are trying out the service. These users hail from parts of Asia-Pacific, Europe, and the United States.
It’s a small but promising start from the technically-inclined co-founding team consisting of four engineers — 3 of which were employees of Zoho who have experience building SaaS products.
“We noticed that pay-as-you-go billing model is become more prevalent across various verticals and with cloud adoption, the way customer life cycle is managed and businesses’ getting paid is set for an overhaul,” said Krish.
The company has raised an angel round from US investors to the tune of USD 350K.
How ChargeBee works:
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