Cratejoy vs. Maxio vs. Recurly

I will not recommend Cratejoy to anyone I know because I had a very poor experience with them. Initially, in my research, I had contacted Cratejoy to understand their platform more. I was led to believe that selling on their 'marketplace' would allow me to take advantage of a lower selling fee. We discussed how I would set up my shop and they assured me that it was done correctly so I would pay the lower amount. It took me over a year to realize I was paying the higher fee, which is about 10 times higher than the lower one. Fees are not listed anywhere in the Cratejoy administrative panels. They are not being emailed and there is no information about them anywhere UNLESS you think to go into your payment processor and look at individual transactions. Clearly, it's my responsibility to look at these things and see why the math is not adding up. However, at the time I signed up this information was not clear and I was given incorrect answers to my questions. I was operating on an assumption that took me a long time to realize and ended up costing me thousands in fees.

Incentivized

In my opinion, Maxio is well suited for a large company with simple products/billing scenarios and 10s of thousands of dollars available to waste on implementation, learning curve, and mistakes. For any other company, I do not advise purchasing Maxio.

Recurly is great for tracking transactions and reviewing payment method declines. The platform is extremely helpful when dealing with scenarios where someone believes they have been fraudulently charged for the product. Recurly allows for transaction filtering, which is very helpful when trying to find possibly fraudulent charges very easy. If expecting precise, detailed information about a card decline, Recurly would not be very helpful.

Incentivized

• Markets your boxes in their marketplace
• Sets up shipping so it's easier and cheaper
• Helps get your online subscription boxes started

Incentivized

• Managing deferred revenue.
• Contract management is flexible and allows us to see data that we never had before.
• Billing is painless and is now done within a couple hours. Previously it would take at least 1-2 days.
• Business Metrics and Reporting.

Incentivized

• It handles 1:1 and 1:many accounts to subscription set up.
• It has a good billing customization option (cadence, pricing, etc.)
• Can easily set up a customer account and invoice - billing link can be generated so no need to take credit card info over chat, phone, or email.
• Great and responsive customer support.
• Supports multi-language.

Incentivized

• Fees
• Transparency
• Customer service

Incentivized

• Options for Cash-based businesses. While it's not GAAP compliant and most users are accrual, many SaaS start ups are still small and operating on a cash basis.
• Commissions Module since SO already has all our data intergrations
• So many different features and data entry points that manual data entry errors are common

Incentivized

• I really can't think of any shortcomings on Recurly because they have tried to cover all bases well. However, I believe that pricing could be little competitive because Recurly can become quite expensive when you have acquired a good number of subscribers. So apart from price, there are no shortcomings I can think of on product side.

Incentivized

They are a crucial piece of what we do. We hope to have them as a vendor for a long time to come.

I believe we would continue to use Recurly because they have shown that they are continually improving their software, and they listen to their customers

Incentivized

There is definitely a learning curve - to me the UI for reporting was not intuitive and often required me to ask our RevOps to pull data for me

Incentivized

Apart from a lot of scope, which it has for improvement, like analytics, api's, customer service, downtimes. It still provides a lot of value, it is helpful for us in Business crtical areas, managing subscriptions and creating and launching coupons, ease of usability, camparatively lower maintainence are some valid reasons to prefer Recurly.

Incentivized

Whether it be their upper management or their customer support crew, they have always acted and treated me like they care. Probably because we make them a lot of money, but nonetheless they do a great job whenever any issue comes up. I even met them in person!

Incentivized

They are willing to help with most challenges and are pretty easy to get ahold of by phone. They are limited in their reach, when it comes to bulk cancellations, along with some other bulk edits. It is no fault to them, Chargify is just a system that hasn’t been upgraded much over the years.

Incentivized

They have always been quick to respond and help. I love their chat feature at the bottom right-hand corner of the platform.

Incentivized

Cratejoy streamlines the process so there's less to figure out on your own.

Incentivized

I inherited SaaSOptics from several predecessors that worked on it before me. I believe they used Chargebee or Chargify before SaaSOptics, but I haven't used them. I pray that the market comes up with a better product for subscription revenue management, SaaS metric reporting, and financial projections. Unfortunately, I don't have the time or the team to be able to successfully complete the transition to new software at this time, so I feel like I'm stuck with SaaSOptics at this point

Recurly does a much better job at handling subscription payments than QuickBooks Online. We only use QuickBooks Online when we have a client who cannot pay via credit/debit card. In those cases, we send out automatic invoices via QuickBooks Online instead. 95% of our clients are processed through Recurly.

Incentivized

• Lots of sales!
• 10% commission paid to them

Incentivized

• Limitations in Chargify's invoicing capability has resulted in our finance team having to manually send invoices from our accounting system. This has resulted in 10-15 hours a week of resource wasted on something that Chargify should automatically do. If this isn't addressed, then the wasted time will increase as we scale.

Incentivized

• Providing an interface for our subscribers to manage their own accounts has simplified our business tremendously. This alone has freed up hours of our staff's time each day.
• Many customers receive new credit cards due to expiration or fraud. The time we spent in updating this information prior to using Recurly's Revenue Recovery feature versus now is significant.

Incentivized