London-based Paddle offers an ecommerce and subscription management solution for software companies seeking a streamlined demonstration of their services and centralized management of their different service levels and cloud-based offerings.
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Recharge
Score 6.7 out of 10
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ReCharge, the eponymous subscription management software solution from ReCharge Payments headquartered in Santa Monica, is said by the vendor to have helped over 15,000 merchants launch and scale their subscription business. Be it a curated monthly box, recurring necessities or access to exclusive perks, they state ReCharge drives billions of dollars in annual processing for nearly 30 million consumers.
I wouldn't recommend them to anybody because their support is getting worse and worse and their business processes require you to contact support whether you want to or not. You will be forced to contact support and then wait for days to get any meaningful response that's not a copy/pasted sentence from FAQ.
If you are using Shopify and have plenty of ecommerce orders a month, Recharge is a no brainer when it comes to setting up and using a subscription service. We can't say enough about how well their team works and implements everything along the way. They also teach us common practice things to set up in the admin for customers to use, and help us with reporting and analysis to get better and grow.
Super easy to implement SDKs across supported platforms that support modern interface paradigms.
Real team members that provide backend support for merchant issues. We had issues addressed quickly and taken seriously whenever we needed anything.
Help with navigating VAT transparently. We never worried that we were messing up in this complicated area of international sales.
Great first line customer support reduces the need for an extensive customer support organization on our end. They dealt with all purchase related issues as well as lightweight technical issues (e.g pointing users to FAQs, update links, etc.).
In my experience, Recharge is very slow loading, both for our customer facing dashboards and our internal dashboards. We regularly deal with customer complaints, having difficulty using their subscription management dashboard. Working in the Recharge admin dashboard is also slow and clunky. It can be a little bit of a battle to get stuff done and it's not uncommon for analytics dashboards to simply fail to load. All in all, working with Recharge is not an enjoyable experience for me.
In my experience, Recharge support is... quite poor. They are slow to respond and unhelpful. Even at a different brand I worked at with an Enterprise contract and guaranteed few hour response times, they would regularly take one to three days to get back to me, which is quite a bit longer than the Enterprise support response times. I've had to get into arguments with them multiple times about bugs before they would admit them to be bugs and fix them and their go to support is to usually blame Shopify. There was one time I accidentally sent an email to a different vendor asking about Recharge support, and the other vendor provided a more helpful response than Recharge support.
We tried using Stripe before Paddle, but it was a pain integrating it and it lacked the licensing. Paddle allows us just to add a payment button and don’t ever think about payment methods, we don’t have to make a separate button for card payments and another one for PayPal. Paddle does all this in their checkout process.
We actually surveyed over a dozen potential Shopify subscription apps before we finally decided to settle on Recharge. Recharge is definitely not the cheapest, but they also weren't the most expensive, either. For the all of the features and technology they offer versus what they are charging, we found it to be extremely fair (and now well worth the price).
