Stripe Billing vs. Subscription Genius (discontinued)

If you have a small to medium sized business Stripe is most likely the perfect solution for you. It will automate almost all of your billing, freeing up your time to be used elsewhere. If you have a large business I would recommend getting in touch with the Stripe customer support team first to ensure it will be a good fit for you.

Incentivized

I would avoid [it] for any subscription management. Personally, we had a torrid experience with the product and company. The platform is dated and feels like an afterthought or a sideline project for Pape Ventures. They certainly don’t invest any time in developing the product and it feels like there is a real ‘Can’t do’ attitude from the management.

• Stripe attempts to bill clients multiple times, so if the initial attempt to collect payment fails, they keep trying. Often payment is collected on the 2nd or 3rd try. This ability to re-try billing attempts with the same user on a monthly basis increases the overall amount we collect in payments.
• It is easy to search for customers using Stripe- type in the first few letters of the subscriber's name and they immediately appear. It's a simple feature, but very useful when fielding customer service calls.
• Stripe does make it easy to create new coupon codes or issue partial or total refunds.

• Initial sales was strong.
• Their website looks the part.
• You feel like they are genuine.

• Dashboard gives too much info for dept. use, may vary for others.
• Be able to export multiple invoices as a PDF at once.
• Getting to the invoices can be tricky if you have to click on multiple links.

Incentivized

• Failed to deliver on promises.
• Auto renew function never worked from the start.
• Facebook Pixel Tracking never worked.
• Support failed to return calls.
• Support failed to return emails.
• Generally ignored.
• It ended up costing us double. I had to waste time chasing them to deliver on a product that never worked.
• Feels like a side project or afterthought.
• No new development time.
• Feels like it has been mothballed.

I have had no problems with Stripe support, they are prompt and it does not crash like other platforms or software. They are also great about notifying if maintenance is needed. Since the interface is so easy to use, I haven’t had to contact support that much, versus other platforms, it can be hard to be aware of certain features.

Incentivized

Our previous product was Cloudnet360, which provides an integrated shopping cart and CRM. With Cloudnet, our customers had to leave our site and go to an outside checkout page in order to purchase. In addition, Stripe provides a robust API which allows us to automate more of the work of maintaining a subscription service.

Incentivized

• By managing our e-commerce, Stripe makes it easy to have a subscription business, so it automates the whole thing.
• ROI would be much higher with better analytics -- having to create reports and segment customers manually is a pain and definitely eats into the ROI of the product
• I would also like to see more AI applied to the reporting and data for better insights

Incentivized

• We actually lost money and further time
• We ended up reverting back to manual subscription management