Maxio

Formerly Chargify + SaaSOptics

The Maxio interface (excluding SaaSOptics) is clean.

Our experience was so bad that it pushed us to find another solution and we found Chargebee. In my opinion, they have been amazing and have accomplished in 4 weeks what took Maxio 10 months.

We are a small company and the onboarding process took over 10 months to complete.

The Maxio billing API is a nightmare for us. We have a usage-based billing product that consistently showed issues (incorrect invoices) every single month we used Maxio. Our developer is a former Google dev and expressed that he has never been more frustrated with a company than he was with Maxio. His points below:

No Golang API.

He felt their API was poorly documented and things had to be guessed.

Everyone is enrolled in everything, just use a non-zero usage to activate. In my experience, this made it impossible to indicate programmatically that there was no usage but should be a default bill, so I needed to send 1 when 0 was the usage AND I needed to remember which service the customer was using.

Time zones never did get figured out. Eventually we abandoned recording usage on the first & last day of the month.

Highest-day-billed is not an available feature set, which meant yet another thing our billing integration had to take care of.

For us, there was little time to verify the bills before they went out. It did not appear configurable

In my opinion, Consultants seemed to struggle with their own system.

In our experience, there was effectively no way to 'dry-run' without changing all the parameters for a shorter time period which then work differently. It effectively required building an unrelated system which we had no time for.

Negative usages horror: you can't correct something day-by-day, because if it ever goes below zero (when sending a negative usage update) then it would keep it at 0, so, for us, this required managing all usage records at once for a customer.

In our experience, usage queries returned every record for a user forever, so filtering was a chore, especially considering the time zone mess. Queries were required to set usage to match our system because you couldn't just express a value: it was always an accumulation.

Maxio used Guide CX for our onboarding checklist. We found it was a confusing list and the descriptions for each item were blank (zero help documentation and zero context). We were told after a month or so that the onboarding template we were using wasn't even applicable to our business and they would need to update it.

We found it nearly impossible to get in touch with management when our implementation consultant for the first 6 months was negligent and refused to communicate. He was eventually replaced.

With both the old and new implementation consultants, the only way we had a record of meeting notes and action items (including things that needed to be done on Maxio's end) was if WE took the notes and emailed them the action items. On many occasions, it took multiple emails from us with the same action items to get anything accomplished.

We wanted to migrate our existing customers over in bulk (from QuickBooks and SamCart) and avoid having them re-submit credit card info and we were told in the sales call that this was both possible and easy. Three months post-sales call, we were unable to get ahold of the technical solutions consultant who promised the easy solution and had still not migrated our customers due to the implementation consultant telling us the bulk migration was difficult and cumbersome. We ended up going the exact route we didn't want to take and spent 10s of hours migrating customers manually and asking them to re-submit their credit card information via the public signup pages.

Our product catalog was built entirely wrong at the advice of the implementation consultant and had to be completely rebuilt. We had no revenue visibility for 8 months other than the lump sum.

In our experience, we waited weeks for responses from everyone we spoke to at Maxio.

We weren't instructed that we needed to enable 3D Secure in Braintree, which lead to a host of client issues with the public signup pages, multiple support tickets dragged out over weeks, and thousands of dollars of lost revenue.

We found that the only way to triage our clients' tech issues was by asking them to complete technical tasks beyond their understanding (screenshotting their browser console, for example), which left them frustrated and waiting sometimes multiple weeks for answers.

We were told we could use the SaaSOptics / Quickbooks integration to make life easier for our accountant. After 4 months of asking about it, we were finally told that, since we had two business entities in one account, we would have to pick only one instance to connect to QuickBooks. For the other business, we would have to export an invoice CSV file and manually upload to QuickBooks. We were also advised that the QuickBooks connection was clunky and not recommended.

SaaSOptics was a nightmare for us to use and resulted in a lot of frustration. It was difficult for us to produce even a simple revenue report. We found this out after a few weeks of Maxio debating internally on whether or not revenue reports were even included in our $600/month plan.

The only way to customize the public signup pages was by altering the JavaScript.

For products with components, the client has to specify a quantity of "1" for each component of the plan on the public signup page. If they screw this up, they are either overcharged (if >1 for each component is chosen) or the component has to then be manually added to their account. The only way to lock the values of components on a public signup page is by using JavaScript.

There is no option for cash-based accounting, only accrual.

The implementation consultant wanted to speak with our accountant regarding a QuickBooks item sync and a few other items involving monthly tasks for the accountant. We don't have a full-time accountant, meetings with outside softwares is not factored into our accounting package, and we certainly weren't factoring in the extra expense of training an accountant on a new software.

In our experience, for more complicated products with multiple components or billing scenarios, testing was limited. With an API as complicated as Maxio's, we really needed a feature like Chargebee's "time machine" to ensure our products and components were working properly.

Because the implementation dragged out to almost a year, one of my most talented employees was constantly tied up in communications, troubleshooting, and firefighting. This was expensive monetarily... but more importantly, it was a HUGE misallocation of her considerable talent. Other projects that she was working on dragged out because of this, in my opinion, absolute joke of a company.

Integrates with CRM (Salesforce) and accounting software, and keeps our team out of Excel for revenue and deferred revenue

Provides assistance with automating our AR collections process

The Quickbooks Online (QBO) and SaaSOptics (SO) sales tax integration seems to work well (with the help of a sales tax consultant) and allows us to stay organized enough that we haven’t needed to implement another software like Avalara

You can easily export a Transaction List of all transactions in the system

You can set up a parent/child relationships to get more accurate ARR reporting at the customer account level and customer count level.

The ability to set up and allow customers to make payments by ACH and credit card through the Stripe integration was easy to set up. It does take 2 days for credit card payments to hit your bank account though, and you can’t pass along the credit card fees to your customers (some states don’t allow passing along the fees to customers).

I can barely use the full functionality of the software because of reporting and transaction issues that are not easy to resolve, and appear to be system limitations. For example, the cohort report doesn’t make any sense, the gross renewal and reports are completely inaccurate, and they still haven’t created an accurate, standard MRR and ARR report (order dates before the subscription period could result in overlapping transactions, which will be excluded from the ARR report, so your ARR is understated and you could make uninformed decisions)

You cannot renew transactions between customers, which is a total pain. There is very little guidance on how to handle mergers and acquisitions and there has been a significant amount of M&A in the market lately. Their customer support says you need to move the invoices to the new customer in your GL system, but I don’t want to change any historical information that could potentially change our audited financials.

It is too easy to make mistakes and not understand or realize where and how the issue was created and how to resolve it

There is very limited information (MRR and ARR at End of Month, and Total AR Balance, which isn’t groundbreakingly helpful) you can send from SaaSOptics to Salesforce, and the Salesforce IDs can easily change without you knowing, which stops the information from flowing from SaaSOptics to Salesforce

They have a Dropbox functionality to save executed contracts, but I think it would be better to store them in your CRM where the sales, AM, and CS teams can access the docs instead of trying to teach your team members how to us SaaSOptics.

They have a Clearbit integration to get more detailed information about your customer, but I haven’t set this up, and am unsure why you would use it if your CRM already imports information from ZoomInfo

They don’t have an integration with Bill.com, so I don’t understand how they expect customers to use their expense module

There is no need to use their expense module for 606 commissions if you already have a commission software that can handle 606. I haven’t had to implement 606 on the revenue side, but that seems to be a more practical use case.

You can’t natively integrate with a customer success software, like ChurnZero. You need to hire a developer or pay more.

It is difficult to collaborate and share reports with other parties. Their reports doesn’t export cleanly either and requires additional Excel manipulation. There is no multi-year reporting without creating custom fields and additional data entry. You can’t easily create a bookings report based on the order date or signed date, which could be different than the subscription start date.

The granularity of security settings is not great and they don’t help you organize and direct users to use the software. My preference would be to not have any report users in the system.

There are poor notifications about invoice issues. For example, our AR invoice email keeps getting unsubscribed when we want to have a copy of the invoice saved in our email to prove it was sent. If an invoice is rejected or kicked back, then you will not know until the invoice becomes past due and you start investigating why your customer hasn’t paid you yet.

Invoice template changes impact all previous invoices, which doesn’t make sense and distorts your audit trail. Invoice template changes should only impact the present and future invoices. You also can’t easily add invoice 1 of 8, invoice 2 of 8, etc. You have to have manually type it in the invoice description.

The detail for revenue and deferred revenue does not sync to the GL. You have to make a manually summary journal entry once a month.

There is no data validation on the billing and shipping state fields so when you run a report of “Sales by State”, you will have uncombined rows for “CA”, “California”, “Ca”, which isn’t helpful as we try to do an economic nexus review for sales tax.

Can set up multiple price points (products) with ease

Discounts are super-easy to integrate

Reporting is fantastic, so you can easily see your churn, paid subscribers, etc

API allows you to create custom forms on your own site

Their sales tax integration could use more help

Limited ability to customize emails/invoices/landing pages

DKIM/SPF support is weak, resulting in some emails not being delivered

Invoice Automation

Data Integrations

Customer Service

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

Very easy to automate and keep track of invoices.

Great collections tools - automate messaging to customers that drives collections via cadences functionality.

Single source of the truth, maintains everything related to each customer's contract. Schedules out invoicing, revenue recognition, renewals along with storing actual contract and notes.

Our implementation process was a bit overwhelming. Too much information, too deep, should have focused on core functionality first. I believe they fixed this subsequent to our implementation.

Should be able to attach physical contract to the contract level, not at the customer level.

I never really used the analytics and reporting functionality, seems like it would have been great.

The default reports are easy to use and provide concise information.

Tracking what my customers have spent, and what items they have purchased, is easy to find and identify.

Their support squad is fantastic.

There are some minor UI changes that would improve ease of use and functionality.

Subscription management

Bulk changes to renewal dates

Order exports

Bulk cancellations

Integrations with 3rd-party services

E-commerce order functionality

Scales well as our customer base grows

Good reporting and continues to improve

Stable product - no downtime except for scheduled maintenance which rarely requires app downtime

Needs to improve customer invoices. Currency customers who pay by credit card cannot be sent an invoice from Chargify, only a payment receipt. This means we have to manually generate invoices from our accounting system. Apparently this feature is coming, but we've been waiting for years.

Reporting could be better. We need multiple Chargify sites because each site can only charge in one currency. Unfortunately, the Chargify reports can't consolidate the multiple site data. Therefore you need to run separate reports for each site. This has resulted in us having to use another SaaS tool for reporting.

API could be improved. We use ChartMogul for our reporting due to limitations in Chargify's reporting. However, they have made the decision not to improve the integration due to continued technical issues with the Chargify API data. Other SaaS analytic tools have recently discontinued their integration with Chargify.

Pricing - for the limitations mentioned above, the monthly subscription price is quite high.

Billing - We've never had a problem with the billing not working.

Dunning - The dunning system is easy to use and automatically handles the missed payments.

Adjustments - It is easy to make adjustments to a customer's bill when needed.

Reporting - It doesn't provide the reporting we need so I have to do it manually. It doesn't track individual components like we need it to for monthly reporting.

Emails - The system's emails sometimes end up in junk mail, so I also follow up once a customer has missed 2 payment attempts.

Transactions - An easier way to get to the transactions would be nice. It takes many clicks to see the transaction history.

Tracking and renewing all contracts with numerous customers

Invoicing customers via email

Tracking payments by customers by both credit card, ACH or check

We have contracts that are 12 months long but customers pay monthly. When terms change (raise or lower price) mid contract, changes are not easy.

AR collection was an issue. However, SaaSOptics just released a report to track outstanding invoices and it works great.

Integration with QuickBooks is OK but it isn't straightforward to issue a credit memo for a particular customer.

Tracks revenue recognition and provides journal entries, simplifying the accounting process

Provides monthly and annual revenue recognition reports and analytics that allow us to manage the business more easily

Maintains all of our relevant contract info, including attachments

Automates recurring billing and payments

The dashboard is difficult to customize

I would like to be able to delete report snapshots and have a better way to organize saved reports

Chat feature for help would be nice

The software was built by a SaaS company for SaaS companies. This comes through in the user experience and training.

Integration with Avalara was very important and appreciated.

The subscription momentum reporting is amazing. Almost every meaningful SaaS metric in one place.

Would love to a see a commissions module or add on. This would add an incredible amount of value to our organization.

Improved documentation of general use case workflows. Having a visual and starting point for what needs to be done would go a long way in grasping what needs to be done in various scenarios (new contract, renewal, cancellation, refund).

Reports on subscription services

Reports on revenue deferrals

Integrations

Invoicing

Would love to have more control over reports, customization, and printing to PDF instead of just CSV.

Revenue recognition. No more spreadsheets! It is robust and highly configurable.

Metrics around SaaS sales. ARR, MRR, TCV. All of these things are available quickly and easily,

Syncing with QuickBooks Online. Nice to not duplicate our efforts. You can continue to invoice using QB, or you can use SaaSOptics to invoice. The flexibility is appreciated.

I would like a bit more visibility into sub-customers. All sub-customers are currently listed under the parent. If there were a way to differentiate each sub-customer without having to drill down too far that would be great.

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.

I would like to see a feature where clients can be notified if payments are applied to invoices.

Incredible reliability - we have literally never had a minute of downtime with Chargify in five years. This is astonishing.

Simplicity - the API is relatively easy to use; we were able to get it set up without assistance. Comparatively, services like Zuora require a heavy enterprise consulting engagement to get set up.

Their API documentation has holes; they could definitely do better here.

They have quite weak client libraries and have outsourced this critical task to the open source community. That's a mistake. They should have their own client libraries, which they update regularly and ensure are working properly.

User-friendly interface

Easily scaled to fit large volumes of customers

Phenomenal customer service and support

Needs more filtering options when looking up specific types of customers

Chargify has a great and easy to use interface with a good flow that is easy to navigate.

They do a great job with the layout of their invoices. They're clean and easy to read.

They easily list my products to make sure I'm properly lining up details with what my clients should be charged for.

I'd like to see a more unique dashboard with analytics on the front end.

I found customer service and documentation to be particularly helpful. There were a couple of instances where we had confusion about or misconfiguration with our subscriptions, and customer service responded right away with clear answers. The documentation is clearly written and it's not difficult to get started using the API.

APIs can be hard to get right, but I feel the Chargify API strikes the right balance between features and elegance.

I have a long wish list of features. Some of them: I'd like to import data that can be anonymized. I'd like better implementation of charge features on the sandbox which don't require a working credit card. I wish we didn't have to always set up subscriptions and could just do a single charge. I wish we had a multiple-delete feature for subscriptions and customers. I wish we didn't have to pick a credit card processor (that's a big wish though - we picked Braintree).

The dashboard can be really confusing, in part because it's so feature-rich, however, constructing custom products with a custom pricing set was kind of bewildering and I'm not sure we ever got it down quite right. Unfortunately, we did not have time to really test our configuration live, because it never got out of testing on our staging server. I will say that I'm really glad we never had to set up discounts for real, because that was even more confusing.

Chargify's API is solid and easy to use, including JSON and XML interfaces.

Chargify's customer service is responsive and thorough; always making sure your needs as a customer are met.

Chargify listens to its customer base and their suggestions for feature enhancements.

Chargify's dashboard could use some additional reporting features.

Chargify's pricing model is fair, but could be more competitive with similar services in the same market niche.

Chargify's service is not well-tuned for one-time charges. It would be beneficial to most vendors if one API could handle both without requiring a workaround for one-time payments.

Easy to use billing platform for a SAS company. Very intuitive.

Store credit card information with PCI compliance.

Automates our monthly billing.

Great for monthly billing not good for itemized billing that can change month to month.

Supports multiple products and payment plans.

Has a strong admin web user interface.

Provides excellent technical support.

More flexible coupons.

Finer level of control over emails sent to customers.

More options/control within the dunning process.

Useful APIs, easy to integrate

Lots of features and customization, notification emails, receipts

Ability to invoice

Good reporting tools

don't have

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