Maxio

Formerly Chargify + SaaSOptics

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.

SO is helpful for small accounting and finance teams that do not want to manage revenue, deferred revenue schedules, ARR, and customer count in Excel. It is also well-suited for organizations that have very few mergers and acquisitions among their customer base, are not dependent upon the SO projections for FP&A, want to have a more automated AR invoice collections process, and receive payments through credit card and ACH easily.

While it works great for subscriptions, I'm not sure this would be robust enough for a non-subscription business.

SaaSOptics is awesome for growing companies that want to automate their invoicing. I like that it is also aimed at subscription based sales structures rather than sales that occur at a single point in time (but has the ability to support both). SaaSOptics makes it super easy to keep track of subscriptions, renewals, co-terms, etc. The reporting is a great feature, but we are unable to use most of the reports as we are a cash-based accounting firm. SO caters to accrual accounting and GAAP compliant firms which makes sense as it is the most commonly accepted accounting basis here in the US, but many small SaaS start-ups are still operating on cash basis. We are one of those companies, so we are able to get a ton of use out of the invoicing side of things, a lot of the reports are useless for us. We also wish SO had a commission module since we already integrate our CRM and accounting softwares into it, but that is not a make it or break it for us. We love the time SO has saved us.

It fit our use case perfectly. We acquired hundreds of contracts with an acquisition (prior to had only a few contracts). Our business model completely changed and we needed to make sure there were no interruptions in billing and most important collections from these contracts. SaaSOptics helped me quickly get control of and manage these contracts and get processes in place.

Best used for recurring invoicing - monthly, quarterly annually, etc. Invoicing and collections can be automated without the need to hire staff.

SaaSOptics is great for our billing management. It's easy to help customers update their billing information, sending them their current invoicing, and tracking any past due invoices. The reporting is clear to know where we are winning as a team.
I haven't found a scenario where SaaSOptics has not met my expectations for the service it provides.

It is well suited to renewing subscription products. It is not so great for e-commerce orders. If your business has only a few varying subscription products, it’s easy to use and manage. If you have a series of complex subscription services, it is not as useful and can be a bit time consuming to manage.

If you are a small startup, likely to be charging only in one currency, then Chargify will likely be suitable for you, as it was for us when we first started. However, as you expand and need to charge in additional currencies and require good reporting, you might find Chargify becomes more cumbersome. You do get a very stable and reliable billing platform with Chargify. I can't recall any downtime dues to issues. In the last 5 years, there have been only been 2 times where the app was down, both for scheduled maintenance. The communication leading up to the downtime was excellent, the app was up and running well within the maintenance window and everything kept functioning smoothly afterward.

Chargify is well suited for companies who need to offer a reoccurring license fee. I see it more suited for smaller companies, but we don't have the enterprise version so I'm not sure what it entails. It may offer more, in which case would make sense for larger organizations. I believe it is a great fit for smaller companies who need a system that is user friendly and fairly easy to use.

Revenue recognition is a big issue for SaaS companies whether or not they are audited. SaaSOptics was built around the idea of proper revenue recognition per GAAP. If you have contract with more than 15 customers and need to track those contract expirations, bill the customers, and are concerned with revenue recognition, then the product works well.

For any business that needs to follow ASC 606 Revenue Recognition standards - [they] need to ditch the spreadsheets and go with SaaSOptics.

SaaSOptics absolutely nails contracts. It has the flexibility to deal with your one-off situations and then provides great default settings for the majority of contracts.

If you are a SaaS provider needing a way to report on annual recurring revenue, monthly recurring revenue, or deferred revenue, then SaaSOptics would work for you.

I would recommend SaaSOptics just for the revenue recognition functionality alone. It is robust, and I can finally trash my clunky spreadsheet. But it also comes with analytics and reporting functionality that is very useful as well, across Finance and Sales. I found the implementation to be useful, because we ended up migrating our own data, and in so doing, I was able to learn the software and how it works in a more complete way. I still have a lot to learn about the reporting, but I feel as though I understand how it works on its own, and how it works with QB. Getting our revenue recognition right for 2019 and onward was a high priority for us, since new revenue recognition standards are applicable to non-public companies this month. The process enabled us to "audit" our current year revenue recognition and make sure we have everything in place going forward for accurate, complete and current financial statements.

Managing deferred revenue can be tedious and inaccurate if not maintained properly. For a B2B business, SaaSOptics has the functionality that allows for us to properly build contracts, bill, and recognize revenue, streamlining the month-end close. Since it syncs customer-level detail with our GL, it allows for easy reconciliation. SaaSOptics has allowed us to be more flexible for our clients and their billing needs.

Anyone with a subscription-based service who needs a fairly comprehensive recurring billing system that they can get up and running quickly, and then basically never worry about again. Chargify is particularly well suited to applications with complex component billing (aka different product add-ons and things which are metered).

Anyone who has subscription based billing would benefit from Chargify, so long as their numbers and revenue can support spending on the service. We have made back 5X what we have spent on Chargify's services - in the first 5 months alone.

I think Chargify works for managing your monthly incoming revenue among your clients. It's a great interface for providing easy to read and easy to manage data. I like the fact that the application isn't crammed to fill in every gap, nook, and nanny of the page. Chargify provides what you need, nothing overly obnoxious.

If you're setting up payments for a subscription plan, Chargify is a great choice. If you don't need subscriptions, i.e. if most of your customers won't be repeat business, then you may be better off just using a direct payment provider. The limits on the number of subscriptions caused us to quickly run out of subscriptions on our smaller, budget-conscious pricing plan, and deleting those subscriptions is tedious.

Chargify is particularly well-suited for API integration and specifically for recurring charges. It's not as useful where one-time payments are often made.

Changify works great as a billing platform for any SAS service that bills monthly. It replaces a part time billing associate / bookkeeper.

We have had a great experience so far. They are a crucial vendor for us and we have not had any problems with them.