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Maxio

Maxio
Formerly Chargify + SaaSOptics

Overview

What is Maxio?

Chargify provides a SaaS billing solution that handles free trial periods, one-time fees, promotions, refunds, email receipts. They support billing your customers by credit card or invoicing for larger accounts. Prices start at $65/month for 20 customers, and trend upward…

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Recent Reviews

SaaSOptics

8 out of 10
April 29, 2021
Incentivized
We currently use SaaSOptics in Finance for sending out and tracking invoices for our SaaS clients. It has cut down on invoicing time …
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Reviewer Pros & Cons

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DP
Daniel Patterson
CEO (Chief Executive Officer)
Grow Your Music Studio & Piano Express (Education Management, 1-10 employees)
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Pricing

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Essentials

$599

Cloud
per month

Growth

Custom

Cloud

Scale

Custom

Cloud

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee
For the latest information on pricing, visithttps://www.maxio.com/pricing

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services

Starting price (does not include set up fee)

  • $599 per month
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Product Details

What is Maxio?

Chargify offers Recurring Billing and Subscription Management. According to the vendor, Chargify Elastic Billing turns billing into a competitive edge for modern recurring revenue-based businesses that need to personalize and differentiate their offerings for the Relationship Economy.


Founded in 2009, Chargify has helped thousands of businesses manage millions of offers that drive billions in annual revenue. Chargify promises to remove billing bottlenecks and give front, corner, and back office teams the speed and flexibility to grow faster.


Maxio Features

  • Supported: Offer Management
  • Supported: Recurring Billing
  • Supported: Subscription Relationship Management
  • Supported: Revenue Retention
  • Supported: Subscription Analytics & Insights

Maxio Integrations

Maxio Competitors

Maxio Technical Details

Deployment TypesSoftware as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationApple iOS, Mobile Web

Frequently Asked Questions

Chargify provides a SaaS billing solution that handles free trial periods, one-time fees, promotions, refunds, email receipts. They support billing your customers by credit card or invoicing for larger accounts. Prices start at $65/month for 20 customers, and trend upward to $1,299/month for 10,000 customers

Maxio starts at $599.

Braintree, a PayPal service, Fusebill, and Recurly are common alternatives for Maxio.

The most common users of Maxio are from Small Businesses (1-50 employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(58)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-3 of 3)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
September 12, 2023

10 months of an onboarding nightmare

DP
Daniel Patterson
CEO (Chief Executive Officer)
Grow Your Music Studio & Piano Express (Education Management, 1-10 employees)
Score 1 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We signed up for Maxio because we needed more billing features and flexibility. We were using QBO and SamCart (and still use them in some capacity). However, we were using QBO for our custom contracts for [...] and QBO doesn't have a PCI-compliant signup page for customers and lacks the ability to autobill customers for the duration of their contract. SamCart offers the PCI-compliant signup page but lacks the ability to create custom contracts (flexible on duration and amount) under a singular product. We also were looking for a solution for billing for our usage-based software business (...).
Pros and Cons
  • 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.
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
Most Important Features
  • Usage-based billing
  • PCI-compliant signup pages and auto-billing
  • Flexibility with duration and amount for contracts under a singular product
Return on Investment
  • We wasted 10s of thousands of dollars on Maxio that we will never get back
  • We wasted hundreds of hours of staff time that we will never get back
  • We have never, as a company, had a worse experience with a software
  • We have never, as a company, frustrated our clients more than with Maxio
Alternatives Considered
Maxio (via information we found on their website and in the initial sales call) seemed like the most comprehensive fit at the time and we liked the interface. We eventually found out that there was a massive gap between what was promised us and what was actually delivered. Below is an excerpt to an email that we sent to the technical solutions consultant and sales rep three months after purchase:

"I am, however, frustrated that a solution promised in the demo call ended up being a solution that was so cumbersome that 1) no one knew how to implement it except [tech consultant], who I was never able to get ahold of 2) it delayed our launch by two months and resulted in real frustration for my team and thousands of dollars in lost revenue and 3) brought more effort and annoyance to our customers than we were anticipating. I'm bringing this to your attention because I strongly feel that there has been a discrepancy between possible solutions and actual solutions. It is frustrating to make a purchase decision based on features discussed during a demo call, develop a plan of action based on what was discussed, and then have to iterate for months on end. It is also frustrating to hear that something is an "easy" solution by one team member and then hear it is "difficult and not recommended" by another."
Other Software Used
July 29, 2022

SaaSOptics doesn't understand its customers and product development is off track

Verified User
Director in Finance and Accounting
Information Technology & Services Company, 51-200 employees
Score 3 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
SaaSOptics (SO) integrates with our CRM (Salesforce) and our GL accounting software (Quickbooks Online; QBO). I inherited this software from several predecessors before me. SO mainly serves as an intermediary between our CRM and GL to keep track of our customers, send invoices and perform collections and dunning, maintains our revenue and deferred revenue schedules and ARR reporting so we don't have to use Excel. Not having to keep track of all of this in Excel is a huge benefit for us and allows us to delegate the bookings process to a lower level staff member. The automated emails when an invoice becomes past due (or any other time period you set) is helpful as well. SO can also sync sales tax settings from QBO so we properly charge sales tax to our customers.
Pros and Cons
  • 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.
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
Most Important Features
  • Reduces / eliminates the need for us to use Excel
  • Integration with CRM, GL and FP&A (SO doesn't have an FP&A integration)
  • Automation assistance of AR collections process
Return on Investment
  • Saves several days during month end close for ARR and customer count reporting
  • Doesn't make our reporting easier for gross renewal
  • Doesn't integrate well with our CRM or other software that we use
  • I feel like it would be very difficult for me to switch to a new software, which I would do if I could but I don't have the time or team to handle a transition
  • Helps us with AR collections
Alternatives Considered
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.
September 23, 2021

Want a Great Billing System for Subscriptions? Give Chargify A Try

PR
Padraic Ryan
Community Manager
eCommerceFuel (Internet, 1-10 employees)
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We use Chargify to handle subscriptions for our 1000+ members.
Pros and Cons
  • 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
Likelihood to Recommend
While it works great for subscriptions, I'm not sure this would be robust enough for a non-subscription business.
Most Important Features
  • Subscription Management
  • API that allows a self-hosted payment page
  • Multiple price points and subscription options with discounts
Return on Investment
  • As it is the main payment system for our company, it helps us generate our $$$
  • Saves countless hours for our staff by automating repetitive tasks
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