Chargify - good for startups, but worth considering other solutions!
Updated October 13, 2019

Chargify - good for startups, but worth considering other solutions!

Nikhil George | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Growing Business

Overall Satisfaction with Chargify

We use Chargify as our billing platform. It manages all our customer subscriptions and facilitates payments via our payment merchant. A number of departments across the company use Chargify. The product department sets up and manages the Chargify integration with our application. Finance users Chargify to ensure customers have subscribed to the right plan and are charged correctly. Sales, customer support, and success use Chargify to view customer account information.
  • 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.
  • Limitations in Chargify's invoicing capability has resulted in our finance team having to manually send invoices from our accounting system. This has resulted in 10-15 hours a week of resource wasted on something that Chargify should automatically do. If this isn't addressed, then the wasted time will increase as we scale.
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.