If you’re here, chances are that the Chargebee subscription billing software hasn’t won you over.
Perhaps you’re:
- put off by the platform’s high fees,
- unhappy with how it locks various features behind more expensive plans,
- dissatisfied by its quality of customer support, or something else.
So you’re looking around for Chargebee alternatives and wondering: “What about Stax Bill?”
And that’s an excellent question, my friend!
Having been in business for 11 years and counting, we’re well-versed in the subscription management and billing needs of SaaS businesses. So, we’ve built Stax Bill to be a top-notch subscription billing platform for businesses of all sizes and industries—and a strong choice if Chargebee has left you wanting.
Read on as I compare Stax Bill and Chargebee head-to-head, and you’ll see what I mean.
Features
Inside the Stax Bill platform, you’ll find all the features you’ll need to effortlessly manage both customer subscriptions and recurring payments. These include:
- A flexible product catalog designed for unlimited plan and product combinations as you tailor customers’ subscriptions to meet their needs.
- Advanced dunning management to automatically follow up on failed payments and reduce revenue loss to involuntary churn.
- Comprehensive reports that give you holistic views of your business’s financial health.
Chargebee offers a similar feature set, but there are some differences. For example:
- Stax Bill includes a payment gateway out of the box, while Chargebee doesn’t—more on this later.
- Stax Bill’s account hierarchy feature lets child accounts assign subscriptions to both themselves and their parent accounts. However, Chargebee’s allows only parent accounts such flexibility.
- Chargebee provides multilingual support, meaning you can display both customer-facing and backend interfaces in different languages. The Stax Bill platform is available only in English, but you can customize customer self-service portals and invoices to display text in any language you wish.
To explore how Stax Bill’s advanced features can enhance your business’s subscription billing processes, schedule a demo here. This demo is free—you won’t have to pay a cent unless you sign up.
So on that note, how do our pricing plans compare with Chargebee’s?
Pricing
All our Stax Bill pricing plans include the full range of advanced payment tools for subscription management and recurring billing. We just use your yearly net invoiced revenue figure to determine your monthly fee.
While Chargebee similarly has revenue limits on its plans, it also bars access to various features unless you opt for a higher-tiered—and more expensive—plan.
This effectively forces you to pay more to access features that you need, even if you are nowhere near to reaching Chargebee’s revenue cap on a lower plan.
And here’s one thing Chargebee levies that Stax Bill doesn’t: overage fees!
If you bust your plan’s revenue cap, Chargebee will impose an overage fee calculated as a percentage of exceeded revenue. This percentage ranges from 0.6% to 0.75% of overage revenue, and can really cause your fees to add up.
For example, if you clock $100,000 in overage revenue, you’re looking at an overage fee of at least $600. Oof.
On the other hand, we don’t penalize your business for doing well.
If you go over your plan’s revenue band, we simply move you to a higher plan at the end of your annual contract with us.
The result is flat and predictable monthly fees—which is the way we like to operate at Stax Bill.
Payment gateway availability
A payment gateway is essential for collecting payments from customers. No matter which recurring billing software you end up using, you’ll definitely need to have a payment gateway.
So, we decided to throw in a payment gateway with every Stax Bill subscription.
Dubbed Stax Bill Payments Powered by Stax, this payment gateway integrates directly with our subscription billing software to make payment processing seamless. There’s no need to scout for a separate payment gateway provider—with Fusebill, you’ll be set up for getting paid from day one.
Stax Bill Payments Powered by Stax also includes powerful features such as:
- Credit card auto-updating for keeping customers’ credit card details up to date within your system.
- Detailed visibility into your transaction fees so you have a clear picture of what you’re paying.
On the other hand, Chargebee doesn’t include a payment gateway with its software. You’d need to integrate a third-party payment gateway, which introduces complexity to your payments setup.
Not only that, but you may also have to get help from two separate businesses—namely Chargebee and the payment gateway provider—if your payment gateway is giving you trouble.
And while you can bring your own third-party gateway to Stax Bill, you’ll have the option to avoid such a headache. Our customer success team can competently handle any query you may have on either the core Stax Bill platform or Stax Bill Payments Powered by Stax.
Localization
If you have customers from all over the world, you’d need your recurring billing system to:
- display customer-facing interfaces in your customers’ local language,
- charge and collect recurring payments in their native currency, and
- comply with the laws and tax regulations of their jurisdiction.
As mentioned earlier, Chargebee includes multilingual features for customizing the languages of both your customer-facing and backend interfaces. It also provides SEPA compliance, which is a plus if you do a lot of business in Europe.
On the flip side, Stax Bill works best for businesses that operate mainly in the U.S. That’s because our platform is designed with a strong focus on compliance with PCI and other U.S. financial and data security requirements.
But let’s say you become a Stax Bill user and subsequently expand your subscription business abroad. Will you have to say goodbye to the Stax Bill features you love and endure a tedious migration to another platform?
Not at all.
The USD isn’t the only currency that our platform can bill in: we also support the Euro and any other world currency you may need. The customer-facing text fields on self-service portals and invoices are also 100% customizable for displaying text in any language.
At the same time, Stax Bill provides an integration with merchant of record solution Digital River to help you maintain international compliance.
This includes facilitating the collection of domestic taxes and navigating red-tape issues, so that’s a few things off your plate as you venture abroad.
Stax Bill is the only Chargebee alternative you need
Chargebee is a possible subscription billing tool option, but it certainly isn’t for everyone. And if your gut is telling you that Chargebee isn’t the right subscription management software for your business, you’ll find Stax Bill to be a superior alternative to Chargebee.
This is especially so if most of your customers are U.S.-based, and you value:
- best-in-class subscription management and recurring billing features built for businesses at all stages of growth,
- a predictable total cost of ownership for your recurring billing platform,
- the convenience of an integrated payment gateway, and/or
- having options for localization if you have international expansion in your sights.
Expect all these perks and more when you add the Stax Bill subscription billing software to your fintech stack. Businesses that have entrusted us with their subscription billing have cut billing time by up to 80%, reduced late and failed payments by up to 700%, and also made revenue leakage a thing of the past.
Arrange a demo with our billing experts to learn how Stax Bill can empower your subscription billing operations and set you up for business growth today.
