Stripe Billing

I used Stripe to manage Saas recurring billing with a few unique models, and it handled each of them after some integration work. It is a very product/business friendly tool that makes it easy to spin up new SKUs/products, discount dynamically, and analyze your sales. Stripe also integrates masterfully well with other reporting tools. I appreciated the work they put into automatically handling security and authentication as well, as it eased the burden on development.

Stripe can be hard to implement without at least some domain expertise on the team, and if your model is non-traditional. Doing things like highwater billing or multi-SKU billing on software utilization (seats vs. instances) can be a real challenge, and require coding on your side to roll up the right numbers. However, these are edge cases, and the core product works exactly as described.

I love using this app for my small side business. It’s free to use and the only cost I’ve incurred is transferring my funds to my account. And it’s a small fee. Invoicing is super simple and can be done through the app. You can take payments yourself or customers can pay through their invoice. Reports are available.

Invoices aren’t very customizable. Not idea for large batches of invoices.

It's so essential to so many online businesses and does so many detailed things. I love that I can essentially use it for free and only get charged when a client makes a payment. I love that recurring billings, products and subscriptions can be created easily. I also love that I can see the whole past history of any customer.

It still needs to be simplified to be understood by a non-developer. There are fees that are not too transparent or still confusing as I have customers all over the world and have to pay differing charges. Overall, it doesn't make me confident at all to use Stripe Billing as a stand-alone tool for all my invoicing, billing and subscription needs.