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Chargebee for SaaS: What It Is and Its Alternative

by
in
Maciej Wilczyński
Managing Partner, Founder Valueships
January 15, 2024
SaaS

Are you in the SaaS business and would like to streamline your operations? Would you like to forget about losing customers? Or are you looking for a working solution that will help you improve your business? 

That sounds like a job for Chargebee.

But what exactly is Chargebee? What products does it have? Is it the perfect solution?

Today we will answer all your questions and present its best alternative.

Now let's get started!

What is Chargebee?

Chargebee is a Revenue Growth Management platform that helps businesses manage subscriptions and billing, retain customers, recover failed payments, and recognize revenue. It's designed to assist companies in efficiently handling different operations and processes as they scale.

Chargebee offers solutions for various industries like B2B SaaS, e-commerce, and e-learning. It integrates with multiple systems, including payment gateways, CRM (for example, with Capsule CRM via Zapier), and accounting software. It also provides tools for payment management, subscription management, and analytics.

Key products

Chargebee offers 4 main products:

▶️ Billing

Chargebee's Billing solution streamlines subscription management for businesses. It simplifies the handling of recurring billing, custom quotes, price-modeling, usage-based billing, and planning. The service includes features for usage-based billing, account hierarchy, and billing APIs, catering to diverse pricing models. It integrates seamlessly with other business tools, enhance payment, subscription, and reporting analytics processes.

Chargebee Billing is tailored to support scalable, efficient financial operations for businesses, particularly those with subscription-based models.

▶️ RevRec

Chargebee's Revenue Recognition (RevRec) software automates revenue recognition in compliance with accounting standards like GAAP. It's designed for SaaS and other subscription-based businesses, as it ensures accurate and timely revenue reporting. RevRec handles complex revenue schedules, provides detailed revenue insights, and supports compliance with financial reporting requirements.

This tool is essential for businesses seeking to streamline their revenue accounting processes, improve accuracy, and ensure regulatory compliance.

▶️ Receivables

Chargebee Receivables focuses on improving collections. It helps in recovering failed payments and speeding up the payment process. The custom payment recovery program provides tools for efficiently managing receivables, ensuring timely payment collection, and minimizing revenue loss due to payment failures.

Chargebee Receivables integrates with existing financial systems and offers a comprehensive solution for managing the entire receivables lifecycle.

▶️ Retention

Chargebee Retention, on the other hand, is a customer retention management tool. It offers insights into cancellation reasons and provides strategies for winning clients back. Also, the tool allows businesses to run experiments to find the most effective offers for an existing customer. Chargebee Retention integrates with billing and customer engagement tools to create a seamless experience.

This solution is key for businesses that aim to reduce churn and enhance customer lifetime value.

Chargebee's Impact on SaaS Businesses

Chargebee's impact on SaaS revolves around its comprehensive subscription management system.

  • It can automate payment collection and manage recurring billing.
  • It can support future billing strategies and reduce the complexity of subscription billing.
  • It enables businesses to focus on product development by handling billing complexities.
  • It aids in acquiring new customers and retaining existing ones by facilitating more informed purchase decisions and managing credit notes.
  • With its help, you can also launch plans and pricing changes in no time.

Solutions like Chargebee help you manage just all the stuff. With them, you can forget about failed system operations, take care of future customers, and enjoy seamless subscription management.

This system is a significant player in the SaaS market, yet it's important to consider it in the context of another tool.

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Comparison with Valueships

Chargebee is not the only solution that can help SaaS companies perform better in the market. Then there's Valueships, which has a team of specialists that offers services such as strategy consulting, pricing consulting, value-selling, and advanced analytics & research.

Chargebee and Valueships both offer help in subscription management, but there are key differences between them:

  • Type of service - Chargebee is the platform, and Valueships is the team of experts.
  • Customization and flexibility - Valueships may provide more tailored solutions for specific business needs.
  • Advanced features - Valueships have unique services for SaaS, not present in Chargebee.
  • Customer support - Valueships potentially excels in offering more responsive support.
  • Type of action - at Chargebee, you act and manage on your own by working on their tool. In Valueships, you work with people. We offer an action plan and quantitative and qualitative research. Such a detailed review helps us understand your needs and meet them adequately.

Valueships' unique services cater to businesses looking for specific solutions that Chargebee might lack, particularly in customization and advanced offerings.

Valueships is a team of specialists that tailors all communications, plans, strategies, research, and more to the client. As a result, it is much more effective, customized, and flexible than any other platform.

Of course, the Chargebee tool is versatile and offers many features and advantages, but if you expect co-working, assistance, advice, and partnership - Valueships is a better choice.

Why Valueships Could Be a Better Choice

Chargebee enables businesses to do better, but Valueships can do more.

Let's start with common SaaS challenges. They include:

  • SaaS pricing mismatch,
  • lack of expansion revenue,
  • grandfathering and discounting.

But we, at Valueships, can help meet these ongoing issues by tailoring our approach to our clients' specific use cases through analytics, data science, and fundamental research.

⭐ Through primary research and usage analysis, we can understand what willingness to pay, packaging, and billing models are ideal for SaaS development.

⭐ We can effectively increase sales by improving the differentiation of SaaS pricing and plans, and setting usage thresholds based on in-depth research.

⭐ We can help you make informed decisions about how to approach users through: advanced analysis of current customers, profit and loss statement analysis, and SaaS churn analytics.

So, Valueships extends its benefits for SaaS companies beyond pricing consultancy. We provide comprehensive SaaS margin analysis and help businesses identify and cut unnecessary costs.

Additionally, we offer insights into leveraging expansion revenue opportunities, a critical area often overlooked by SaaS businesses.

This holistic approach not only enhances revenue streams but also strengthens the overall financial health and market positioning of SaaS companies.

By analyzing over 300 SaaS companies, we have developed expertise in identifying and addressing common challenges in SaaS pricing, such as pricing mismatches, lack of expansion revenue, and issues with discounted or grandfathered pricing.

These are our reasons why Valueships can meet your needs better than Chargebee.

Success Stories with Valueships

Want to know more? If so, check our case studies.

#1 Centrum Respo

Valueships helped Centrum Respo achieve a 60% revenue growth by implementing a comprehensive pricing and packaging transformation. We conducted extensive surveys to understand customer preferences and willingness to pay. This data-driven approach led to major changes in pricing, the introduction of new monetization models, and optimized offerings based on customer feedback.

Also, Valueships' strategies significantly reduced customer down-sell rates and increased upsell. This contributes to higher revenue and a more substantial client base by choosing longer plans. Such a holistic pricing and monetization strategy proved to be a key factor in Centrum Respo's impressive growth.

Read the case study here: How we helped Centrum Respo grow by 60% and surpass the most optimistic prediction

#2 Brand24

Valueships increased Brand24's Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) by 23% by addressing margin leakages in discounted accounts. We conducted a detailed revenue engine diagnostic and found that 30% of customers paid less than the standard price due to a liberal discount policy.

By implementing a stricter policy and reengineering the pricing model, we minimized discounting leakage. Competitive analysis and customer surveys helped reshape the pricing structure and packages and led to almost no churn increase, a significant net annual gain, and a notable rise in ARPU.

Read the case study here: How have we increased the Brand24' ARPU by 23% by sealing margin leakages in discounted accounts?

#3 LiveSession

In the LiveSession case study, Valueships helped boost the company's Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) by 30%. This was achieved through a strategic price increase and transitioning customers to higher-tier plans. A significant 87% of customers moved to these higher plans, indicating the initial pricing was lower than the perceived value.

Despite these changes, there was no increase in customer churn. Our approach involved a detailed analysis of internal client data and a competitive space scan. We focused on LiveSession's strong Net Promoter Score (NPS) and return on investment (ROI) as indicators of potential for price increase.

Read the case study here: How have we helped LiveSession boost MRR by 30% through scenario planning and analytics?

Improve Subscription Businesses with Valueships

So as you can see, Chargebee is a valuable tool. It is a system worth considering, but we have a better suggestion for you. 

And that is Valueships.

Valueships is a reliable partner for any SaaS runner - small companies or large enterprises. Their size doesn't matter. We can meet all customers' needs, analyze their previous activities, develop the best strategy, choose the best prices, and much more.

For example, we offer specialized services, like pricing consultancy. We focus on optimizing pricing strategies based on in-depth quantitative and qualitative research. Moreover, we tailor this approach to each client's unique situation and aim to achieve their goals, like maximizing MRR or ARPU metrics.

💻 Get to know us better through our contact page, or stay in touch with us on our YouTube channel!

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Maciej Wilczyński
Managing Partner, Founder Valueships

Expert in B2B pricing, monetization and value-based selling strategies. Over the past year, he has completed over 40 consulting projects in Europe. Prior to founding Valueships, he worked at McKinsey & Company, mainly in the TelCo, software, and banking industries. He completed his doctorate in pricing in SaaS start-ups at the University of Economics in Wrocław, where he also lectures.

Schedlue a free consultation
Maciej Wilczyński
Managing Partner, Founder Valueships

Expert in B2B pricing, monetization and value-based selling strategies. Over the past year, he has completed over 40 consulting projects in Europe. Prior to founding Valueships, he worked at McKinsey & Company, mainly in the TelCo, software, and banking industries. He completed his doctorate in pricing in SaaS start-ups at the University of Economics in Wrocław, where he also lectures.