I think it's crazy that everyone writes and maintains their own billing solutions too.
I think people build their own billing solution because for a long time, there wasn't one well-known tool out there that could handle all of the complexities of a software company's billing (dunning, customer emails, assembling invoices, usage tracking and metering, etc.).
And when a well-known company like Stripe comes along and offers billing, people are hesitant and have a little sticker shock because at scale, they charge a lot of money for billing. Stripe Billing costs 0.4% of revenue (after $1m in lifetime revenue) and then 0.7% at scale on top of their payment processor which already costs 2.9% + 30% per transaction[1]. And while that rate is pretty standard, if you have high and growing revenue, you can often negotiate a lower payment processor rate with other payment processors, but Stripe locks you in to using them.
So, instead, developers choose to build billing systems themselves using tools out there (Stripe for payments, X for dunning, Y for customer communicating, etc.). However, that also creates a lot of complexities because if you need to change anything down the line or update how exactly you charge for your product, you'll probably have to go back to the codebase, meaning developers will have to dive into code they haven't touched in a while and rework things.
That's why we created Cheddar (https://getcheddar.com), a usage-based billing platform and API that lets software engineers finally decouple billing from the codebase, track usage data (that you're not even billing for), and flexibly apply and iterate pricing plans to that usage data.
I think it's crazy that everyone writes and maintains their own billing solutions too.
I think people build their own billing solution because for a long time, there wasn't one well-known tool out there that could handle all of the complexities of a software company's billing (dunning, customer emails, assembling invoices, usage tracking and metering, etc.).
And when a well-known company like Stripe comes along and offers billing, people are hesitant and have a little sticker shock because at scale, they charge a lot of money for billing. Stripe Billing costs 0.4% of revenue (after $1m in lifetime revenue) and then 0.7% at scale on top of their payment processor which already costs 2.9% + 30% per transaction[1]. And while that rate is pretty standard, if you have high and growing revenue, you can often negotiate a lower payment processor rate with other payment processors, but Stripe locks you in to using them.
So, instead, developers choose to build billing systems themselves using tools out there (Stripe for payments, X for dunning, Y for customer communicating, etc.). However, that also creates a lot of complexities because if you need to change anything down the line or update how exactly you charge for your product, you'll probably have to go back to the codebase, meaning developers will have to dive into code they haven't touched in a while and rework things.
That's why we created Cheddar (https://getcheddar.com), a usage-based billing platform and API that lets software engineers finally decouple billing from the codebase, track usage data (that you're not even billing for), and flexibly apply and iterate pricing plans to that usage data.
[1] https://stripe.com/us/billing/pricing