Comment by dkyc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dkyc | Hacker News Reader

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Running a Germany-based SaaS startup at some scale, so I feel confident to chime in.

To put it bluntly, you're right. We have to do more work just to get started accepting money than our American counterparts. Yes, the insanely complex EU-VAT rules actually need to be followed. Yes, a lot of your customers will want to pay via bank transfer and not through credit card. Yes, the American folks will still want to pay in USD and not in EUR.

We use ChargeBee (https://www.chargebee.com/) to abstract away most of the pain. I would greatly suggest using such a service (Recurly and Chargify are more enterprisey alternatives). We had a selfmade implementation before switching to ChargeBee, and one EU rule change caused us to have to re-issue all customer invoices for one quarter. Not fun. ChargeBee prevents you from doing the biggest blunders in taxation, and also allows you to keep track of invoices paid through credit card or through bank transfer (and specify the Dunning rules accordingly). Overall, I'd greatly recommend it.

We've been using Chargebee since the start of 2015. I found it after trying to figure out how we were going to deal with the EU VAT rules. At the time I couldn't find anyone else using it but we took a punt on it and I can say that it's probably our favourite bit of software in the business.

Beyond the subscription and invoicing side (in which they seem to have thought of everything) it also manages all our reconciliation in Xero. The payments come in to a holding account from Stripe in big transactions so you don't know which invoices should be mapped against the transactions. Chargebee have a chrome extension that will match everything up and automatically reconcile it all for you.

Also, the team have always been awesome to work with. Could not recommend them highly enough.

Thanks for the info!

I tried your site and I saw that it adds the VAT when the user selects their country. Since the order page makes network requests to ChargBee, I guess they provide all that functionalilty.

Would you say ChargeBee is also a good solution for small one-time-payments?

When you say it abstracts away 'most of the pain' - what pain is left?

> Would you say ChargeBee is also a good solution for small one-time-payments?

My startup uses ChargeBee and deals with one-time-payments as well as subscriptions. It's definitely geared towards the subscription model, but you can make the one-off payments work by using the API and utilizing add-on products.

First, the customer would need to be signed up for a subscription plan that has a trial set to expire X years out (I think the maximum is 10). ChargeBee's pricing model is based on the total number of invoices per month (or at least that's how our plan works), so signing them up for a trial does not result in an invoice being generated.

Then you would set up an add-on product in ChargeBee that is of the "Quantity" type and has a price of $.01. When the customer makes a one-off purchase, you would call use the ChargeBee API to purchase a quantity of X of the add-on. So if the total charge is $10, you would use a quantity of 1,000 (1,000 x .01 = 10).

If you have products that have a set price, you can just add each one as an add-on and reference that product ID when calling the API.

It sounds kind of hack-ey, but I'm very happy with our decision to go with ChargeBee. Their customer support is awesome as well.

I think my sibling comment's experiences are somewhat dated. Running one-time payments has been absolutely no problem with ChargeBee for us. It's obviously geared toward subscription businesses, but it has full support for one-time charges as well. No need for any hacks or weird work-arounds.

Regarding what pain is left: I'm approaching this from an end-to-end perspective, so answering the question "Even when using ChargeBee, what additional work do we have to do compared to a similar business based in the US?":

- You still have to code in UI-level support for multiple currencies. ChargeBee handles the backend.

- ChargeBee gives you a nice UI for keeping track of paid and unpaid invoices. Nonetheless, for payments via bank transfer [which your EU business customers will want to use], you still have to manually confirm in ChargeBee that you've received payment.

- You still have to supply quarterly MOSS tax returns to your local tax authorities (though ChargeBee does all it can to make that process quick).

AFAIK there is no other work-around for one-time charges that have variable pricing. The $.01 quantity add-on is what's recommended by their support.

Have been using Chargebee for our B2C subscription product since December 2016, with plenty of European customers, and can heartily vouch for it.

Do ChargeBee publish their pricing? I can't seem to find anything concrete on their website, which is always a red flag for me :(

https://www.chargebee.com/pricing/

Free tier for new businesses, $99/mo and up (up up) nonlinearly.

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