Even at the very peak of this Web 2.0 era, it’s not exactly easy to setup a payment gateway. Supporting multiple payment gateways needs extreme coding expertise. Now if you add recurring payments to the mix, we will have a glorious mess in our hands.

Chargify helps novices and large businesses alike in making recurring payments on websites such a simple exercise. We tested the app for you and you can read our take on it after the jump.

Overview

Chargify helps Web 2.0 and SaaS business’ set up a recurring payment system to charge paying customers. In addition to charging customers on a recurring basis, Chargify also takes care the complications of processing credit card payments with its built in dunning system. Chargify’s dunning management tool handles all potential charge-failure scenarios — expired or invalid credit cards, or charge limit exceeded — and lets you send a customized notification for each event.

Advance notifications are sent to customers whose credit cards are going to expire soon so that they can login and update new payment info. With this automated dunning system you can save a lot of time and avoid any potential hassle to your customers.

Overview

Signing up is simple, makes you feel like creating free email account & does not look like you are signing up for a system that is going to be the backbone of your company. The app asks you to enter a password that is at least 4 letters long. Really Chargify? How secure could a 4 digit password be, especially for an app that handles money? Email activation is absolutely not necessary.

Pricing

Chargify has a well thought out, tiered pricing plan. With a free plan that supports up to 50 paying customers to the $2499 monthly plan with unlimited users, Chargify has a plan that will fit every company’s budget. Not all plans involve a contract and can be cancelled at anytime. Moreover, Chargify does not levy a transaction fee on the recurring charges.

Pricing

Chargify also makes life easy for companies with a freemium service model. Each and every plan includes 1000 free users; users who are evaluating the service with the free plan. If you exceed the free limit, additional users are charged at $10 a month per thousand users.

Setting Up

Setting up Chargify payment processor for your company begins with the addition of a website. You can choose from the list of eight currencies. Chargify asks the users to check the system in the test mode before going live. Sensible suggestion indeed.

Creating a new site

After creating the site, we are taken to the dashboard which displays all the details pertaining to this website & its transactions. This is actually the first in a set of three steps.

Dashboard

The second step is adding products that are going to be charged to the customer. To add products, you need to create a product family first.

Adding a new product family

Now you can start adding products to your website. This is the most important step as this happens to be the page where you set the subscription details. You can choose whether or not to ask the customers to submit CC information, billing address and shipping address while signing up itself.

Chargify has a fantastic billing structure that is comprehensive yet very simple. You can choose to charge a one time fee, offer a free trial, offer trials at discounted rates followed by a totally different pricing after the end of the trial, from this page. You can also set the subscription to expire after a certain period of time from this page.

Adding a product

Charging Customers

With Chargify you have the flexibility to use your own payment page or you can use a branded page from Chargify. Branded payment pages allow non-developers to start collecting payments right away without syncing their site with Chargify API.

Branded Payment Webpage

Chargify supports multiple payment gateways in a number of countries, making it easy for both you and your users. PayPal is also supported.

Supported Payment Gateways

As we mentioned above, Chargify has a comprehensive dunning management feature which is extremely easy to tweak.

Dunning Management

Business Intelligence

Chargify has built in business intelligence tools for you to analyze the financial health of your company. Trends on sign ups and cancellations are displayed in neat graphs by analyzing the billing data. These operational metrics will help you to make informed business decisions that are supported with real data.

Business Intelligence

Final Thoughts

Right from charging the user’s credit card to providing business intelligence, Chargify is an end to end solution to your company’s recurring billing needs. To their credit, Chargify has a very reasonable pricing structure for a full featured app. Chargify could help the freemium Web 2.0 companies in a big way with its flexible free user handling plans. If you are looking for a service that can handle the painful and complex task of payment processing in its entirety, you don’t have to look beyond Chargify.