We try really hard to keep our systems running as close to 100% uptime as possible.

We’re hosted in a great data center that’s one of the best in the USA for systems that need to be PCI compliant. We share the place with banks, payment gateways, etc.

Our database is managed by the data center staff. This is good for a number of reasons, including keeping the DB separate from our app and being managed by others who are typically better at DB management.

We were informed recently that the DB we’re on is growing too big and is going to run out of disk space very soon. A number of attempts have been made to remedy this without downtime. The data center DB staff has tried various things with help from their DB vendor, but with no success.

Thus, we have been told today that they have to take the database offline tonight to install new disks.

We’re making a small change to the Chargify API and we wanted you to know about it.  If you use the API to pull Transactions or create Credits, then you’ll want to read on to see what’s changing.  If you don’t do either of these things, you shouldn’t need to change anything.  Here are the details of the change and the new functionality that’s coming with it:

What’s Changing

We are changing the way Chargify “Credit” Transactions work behind the scenes.  Today, Credits deduct an amount from a Subscription’s balance, but are represented with a positive “amount”.  For example:

Old Subscription Balance:  $40
Applied Credit Amount:    $30
————————————————
New Subscription Balance:  $10

Since it would be nice to also adjust the balance up in some cases, we’re introducing Adjustments.  Adjustments with positive amounts make the balance go up, Adjustments with negative amounts make the balance go down (like Credits).

Old Subscription Balance:  $40
Applied Adjustment 1:    -$30
Applied Adjustment 2:    $ 5
————————————————
New Subscription Balance:  $15

Internally, we’re converting all existing Credits to Adjustments.

We’ve just released a new feature that allows you to add “components” to your products which your customers can purchase and be charged according to the quantity chosen.  This is great for offering things like the following to your products:

• IP Addresses - say your basic service offers 1 custom IP address for free, and extras can be purchased for $1 each
• Extra Projects - say your project management service allows users to purchase extra “projects” a la carte.  The first 5 cost $5 each, the next 5 cost $3 each
• Charge flat fees based on a number of customers (like how Chargify works).  0-50 customers is $0, 51-500 is $49, etc.

What the heck are components?

We’ve built a new framework that is going to give you a lot of flexibility in defining your products, and we’re calling these “components”.  If you think of the traditional “product matrix” you used to see on most websites selling a service, you would usually see their plans (or products) in the columns and row after row of optional and included things.  Well, in Chargify these “things” are called “components” - they are the building blocks of your products that you use to add options, upgrades, and add-ons to enhance your offerings.

The following simplified graphic shows what I’m talking about.

Welcome to the Bullring, the blog dedicated entirely to empowering entrepreneurs and developers to start and run successful businesses based on recurring revenue models. 

Let’s lay it out there. Recurring billing is a pain in the ass. Credit cards get declined for a million different reasons, you have to deal with upgrades/downgrades, proration, refunds, credits, customer communication, fraudulent transactions, and the list goes on. It’s no small task to implement a system that handles all of the potential pitfalls of billing on a recurring basis.

We sent out a survey recently to those on our Beta waiting list (thanks for all your responses!) and one thing that I noticed from the comments was that not everyone is aware of the API libraries/wrappers that have emerged so far for the Chargify API. The Chargifiy team has published one for Ruby/Rails, and I’m aware of another one for Ruby and one for Python.

The full list is always our support site, but here’s a quick run through.

Development and the private beta of Chargify is proceeding rapidly and we’re getting great feedback from lots of our beta testers.

Recently, we’ve released a few major updates and we plan to release another major update by the end of the week. This update includes, among other things, access to all of your product information via our API which has been one of our most requested features.