This Thursday, July 29th, the Chargify team will be at the 4th annual Boston TECH cocktail event.

For those of you unfamiliar with TECH cocktail, the company is run by two entrepreneurs and works to connects local technology companies through awesome events like the one we will be at Thursday.

What Happens at the Event?

Boston area startups, investors and others in the tech industry will be gathered at the Microsoft NERD Center in Cambridge, MA to network, showcase their companies and maybe generate some funding interest.

Along with hundreds of attendees, there will be eleven “Showcased Startups” (including Chargify). Each company will have a table set up expo-style where they will feature their company, answer questions and network with other local entrepreneurs.

One Year In, a Really Dynamic Business

Our code base is over a year old and I thought it was a good time to think & write about where Chargify is and where we’re headed.

Overall, people seem to like Chargify .

I’ve never been part of a more dynamic business. I’m amazed and inspired because most customers are start-ups or small businesses, which is a nice bit of news against the backdrop of recession. There are developers who give back to the community in the form of sample code. And some of them also offer consulting services to other customers.

We’re of course delighted that so many businesses and developers put their trust in us. There are challenges, of course, but so far we seem to be keeping up with them reasonably well, even with the occasional glitch.

Chargify is officially entering into public beta today, and we couldn’t be more excited!

Having originally launched at the TechCrunch50 Conference (http://techcrunch50.com) in San Francisco, CA on September 14th, 2009, we’ve been steadily growing our beta list this past 6 months while making numerous improvements and adding new features.

Some highlights/ improvements include:

• Through today, Chargify has accepted over 2000+ companies into our beta and we’ll be letting any that are pending in over the coming days – allowing any and all companies who sign up going forward into the public beta

Plan on attending SWSW (South by SouthWest) 2010 in Austin, TX from March 12th - 16th? Or are you already at SXSW enjoying Austin? If so, you are in luck because the Chargify team is there too and will be through the 16th.

Curious to meet the team behind the company? Or maybe you just want to get your hands on some Chargify schwag?

Either way keep an eye out for us. if you need a reference as to who we are check out our About Us page and put a face with the names.

We have a few surprises up our sleeves as well so be sure to keep tabs on us on Twitter @chargify.

Last week was a great week at Chargify. The team is normally spread out across the USA, but last week we all worked together in Sacramento, CA.

Two exciting and useful developments happened over the weekend:

1. iPhone App: our brand new Chargify to Go! app is available for free download from the iTunes App Store. Keep track of your signups, total customer count, monthly revenue, and annual revenue.
2. Freemium Model Support: our fees are based on the number of paying customers that you (our customers) manage through Chargify. That’s what’s on our pricing page right now. But we have also added a “Freemium add-on package”.

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.

Acronyms can be corny, right ?

Sorry that this post is so long! It covers 3 years of experience, as well as my recent journey with some great folks to help provide a solution to a problem that’s been affecting entrepreneurs, web startups, and SMBs over the past few years.

The businesses I’ve been involved in since 2006 are all about billing the same customer repeatedly. The product never “ships”. Instead, the product is something that flows continuously from us to our customer, and money flows back to us.

Consequently, billing customers involves more than it used to.

BAM!

The activities that surround recurring billing touch many parts of a business. These activities, added together, can be seen as a business unit, just like Marketing or Human Resources. As a business unit, BAM can include all of these things:

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.

Its been a while since the last blog update on Chargify, so allow me to fill you in. Things have been progressing rapidly and we’ve gotten great feedback from our beta testers. A big thanks to all of you!

Not a beta tester yet, but want to be? We hear you! If you’re not already signed up, head on over to http://chargify.com/pricing-and-signup and click the big “Sign Up for the Beta” button.

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.

Monday was a wild one for the Chargify team – we launched our product in the DemoPit at the TechCrunch50 in San Francisco. We did not win the “Audience Choice” vote (votes are cast through poker chips placed in to DemoPit presenters’ jars), but the day was full of affirmation nonetheless.

Most people simply “got it” when we explained what we are doing. We particularly resonated with developers who have tried to integrate a billing system, and investors/stakeholders who have seen their developers flounder when it comes to smoothly accepting recurring payments.

A particularly great moment for us came when Mr. Michael Arrington himself rode up on his Segway, chatted with our CTO and co-founder David Hauser for a few moments, then dropped his chip in our jar and rode off. I can only guess that someone else tipped him off to what we’re doing, so many thanks to that person.