Congrats, Chargify merchants! You’re growing your businesses quickly!

In January, 2012, in the aggregate, Chargify merchants billed their customers a total of $5,300,000.

That’s a huge step above December, 2011, which was $3,900,000. That represents month-over-month growth of 36%!

Thanks for using Chargify!

What we’ve been doing over the past couple of months, and what we continue to do, to meet the quickly growing capacity needs of our merchants and their customers.

Click to read a lot more detail!

3 Years In…

Where we started.

Good decisions and some bad ones along the way to supporting 700 businesses.

How Mark Cuban got involved.

Where we’re headed in 2012.

And a look at our brand new (we just got it and it’s still empty!) office in Raleigh, NC.

Read the full article…

We’re happy to announce that there are now over 550 businesses using Chargify to manage their subscriptions & billing. We’re proud to have an amazing customer base and loyal Chargify fans. Some of you are even showing off your candy.

Feedback from our growing customer base has been great. We’re busy building more amazing features to help you grow your business with Chargify.

And in more good news, Mark Cuban has invested in Chargify. Mark’s experience and wisdom building great companies gets us even more excited for the future of Chargify. BRL Law Group represented Chargify in the equity financing deal.

Thanks for being great customers, and as always, good luck growing your businesses.

~ Lance

Back in October we announced that we were on the verge of becoming PCI compliant. Today we are happy to announce that Chargify is officially Level 1 PCI compliant. The Chargify team worked really hard to make this happen and it’s a great step for both Chargify and our merchants.

Why is this important?

Being PCI Level 1 compliant means we’ve been thoroughly evaluated by outside auditors to ensure we run a “tight ship” (see our certification here). Level 1 compliance is the highest certification and requirement for large processing companies. These standards dictate everything from how we secure physical infrastructure to what processes software developers can use to update production systems. 

PCI Level 1 reaches into many parts of Chargify and makes us a better company for it.

This is a huge benefit to our merchants. By letting Chargify handle credit card data, our merchants can off-load almost all PCI responsibilities.  It took us 9 months to do everything needed to reach PCI Level 1, and that’s something few companies want to go through if they can easily avoid it.

Be on the lookout

In the upcoming weeks we will cover what it took to become PCI compliant and how you as our merchants can make sure you too are abiding by all standards.

This is a great achievement for the Chargify team!

As we announced a few weeks ago, we’re currently in the process of changing our pricing here at Chargify (you can read the blog posts from our founders here and here).  We wanted to remind you that come midnight tonight, all price changes will become official.

How will this affect you?

Chargify will automatically transition merchants based on your site status and customer count. If you have already transitioned your account, you will not be affected.  Below, we have broken down the transition by merchant segments:

• No live site & No customers
  For merchants without a live site, you’ll automatically be moved onto the Developer Plan. The Developer Plan is a free plan with zero included customers that will allow you to test Chargify and make sure it fits your needs before you begin actually charging customers.

Some of our merchants like to see who’s running a service that their business depends on. I know I would!

Chargify is part of Grasshopper Group, which has been supporting small businesses for 6 years, and my recent past includes co-founding Engine Yard.

But that’s just part of the story…

The picture with this blog entry shows some of the great people who answer phones 24/7 and others who keep an eye on things in our Network Operations Center.

And here are 3 short videos that allow you to meet some of the team…

Boston Headquarters, Quick Tour

With several on Rails developers here at Chargify and an even bigger Rails community in our customer base, we thought it would be great to sponsor this year’s Rails Rumble.

This weekend, Rails developers from all over the world, including two teams from Grasshopper Group, will be competing in the 2010 Rails Rumble.

What is Rails Rumble?

“The Rails Rumble is a kickass 48 hour web application development competition. As a contestant, your team gets one caffeine-fueled weekend to design, develop, and deploy the best web property that you can, using the awesome power of Ruby and Rails.”

Insight into why we changed our pricing (definitely not greed!), and an apology from our CEO for the missteps we made.
__________________________________________________________

Hi all,

We’re still hearing the feedback and we’ll write up a “postmortem” soon regarding how we (mis)handled this. A number of people have asked for something like that and I think we can learn from it and convey some lessons from which others may learn from our mistakes, too.

I just want everyone to know that it’s definitely not because of “greed” that we made this change. “Greed” to me would mean that we’re already making tons of profit and we just want more! That is not the case.

I updated an earlier blog post earlier today to add a tiny bit about this, but the reality is that our old pricing was going to bankrupt us - if not for the fantastic backing of Grasshopper Group.

To be clear, Chargify is NOT in financial danger - Grasshopper Group ensures that.

But Grasshopper Group has a reasonable expectation for Chargify to reach profitability sooner than later. With the old pricing, and the fact that the bulk of our merchants would be on it and the majority of them paying us $0 for quite some time, the future profitability was much too far in the future. It’s costing a lot of money each month to provide what Chargify is inside and out.

UPDATE

Over the last few hours we’ve received a ton of feedback from our merchants based on the Chargify pricing announcement.

We want you to know that it has not gone unheard.

As an existing Chargify merchant, we appreciate your support over the past year and we want to continue to see you grow with us.

To meet your needs when you’re starting out, we’re offering our existing merchants the Bootstrapper Plan for $39/month. It allows you to manage up to 100 customers.

To signup for the plan, login to your account, go to My Account >> Manage Your Plans, and choose Bootstrapper.

We know that this is still an increase, but we hope you see the added value in our :
* 24/7 U.S. based phone and technical support
* Level 1 PCI compliance in a few weeks
* fully coming out of beta in order to serve you better
* and listening to your Uservoice feedback to develop Spreadable

Please feel free to reach out to us at 800-401-2414 with any questions or concerns. Thanks

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ORIGINAL POST

Over the past year, Chargify has grown as merchants sign up and grow their businesses. We definitely appreciate everyone’s business and support.

But the needs of our merchants, as a whole, have shifted from where we thought they’d be when we set pricing in 2009, so we’re changing our business and pricing to meet those needs.

If you called Chargify this week, you may have noticed new voices on the other end. That’s because our US-based telephone support group started integrating with Chargify.

And if there were any system tasks to carry out in the middle of the night, those got handled by our Network Operations Center.

Both of these groups work 24/7 to support the needs of Chargify merchants.

And while these groups are new to Chargify, they are not “new”... they have been part of Grasshopper Group for 6 years, helping entrepreneurs and small businesses. Chargify is part of Grasshopper Group, so we’re all part of the same family.

There will be some ramp-up time, of course, but as the groups learn more Chargify details, they will be able to support our merchants more and more deeply.

We’re growing every day and we need help to keep offering good tech support in a timely manner, so we’re looking for someone who can work from home for 1-2 hours a day as a contractor.

We prefer someone in the USA, since most of our customers are here and our team is here.

It’s not required, but we prefer someone with Ruby and Rails experience, since that’s what Chargify uses internally and it would be especially useful if this person could go in and do development-type things that occasionally come out of tickets.

Support requests come mostly in the form of written tickets, but some come as phone calls and tweets.

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.

*Update* - See some photos of the Chargify team from the event at TECH cocktail.

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.