We don’t normally release features on a Sunday, but this one just couldn’t wait!  I’m excited to tell you about “Predictive Charging”, our latest feature which is sure to improve the experience for all Chargify merchants and customers!

You may have read (and noticed) that we’ve been working to improve the speed and stability of our systems lately.  Thanks to these efforts, we’ve reduced our average response time by over 75% in the past few months.

There’s one large hurdle, though, that remains in the way of improving the speed of signups even more: the external gateways where we send credit cards for charging.  During a signup, we send the credit card to the gateway and have to wait on a response before we can give feedback to the customer.  This is frustrating, because sometimes the gateways can take 6 to 10 seconds to respond.  That’s why we’ve introduced Predictive Charging for our hosted signup pages.

Our dev team shipped something that a lot of merchants have been waiting for!

We just went live with “Components on the Hosted Pages”

This is really useful for merchants who want to sign up customers and have their customers choose ‘x’ number of licenses or some optional add-ons, like an SSL certificate for $20/mo, etc., with no programming work at all.

UPDATE 1: GREAT RESPONSE
Response has been good. Thank you! While no one enjoys a price increase, almost all communications have been positive. People are basically saying, “I know you need to run a good business and that’s important to my business, and I appreciate being part of the conversation.” Again, thanks. Please keep your thoughts coming.

UPDATE 2: MARK CUBAN
Mark Cuban is not behind this! But I asked him, and he does agree with it. We founders put in more capital than Mark did, but his contribution was very useful and he owns enough equity to be interested. He does not tell us what to do, but he does give good advice.

We just realized that, with 800 businesses depending on us, it’s time for Chargify to get profitable. And, by the way, I’m not paid anything. I’m in no big hurry, but the work I do needs to be paid (to someone, if not me). The continued (long-term) lack of pay for that work perpetuates a “false cost structure” that doesn’t represent reality.

All Mark Cuban did was agree with my statement in January, after I reviewed finances & projections, that, “It’s time we actually invest the capital we have, rather than burning it on operational losses.”  To that, he said, and only said, “Amen”.

ORIGINAL POST

It’s time to plan a pricing change for May, and we’d like our merchants to help decide the outcome.

Chargify is a team of 11 people, developing new features, working on infrastructure, training more support people, etc.

Looking at our costs and revenue, we need to raise prices a bit. It’s been 15 months since our only other price increase, and we’ve learned a lot.

Someone commented that they definitely don’t want Chargify to “go the way of the dodo bird”! That’s nearly impossible, given our history and backing. We just want to avoid a path of long-term mediocrity.

We’re aiming for May and we’d like our merchants’ input.

1. Adding yet more web servers and process servers. Our final batch is running and ready to go, but we’re waiting for our data center to add them to their load balancers, which has to be done during a maintenance window of their choosing. Systems have been running well since our last round of upgrades, but we want to get out way ahead of your needs!

2. Our first focused system administrator, Drew, started taking over tasks that used to be handled by our software developers and data center system administrators. Having someone who’s more focused in his areas of expertise, and who can spend time on systems-level things, is already yielding noticeable benefits to Chargify and our merchants and their customers! Happy to have you, Drew!

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!