Maxio

Chargify serves as our billing software for our company. I love it! It gives us a handy, intuitive way to track payments for our customers, allowing us to better serve them overall.

We came from a competing service where the tech support had devolved. We needed an API that was robust enough to let us convert our existing payment system quickly, which Chargify's did. The customer service and tech support along the way has been excellent. As PCI compliance became more rigorous, we moved to using their hosted public payment pages, which allows us to reduce/remove PCI compliance on our side. However, the public pages do come with some limitations in that customizing them requires knowledge of CSS and Javascript to control various elements. Overall, however, our transition to, and continued use of Chargify has been a great experience and I would recommend them to anyone looking for a merchant account payment processor.

UI, UI, UI.

My business recently enrolled in SaaSOptics, a financial reporting service for SaaS business. Seldom have I encountered a user experience so bad. For starters, there is no link for user to log in on their home page. You actually need to navigate to an obscure link hidden away in an email. And the URL is not something easy to remember. Although they do this for security reasons, to reduce the risk of accounts getting hacked.

If you manage to log in, you'll find that the summary lines you want for each report, such as total, are hidden at the very bottom of the report. When the report has hundreds of lines, you really don't want to do that.

Then you'll try to find the most basic things, and struggle. For example, is your report to be found under Finance Reports or Analytics Reports? Should you look in Reports Dashboards or Reports Snapshots? With titles so specific (everything in SaaSOptics is both financial and analytical in nature), who needs a General Confusion Officer?

Then you'll discover what you're looking for is not there, so you'll want to create one. It's so complicated that you have to watch a 30 min video before you start.

So you'll resort to their Business Metrics report, labeled "possibly the only report you'll ever need". Turns out they decided that it's better to place bar charts of completely unrelated metrics side by side than to put successive months of the same metric together. So to look at growth of any metric across just three months, you need to look at columns that span an entire page across 42 columns. Some timelines are horizontal; others are vertical. The last month I am shown is September of last year, and there is no obvious way to change the time period shown.

For the love of God, can someone tell these people that user experience matters?

We've been (sadly) a long-time user of Chargify. Eventually, we will switch to just using native Stripe. Chargify is just a GUI on top of native Stripe and native Stripe has come a long way over the last few years.

Anyway, Chargify got new leadership a few years ago. Their CEO told me via email and on the phone that they would not raise our prices without an adequate heads-up. Well, they did. And they raised them by 10x (TEN!!!) with one month's notice. As a consolation, they gave me $20/month off. Thanks for being so damn generous with your long-time users.

They justified it by saying their development costs have soared as they've worked to develop new and rather poorly rolled out new features that aren't as good as other tools. For example, their analytics is absolute garbage.

To make matters worse: Just recently, there was a BIG bug as they switched their API calls to Stripe where Chargify was calling the ORIGINAL card a user signed up with as opposed to the default one in Chargify. We notified them about this in late August and they passed the buck to Stripe. Well, it was NOT Stripe's fault.

After a lot more back and forth emails, they finally admitted that this was on their end and fixed the bug. But that's after we've had to process thousands of dollars in refunds.

STAY AWAY. Use Native Stripe. Chargify is a rip off.