Has anyone used Avangate for SaaS payments?

Discussions
#1

Hello,

I’m in the latest stage of my web-based SaaS MVP. Aside from some development work, the only problem I have is choosing a payment processor.

A 3-4 years ago I sold some desktop-based software, and I used first e-junkie and later Avangate, and it worked like a charm. Now I’ve started to setup a subscription based product (a product, with different plans and monthly and yearly payments), but this is a bit messy (I don’t think that their site is prepared to handle subscription based products, is more for buying desktop software).

And my question is: Anyone is using Avangate for recurring payments? If not, what payment processor can you recommend me? If possible, I want a complete processor, who handles different VAT prices, signup forms, etc, and I don’t want CC details in my server (I don’t want to be PCI compliant).

Thank you!

#2

We use FastSpring, and so far happy with it. It is more expensive than Avangate, but according to initial research FastSpring appears to be more user-friendly. Support from Avangate was a bit misleading. FastSpring offers invoices to your customers out-of-the-box, fully handles VAT.
Much better than plain PayPal which we used before :slight_smile:

1 Like
#3

I use FastSpring as well and when i look around a lot of larger SaaS companies do as well. It is more expensive but seems to work extremely well for me. Once integrated I can basically forget about it and they manage everything, rebilling, CC failures etc.

2 Likes
#4

@kir, @craigvn
I’ve been looking at FastSpring’s website and it seems really good. There is lot of documentation, full description of the API, etc… Have you found any headache using FastSpring? And is there any problem having three different plans, and different prices for monthly and yearly subscriptions?

#5

No problems for different plans. You just create different products, and specify the price you want for each of them.
Alternatively, you can pass the actual price from your service to Fastspring at the moment of purchase, i.e. you can calculate the price you want in your app, and pass it to FastSpring form.

But even without custom pricing, you can configure in FastSpring volume discounts, discount coupons, time-based offers, etc.

And, in my experience, they have really good support. Every question I had was processed within 24h (including weekends).

On the dark side, twice since the beginning of this year I faced cases when FastSpring declined CC payments due to some automatic fraud-protection they have. But in such a case it is possible to create a pre-approved order and send the link to the customer for direct payment.

#6

We use Fastspring as well. Easy integration, full VAT management and outstanding support.

In my opinion it is well worth the a bit higher price point.

#7

It depends a lot on your pricing, how many transactions you’ll get, and what kind of features you want beyond pure payment. Recurly and Chargify are two names that come up a lot specifically for recurring payments, Stripe complemented by 3rd-party SaaS (for subscription management and analytics) is another way to do it. There are other subscription-focused players such as Zuora that are priced for enterprise customers so not suited for a bootstrapped MVP. I’ve had a mostly positive experience with Recurly. Avangate or FastSpring look almost like ecommerce suites with features leaking into A/B testing that you may prefer to manage in a dedicated SaaS. It’s the usual best-of-breed vs. integrated suite question (like Hubspot that does not just marketing automation but is now also a CMS and a bunch of other things).

There’s definitely a lot more to handling subscriptions over the long run vs. just handling a one-time credit card transaction. Concerns go from customer support (plan changes, prorating, invoicing, multi-user plans etc.) to minimizing churn to tracking subscription metrics (churn, MRR, LTV etc.)

#8

I’ve already looked at Recurly and Chargify, and I found them expensive to begin with ($65/month Chargify and $99/month Recurly)…

At the beginning I’ll have 3 different tiers: 30€/month, 60€/month and 150€/month (then I’ll study if this prices works as expected), but I don’t know how many customers I’ll have (there are some interested people, but until they pay, there aren’t customers).

And there is one thing that I don’t understand: what’s the difference between Recurly, Chargify or Stripe, and FastSpring or Avangate? I already know that with Avangate is a bit difficult to setup a product with three monthly plans, but there are lots of tools, including A/B testing… About FastSpring I only know that they have a good API, but I haven’t seen their customers’ zone.

#9

The current customer zone is pretty good, nothing amazing. But they have a new one in beta testing that I have been using that is much nicer and has some cool reporting features.

#10

Could you please give a hint on how to participate and take a look? Thanks!

#11

Eas[quote=“kir, post:10, topic:3127”]
Could you please give a hint on how to participate and take a look? Thanks!
[/quote]

Easy, just go to beta.fastspring.com and use your normal login :slight_smile:

2 Likes
#12

We were using Avangate for SaaS for a long time. They’re ok. Subscription management is good. Moved to FastSrping couple of years ago. Better support.

#13

I use Fastspring also. The checkout page does need improvement. But it’s easy to set up and works well for my business.

#14

Maybe my answer is too late but it might help others… We are using Avangate to sell our RationalPlan Cloud service. We have 3 price tiers with monthly payments. If you also want to add yearly payments then you have the possibility to duplicate the product and set the yearly tiers.