Chargify vs. Spreedly vs. Cheddargetter: Subscription-Billing Service Prices
We're looking at chargify.com, spreedly.com, and cheddargetter.com to manage subscriptions for a SaaS web app we're developing at pybrew.com. I made some graphs to see how their prices scale with the number of customers they're managing for your business.
Spreedly charges per transaction, whereas chargify and cheddargetter charge per customer. For these graphs, I'm assuming that it's simply one transaction per customer per month, but spreedly's curve will go up or down if you charge more or less frequently than monthly. Also, I didn't include any costs from payment gateways like authorize.net.
In a few places, these graphs make it look like there are some big price differences. However, after looking at it for a while, I'm not sure that the differences are significant. The most noticeable one is where the chargify price jumps when you get your 501st customer. At that point, you'd be paying $249/month for chargify but only $119.20 for spreedly or only $39.00 for cheddargetter. But, if you're charging, say, $15/month for your app, and you have 501 customers, then you're getting $7,515/month in revenue, and the difference of $210 between chargify and cheddargetter is about 2.8% of your revenue, which is the biggest difference in percentage of revenue that I can find in the first 20,000 customers. Once you get past 1,150 customers, spreedly is always the most expensive, but the difference is generally around 1% of revenue, assuming a $15/customer/month subscription model. There's another change at 50,000 customers, which is where the cheddargetter cost begins increasing again, so eventually it will cross the chargify curve, which is fixed at $2,499 for unlimited customers. However, I stopped the graphs at 20,000 customers, because I figure, at that point, with a $15/month subscription, you're bringing in $300,000 per month, so you can afford to do pretty much whatever you want. For a startup, getting to the point of having 50 paying customers is the hardest and probably takes the most time, and with chargify, those first 50 are free, but overall, I'm not convinced that the price differences alone are enough to make a decision between the three. You might want to choose based on some combination of price and features. As primarily Python coders, we like that Spreedly already has a Django app, thanks to Chris Drackett.Here's the quick-and-dirty Python script I wrote to generate the numbers. (Please let me know if you catch a mistake!)
Here's the gnuplot script I wrote to make the graphs.
