Crusading to Hyper growth: is your Billing Engine Scalable Enough?

This post was originally written on the Chargebee blog.

So you’ve just about cracked the product-market fit for your subscription business. You have a growing customer base with consistent recurring revenue. But don’t crack open the bubbly just yet. It’s time to unlock the next leg of growth.

So as a startup leader, you must ensure that your product keeps evolving as you scale your business and open new growth avenues like global expansion, pricing experiments, and new product lines. That means supporting multiple currencies, the ability to make pricing changes quickly, and a flexible product catalog.

Woah, that got a whole lot more complicated, right? That’s why using a single payment gateway like Stripe may no longer be sufficient to match your growth ambition.

Why Home-grown Billing can Hold you Off

On paper, building your billing engine seems relatively quite easy. After all, a relational database design and a 100-line cron job script shouldn’t be too difficult to handle for your in-house developers, right?

But here’s the fine print.

Sooner than later, you’ll find yourself playing catch up with the ever-evolving complexities in billing logic, finding workarounds for new billing scenarios, fixing bugs in your billing logic, testing the billing engine, and keeping up with the ever-changing compliance laws across the globe.

Let’s look at MakeSpace, for example. As a young, engineering-driven tech startup, MakeSpace opted to build its billing system. But as it grew with more pricing variations, added more customers, and expanded to newer markets, they found their internal system to be unscalable and unable to cope with:

• An increasingly dynamic pricing model
• Attempted fraudulent charges
• The complicated US tax structure with different tax rules for individual states.

For complete article, please visit Chargebee blog.