Zoho Subscriptions

Avantages

Really easy to set up, and integrated with the merchant processing of my choice. When we first switched over Zoho subscriptions were the only tool that could email multiple reminders to the clients prior to the billing renewal which I feel is great for subscription services.

The customer portal on the backend allows for customers to change their credit card information without me or one of my team members to have to do it manually. Super time saver.

It also notifies my team when a payment doesn't go through for whatever reason and can automatically retry the card again.

When we first started, it gave up to $50k worth of transactions as a free trial. Meaning you don't have to pay for a subscription until you reach 50k worth of transactions or a certain number of clients. Really cool.

Inconvénients

The only thing I didn't like was that I couldn't do a one time payment easily. Sometimes we have one time jobs such as web development or consulting, and it makes it kind of hard to use just this one system. We had to also get Zoho invoice to complement what we were doing. So unless you are doing just recurring subscriptions you'll need to get an invoicing tool as well.
Als ran into problems with the customer portal, but most of my clients didn't wnat to log in so it wasn't that big of a deal.

Avantages

Pricing structure
API integrations
Webhook announcements
Clean and intuitive admin panel
Robust reporting
Subscriber export
Subscription pricing flexibility with coupons and addons

Inconvénients

The non-API deployment is a bit limited in terms of collecting any customer information that's not part of the default data. We didn't have the budget to do a full API deployment, but we were able to come up with some workarounds to collect info in fields not specifically designed for that information. When we did go with the full API deployment, it was pretty easy to transition our hacked-together data collection into the new custom fields.

Avantages

This software makes automatic billing an unbelievably easy thing to do. I absolutely love how you can create products, and within the product create different pricing plans. You can set how each customer should be billed and how often. It provides an online billing account for your customers to see their subscriptions, paid invoices and even update their credit card details.

Inconvénients

We love it, but our main gripe about Zoho Subscriptions is that you only get one Hosted payment page for ALL of your products and plans. This is truly odd to me, and many people in the forums are also confused why there has not been any ability to create different payment pages for different products. This means that if you have two different branded subscriptions...you must somehow make a single check out page that fits both of them. Also, it's the same page as when a user updates their cc info... everything else is amazing with this product, but for us, it was a face-palm.

Avantages

This is a highly competent subscription service, more features than we could possibly use, and we get to use our own billing. Many subscription services also want to do your billing, or getting a percentage of our sales, charging more than our bank, and then they "own" our customers, which is a deal-breaker for us. Zoho Subscriptions is what a subscription service should be, a highly competent web service that does all the heavy lifting, and plugs into our website and payment processors. We've been with Zoho for two years without an outage. We couldn't be happier.

Inconvénients

The lack of an easily integrated customer portal results in us having to write a lot of user-facing pages on our site simply to do what is already available in the admin interface. But every time we've had a genuinely poorly designed thing on Zoho's end, they listened and rolled out changes within a few months. They obviously care about making this the best service.