by Paul Lynch
One decade.
10 years.
3,650 days.
You get the point — it’s a long amount of time. Ten years ago, our founders built Chargify to solve the billing and subscription management needs specific to SaaS companies. Even at that time, we saw the complexities of billing and managing subscriptions for SaaS and were passionate about creating solutions for this rapidly-evolving industry.
A decade of laser focus in SaaS has made us experts in this space. We are in tune with the evolving needs of SaaS businesses and have worked to continuously solve for them with new features, capabilities and integrations. Our merchants have validated that our outlook of the market direction and SaaS needs are right on:
- Chargify has exceeded a $1B threshold in the number of payments that we process through our platform annually.
- We have managed 23M subscriptions and 135M subscription renewals to date.
- Our customers now leverage 112K unique billing scenarios.
- More than 90% of our customers have adopted our price points capability, giving them the freedom to easily choose, change and customize pricing.
- Customers are adopting our richer SaaS-tailored analytics — more than a quarter of our customers leveraged our enhanced, free subscriber analytics within the first 60 days of its availability in the market.
As experts in the market, we know that SaaS has become more than just subscriptions. It is a rapidly evolving modern business model that has very specific requirements. SaaS companies must provide personalized offers at scale, endless combinations of recurring and usage-based pricing, constant experimentation and real-time analytics — all done in the context of endless change.
Lately, we’ve noticed a trend. These requirements create major management headaches for our customers. Tasks that were once thought to be simple – such as calculating accurate revenue, understanding sales commissions and/or creating CX and operational efficiencies – become extremely complex in a B2B SaaS business.
Simply put, managing revenue and billing has become a SaaS business blocker.
As a company that has been committed to SaaS for more than 10 years, we have identified this need and have evolved our platform to solve for it.
Chargify — Billing and Revenue Management for SaaS
Today, we are thrilled to announce that Chargify is moving beyond billing and expanding our capabilities to include end-to-end revenue management for fast-growing SaaS businesses.
We are starting our expansion into this space with the launch of two key features — Sales Commission Calculator and Revenue Alerts — but more on that later.
First, it is important to understand the meaning of revenue management in the context of SaaS.
A quick Google search will show you that revenue management is a term that has traditionally been used as a term in legacy businesses to describe the use of analytics to predict consumer behavior and maximize revenue.
The reality is that SaaS businesses today do have revenue management needs, but they look much different. To win in the modern SaaS world, businesses must be able to:
- Move faster
- Respond quicker to market and customer needs
- Personalize at scale
- Drive alignment across revenue-generating functions
- Derive insights from the chaos
- Always stay compliant in a changing world
I will dive deeper into the meaning of revenue management for SaaS in later posts, but the crux is that it is difficult — if not impossible — to effectively manage all of these areas without a single platform built specifically for your needs.
This is where Chargify’s expanded platform comes in. We will now give merchants a solution to fully manage their revenue with key features and capabilities in three main areas: elastic billing, revenue operations (RevOps) and SaaS insights.
Elastic Billing – The Flexibility SaaS Companies Need
Elastic billing, which remains a central pillar of our product, gives our merchants the ability to launch complex offers without writing code. Enabling millions of subscription permutations, complex coupons and recurring discounts, streamlined usage-based revenue and invoice flexibility.
RevOps – Automate to Accelerate Growth
The SaaS billing model promotes friction in revenue generation, retention and accounting. This hinders the alignment across revenue-generating functions — or RevOps functions — like sales, customer support and marketing. Our RevOps capabilities such as native recurring sales commissions, account management dunning strategies and revenue maximization alerts, allow merchants to automate growth activities and drive compliance and accounting certainty.
SaaS Insights – Move Faster Confidently
It may sound surprising, (or may not if you’re a SaaS professional) but many companies struggle to know their true revenue, cash and operating metrics. Our merchants can now make better business decisions with Chargify’s SaaS-tailored insights like predicting the impact of product changes and identifying customer growth opportunities.
Introducing the Sales Commission Calculator
Our first step into this expanded platform comes with the exciting launch of our Sales Commission Calculator. This industry-first native Sales Commission Calculator removes the complexity of calculating sales commission on subscription SaaS offerings and gives businesses a simplified, error-free way to automate commissioning.
The Sales Commission Calculator solves one of the major pain points for subscription SaaS businesses. According to research from Xactly, 83% of organizations admit to having inaccuracies in their sales commission payouts.
Commissions are difficult because SaaS billing has gotten extremely complex. How do you compensate a seller when you don’t know what a customer’s revenue will be for some time? It’s a tough issue for SaaS companies, and there are many more like it.
The Sales Commission Calculator is the first step in making Chargify a gateway to deeper and more insightful SaaS management. It allows merchants to save valuable time and avoid business-impacting errors in commissioning by removing the need for manual data processing and multiple tools (that come at an additional cost).
Now, merchants can calculate commissions on many different revenue models (that include both MRR and metered-usage) based on the real-time billing data collected in the Chargify app. The end result is an automated, accurate tool that stays updated even as revenue changes — accessed in a single tool and at no additional cost. Check out our product blog post for more information.
As a part of our move into billing and revenue management for SaaS, Chargify has also launched Revenue Alerts.
This feature allows merchants to closely monitor high-value conversions, expansion and contraction revenue and potential churn risks by defining thresholds for revenue changes that trigger real-time emails and in-app notifications.
Just the Beginning
We have had the chance to show tools like the Sales Commission Calculator and Revenue Alerts to a select few beta customers, and their feedback has been encouraging. All of them have validated the challenges that come along with managing revenue in a SaaS world, and they are excited that they can now look to Chargify as a single platform for their billing and revenue management needs.
With the hyper-speed nature of SaaS, the complexities in the model, and increasing demand for customization from customers, the introduction of Revenue Management is an important and welcome development. Sure, billing is a business fundamental, but anticipating, recognizing, and addressing the challenges SaaS companies face every day means that with Chargify, I can take these challenges and turn them into an opportunity for more growth!
Jess Garza, CEO at Earth Class Mail
Today is an exciting day in Chargify’s history, and it is fitting that it falls in the midst of our 10-year anniversary. We have spent the last 10 years solving for the billing needs of B2B SaaS businesses, and now we set our sights on the challenge ahead — transforming revenue management from a business blocker into a revenue accelerator for our merchants.
We hope you are as excited as we are for the next decade of Chargify.
Questions for our team? Don’t hesitate to reach out to our experts.
Questions about how your SaaS business can effectively manage revenue? Download our eBook.
