Using FreshBooks for your web application’s billing
The best thing about having an API is that your customers can surprise you with really amazing and novel uses for your product. Recently, I learnt that two really interesting web application companies are using FreshBooks for their billing engine.
That’s fantastic, because building a billing system from scratch is a pointless hard problem to solve when you’re a startup.
Here’s an overview of what they are doing.
Gliffy
Last year, I wrote a little review about a great collaborative flow chart and diagramming application we use called Gliffy, that happens to be run by super friendly people. Little did I know that they would turn around and use FreshBooks to invoice their clients.
For their Confluence plugin they generate FreshBooks invoices directly from their pricing page. Based on the options you choose, they create an appropriate invoice in FreshBooks. Then, using invoice.get to get the URL for the invoice, they redirect their customer straight to the invoice where they can pay by credit card. Nice!
StickyStreet
StickyStreet is also using FreshBooks in a very clever way. A little background. StickyStreet is a gift card and loyalty management service. Unlike other similar companies, they have decided to not charge transaction fees because they are building it for small businesses. They are also investing a lot of time making the service user-friendly.
Ok, but what’s a gift card and loyalty management service? We’ve all seen them. StickyStreet allows you to create gift cards with a stored value, like $20. You can also give points to your customers for doing things like coming to your website or paying on time, which they can redeem later for discounts or movie tickets or whatever you like.
How do they use FreshBooks? They charge you automatically based on the number of customers you’re tracking in the system, which is what they call Pay As You Grow Pricing. So, if you’re using up to ten customers it’s free. As soon as you add the eleventh customer, they will automatically generate an invoice in FreshBooks and send it to you so you can pay by credit card.
The best part, Anthony from StickyStreet told me, “we implemented this for $150 and 2 days worth of time.” Holy moly!
What about you?
Are you using the FreshBooks API to automate your subscription billing? Please tell me about it. I’m keen to make this better.
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10:14 am
It would be interesting if StickyStreet integrated with your Freshbooks account to automatically update your StickyStreet customers accounts based on your Freshbook invoices.
3:42 pm
We’ve just rolled out automated billing using Freshbooks for our subscription based web application. The difficult part was figuring out recurring billing since the Freshbooks API doesn’t support entering or updating credit card information.
Here’s how it works:
1. Our signup page uses 1ShoppingCart to gather customer and billing information including the credit card.
2. 1ShoppingCart processes the order, charges the card for the 1st month and sends a confirmation email to us and the client.
3. We parse the confirmation email and pull out the order information. This is used to create a recurring profile in Freshbooks. It also puts one paid invoice into Freshbooks so we can use one system for all revenue reporting.
4. Recurring billing takes place monthly, so customer service has 30 days to manually copy credit card information from 1ShoppingCart into Freshbooks. This is the only step we can’t automate.
5. Any plan changes (upgrade, downgrade, cancel) are handled through the web application interface. Behind the scenes, the recurring profile is updated using the Freshbooks API.
6. We check for failed or overdue payments at login and redirect users to a payment screen showing the failed invoice. From there, they can click into Freshbooks to pay the invoice or update credit card information on file. It’s pretty much seamless.
Note: If the API allowed credit card information, the first few steps wouldn’t be necessary. That feature is still high on our wishlist!!!
Cheers,
Chris
3:53 pm
Forgot before. One *really* nice thing about this setup is support for promotional codes. 1ShoppingCart allow special codes with every order. That means we can offer special pricing, 6 month trials, whatever by just updating the recurring profile properly.
Here’s a couple screenshots (not styled yet).
SUSPENDED ACCOUNT
http://screencast.com/t/OmQ8Jr6Au
PAY INVOICE
http://screencast.com/t/dpqcDhrGyB
3:55 pm
Forgot before. One *really* nice thing about this setup is support for promotional codes. 1ShoppingCart allow special codes with every order. That means we can offer special pricing, 6 month trials, whatever by just updating the recurring profile properly.
I made a couple screenshots, but the blog doesn’t seem to like using URLs???
10:15 am
Wow Chris, thanks for sharing. This seems like a bit of hack but I can truly see the reasons for MAKING it work. Wow. We are having such a problem with recurring billing through Paypal. There is just NO management or tie-in to any other system. We get daily emails of what cards were successfully charged and which ones failed. But it isn’t tied to real customers and accounts and is interesting but utterly useless in terms of doing much with the info. Having it all within FreshBooks (both on our side and the customer’s side) would be great.
If there becomes a way to do this with FreshBooks through the whole process, I am signing us up and starting the integration next week. Being able to enter and update credit card information is the key. Let me know.
9:13 am
Mark:
Not only would it be “interesting”, it would ROCK! We are adding some serious functionality to StickyStreet.com right now, including a great deal of attention to Freshbooks and a few others.
Stay tuned, some features will roll out in a few days, others are in the works!
Stay Sticky,
Anthony
8:21 pm
Chris, we have been selling cellular since 1983, when the NYNEX system first went live. I would like to learn more about what you have done with FreshBooks, and what’s next. We are trying to do something similar, with our audio conferenicng services. It looks like you are really onto something here. ~Tom
7:50 pm
[...] us from other tasks that need doing too. One way we’ve saved a bunch of time is by using Freshbooks for [...]