SOS Billing Tech Stack Help
As the non-technical founder, I have been struggling to make the right decision with the current situation I am facing in regards to billing tech stack:
We have custom coded our authentication, but are needing to set up paywalls, usage walls, trial periods, and clear reporting on customer billing. We have a stripe account but we have an internal debate going on...
1 school of thought is to stick with stripe and build out all of the triggers custom using stripe and bite the bullet on how long that takes.
The other school of thought is to use https://www.outseta.com/ to shortcut the custom dev work, pay $30 per month and slowly transition away from outseta. Problem is we would incur work refactoring authentication and possible add more friction to user experience.. but overall seems it would save significant time.
I do not know enough about what goes into setting up the custom triggers for the aforementioned things we need. Does anyone have an opinion on this. Anyone have an opinion on this?
Based on your site you have a CTO, two developers and one Data scientist. What are they saying?
If you can spend 30 bucks a month and in return gets faster development it seems like a good deal, without having any further information.
Agreed, just wondering if removing this from the tech stack downline outweighs the benefits of saving time now
I would second @dfrancoeur65. I don't have any insights into your requirements and tech stack but if creating all the triggers takes long and your workload is already high the buy seems a valid/good decision.
touche. thanks for your feedback!
Good post!
Looks like a Build vs. Buy question.
Getting billing right is super important and unless you have some core competency building a billing/invoicing system you'd find yourself in a "death march" type of tech build.
So many user stories, etc.
If you have a lot of complexity that seems to be covered by outseta then I'd recommend you go the "Buy" route.
Not sure what your tech stack is, but I'd expect that re-working auth is a tradeoff you should make!
Thanks for the input. Definitely soaking up as much info as possible in regards to how this transitions once we do have more dev bandwidth to use stripe to its full potential. Not sure how familiar you are with Billing tech stack options, but have you seen any patterns with softwares coupled with stripe?
I've worked with a few that kind of work off the shelf (Billing.com/Quickbooks) and then I've worked on some projects that interface directly with a banking api (Stripe, SynapseFI, the latter being on the fully customized side of the spectrum).
I'd need a little bit of info about what you mean by "patterns" but Stripe has been doing a great job at allowing companies to spend their time on their Actual product and not how people pay for that product.
Is there something super customizable you'll need for the billing/subscriptions that you are worried about a third-party not being able to offer?
Thanks for getting back to me. By patterns I just mean billing solutions that SaaS products are using coupled with stripe to save engineering time.
Looking for things like email triggering (for trial period beginning and ending), help desk, reporting