What production-ready SaaS (recurring billing) solutions are available for Rails? [closed]

Question

I am working on a software-as-a-service (SaaS) application and I am looking for a billing plugin of some sort that will manage my subscriptions, customers, and recurring billing. There is the RailsKits SaaS kit ($249.00), but I prefer to use open source software. I have also found maccman's saasy, but the phrase "At the moment this is alpha code - use at your own risk" makes me a tad bit nervous.

Answer 1

You could just outsource the whole SaaS side of things.

http://Recurly.com  
http://chargify.com  
http://spreedly.com  
http://cheddargetter.com  
http://fusebill.com  
http://chargebee.com  

There are other providers like SAASY.com, 2Checkout.com who provide a bundled merchant account + payment gateway service along with subscription billing.

Answer 2

Unless your application actually does billing as its CORE FUNCTION, you definitely, definitely, want to get billing OUT of your app!

Get your business to find another solution for that function (or outsource it to e.g. Salesforce.com - most others do). Your development team should be working on the product you sell, not internally reinventing wheels.

Answer 3

I've heard a lot of good things about CheddarGetter for recurring billing. A friend of mine who did web design for a local e-mag said they ended up being the least expensive given the size of his little subscription pool... dunno how big you are but it might be worth checking out. Also, every once in a while I see retweets of them answering questions in my twitter feed... so that's probably a good sign.

EDIT: A quick check shows me it's on rails & open source as well.

Answer 4

Recurly http://recurly.com is also being used by many companies to launch professional subscription billing solutions. No setup fees, no cancellation fees. Easy to deploy.

Check us out.

Answer 5

We use CheddarGetter for a SaaS we're releasing at my office, and although it took a lot of research to get to that point, I'm really glad we're going with them. Their support staff was incredible - they answered our calls right away, and have a good knack of walking you through the whole billing process, which can be really confusing without some help.

Another reason we chose them was because we could opt to use their own gateway, and so didn't have to make customers leave our app to pay, like PayPal Standard would make you do. Plus, they allow for unlimited transactions and customers - which is good for our growing product - and their features cover all our recurring needs (changing subscriptions, multiple cards, billing at the start of the month, etc). They also have a well-documented API and a good wrapper library (even with code for Ruby!), which I'm sure we'll be digging into once we get everything set up.