Say you’re a startup, and say your plan is to make money (crazy I know), but maybe you don’t have the infrastructure in place to accept payments for whatever your business model is. There are plenty of solutions out there to do this for you, but CheddarGetter, which itself is a startup, wants to be the easiest and most affordable one.
The idea is to have a service with an interface that any developer can figure out, but at the same time, has flexible options so that it can support models like subscriptions, micro-billing, or donations. And the main key to all of this is its rich APIs, which you can read about here.
Using CheddarGetter, you won’t have to worry about declined credit cards, coding for pricing changes, handling trial times and all the complicated stuff that comes with payments. And the services does things like automate email sending for confirmations, and gives you an analytics package, to make your job easier.
The key part aside from ease of use is obviously cost. And CheddarGetter sounds pretty compelling with prices starting at $39 a month. Larger rivals can charge hundreds of dollars a month for the same services. And CheddarGetter has no setup fees, transaction fees or percentage fees. It’s simply the $39 a month and then forget about it — assuming you stay small.
If your startup takes off and you need to manage beyond 1,000 customers, the prices obviously go up. The Advanced package is $169.00 a month for up to 10,000 customers, and the Premium package is $549.99 a month for up to 50,000 customers. Or, if you only slightly go over the alloted number of users, there is a small per-customer overage fee you can choose to pay rather than upgrading. And no matter what payment scale you’re on, there are zero transaction and setup fees.
CheddarGetter is the first startup to launch from SproutBox, an Indiana-based incubator. It’s currently accepting applications for a new crop of early-stage startups, but hurry, the deadline is August 15.
The service isn’t set to launch until September, but we have 100 invites to give away now. Simply visit this page and use the code TECHCRUNCH1 in the ‘Got a Beta Code?’ box.
I can see this has great potential already! sign me up!
Great Info man. i will become a member
The flat fee is a big plus for start-ups, no surprises.
Do they actually allow you to accept credit card payments? If so, who’s absorbing the transactional credit card charges. Something doesn’t seem to add up.
I’m about to launch my startup in a couple of months. I sure wish I could get me a guaranteed beta slot as this would solve just about every issue I’m currently dealing with.
Really? Are you serious? Billing thingy? Can my bills be sent out in 140 chars or less? I will immediately disavow all knowledge of free CRM. Hint … catchy web gizmos are things that people might use, yet no obvious way to make money is apparent. This is a less rounded iteration of the wheel.
!!! FAIL !!!!!
…you are a less rounded version of an idiot Bob.
Hmm, comparing to Amazon FPS (which charges 5%+$0.05 for credit card for transactions below $10):
Assuming 500 customers paying $5 each, that is $0.07 per user from CheddarGetter ($39 account), or from Amazon, $0.30.
Assuming 5,000 users paying $5 each, that is $0.03 ($169 for the CheddarGetter account), while Amazon FPS is still $0.30.
With 25,000 users (still paying $5), that is $0.02 ($550 for the account) versus $0.30.
It seems odd that CheddarGetter can charge so little, given the costs of credit card transactions. Are they taking a loss in order to gain marketshare, or do their projections predict the loss cases (accounts with lots of paying users) will be a minority?
Since you’d enter your own authorize.net credentials into the site, you’d still be paying your merchant transaction fees separately. This service is just to help you coordinate the recurring billing & tracking of customers.
Who is paying the CC transaction fees? This doesn’t add up to me.
Very cool! Best of luck to them. If it’s as easy as it looks offhand, I could have used their system in many sites.
Especially the recurring payments part – such a pain in the neck to get right. Even places like Authorize.net have kinks, missing features in their API and various issues.
they sound like a nice business
Looks cool! A very good solution to a pervasive problem. I like it!
Just been reading up on this, and it looks like you still need to use a payment gateway, at the moment only authorize.net is supported but more will follow. It’s also US only, so if you are based, or you’ve got customers, outside the US it’s of little use.
Thanks. I was already fearing it was US only.
Sounds very confusing. If I am an online shop or whatever other e-commerce website owner, I can switch to them and suddenly all the transaction fees disappear?
They don’t mention a single word about the type of payments they accept. At least I didn’t see a single credit card logo on their website and on the pricing page, it is even written “no credit card required” (?). But how should my clients pay? With their good will?
It is impossible to cover the credit card transaction fees of 1000 “clients” (?? somehow independent of the transaction amount or regularity) – with 39 US$
Sounds too good to be true? We need a cost effective payment system in near future for binfire.com. I will check them out!
I missed out on the 100 invites – are there any competitors I could look at?
Freshbooks.com is pretty good. Also for a more professional recurring revenue model business check out Zuora.
Zuora is very good– in some ways overkill. But they start at $500/mo. And they take 2% of your revenue on top of cc charges.
At the low end, the $500/mo was too high, and at the high end, 2% is a non-trivial amount of revenue (and we figured we’d end up writing our own billing code to avoid it). So either way, we couldn’t make them work.
Spreedly
If anyone has an invite I’d love one, this could be great for a project I’m working on, missed the techcrunch invites
That is what at YouTechno we call innovation, the fact that it is going to be more affordable is an incentive.
http://www.youtechno.info
Would someone please explain if/how they are able to process credit cards and avoid transaction fees? The numbers don’t add up and it is too early for me to go dig around their homepage.
Maybe people really have to pay using some new form of cheddar cheese currency?
Danggg… too late.
This article demands an update! It sounds too good to be true and it is. i had to dig into the site to see that you need an authorize.net account (as most of the users already noted) – ie pay all their fees.
This means cheddar getter is simply an api that makes it a bit easier (i assume) to use than the auth.net api + analytics. All in all it might be worth the price for some companies.
Thanks for all the excitement regarding CheddarGetter, but just to clarify we haven’t been able to eliminate those nasty Credit Card transaction fees (well at least not yet). Those fees are usually charged by banks, processors, gateways and ISO’s at the merchant account level. CheddarGetter sits atop a payment gateway and eliminates the hassles typically associated with
recurring billing – pricing plan changes, declined or expired credit cards, and trial period management, usage tracking, etc. It
automates all the time‐consuming processes such as email notifications and price adjustments– so a startup can get going in days not months.
Looks like that Beta Code has dried up. If you’d still like to get a beta account you can request one here: https://cheddar...ser/signup-beta
Why not simply use the Automated Recurring Billing (ARB)™ from authorize.net? That’s only $10/month…
The big problem with ARB (as I understand it) is that it doesn’t know what plan you’re on. It just hits an account for a fixed amount. So it doesn’t really do things like grandfathering, reporting or overage tracking.
I also don’t think it handles sending out emails or providing the interfaces for updating your info when a card expires, is declined, etc. I think you still have to write a lot of code, and don’t really have any analytics– unless you write that too
Thanks, Mike.
As I will launch a site is a few weeks, I would appreciate if someone could answer the following:
- Does Authorize.net work outside the USA? Their resellers are organised by US State…
- Which is the best authorize.net reseller to go by? What set up and monthly fee can one expect?
- If I understand it correctly the big advantage over Paypal and Moneybookers is avoiding the fees and the horror stories, but authorize.net is credit card only where the other 2 offer more solutions?
No need to answer it anymore. It’s USA only so of little use to me. I’d rather pay more fees than losing out on customers.
Authorize.net only works with merchant accounts from US banks. However, you can accept credit cards from anywhere. The only limitation is the location of the bank.
http://transfs.com is a great resource for finding a reseller. They let you setup a reverse auction to get ISO’s to compete for your business. You can expect around $40 setup, $10/mo + $20/mo for CIM.
What do you mean by “other solutions”? ACH? ACH is cheaper but creates an easy avenue for fraud.
Thanks for all the excitement regarding CheddarGetter, but just to clarify we haven’t been able to eliminate those nasty Credit Card transaction fees (well at least not yet). Those fees are usually charged by banks, processors, gateways and ISO’s at the merchant account level. CheddarGetter sits atop a payment gateway and eliminates the hassles typically associated with recurring billing – pricing plan changes, declined or expired credit cards, and trial period management, usage tracking, etc. It
automates all the time‐consuming processes such as email notifications and price adjustments– so a startup can get going in days not months.
Invite please!
If you want to keep your recurring billing local, check out the SaaS Rails Kit at http://railskits.com/saas/ — if you’re building a Rails app, it’s a great way to have recurring billing, account management, etc. all done for you. And without a monthly fee.
This looks amazing, well done SproutBox!
CheddarGetter is fine if you want a small company. If you want a company with experience and resources use Zoura
Why not just use paypal micro payments? Are there any advantages to using CheddarGetter instead of Paypal?
Zuora (http://www.zuora.com) has been doing this for a few years now, with hundreds of customers, live and cranking through hundreds of millions of dollars in transactions. It’s sure great to see more people starting to realize the value of managed recurring billing and payments.