Subscription Platform in New Zealand

Rent the billing engine, build the join

Stripe Billing, Chargebee and Recurly have each spent years on plans, proration, retries, invoices and tax. Reproducing that is one of the more reliable ways to spend six figures on something you could have rented for a percentage.

What a developer should be building for you is the join between billing and your product:

• What can a customer do on each plan, and where is that enforced?
• What happens the moment they stop paying — immediately, or after a grace period?
• What happens to their data if they never come back?
• How does a salesperson give someone a discount, and is it recorded anywhere a finance team can find?

Ask each firm quoting which billing platform they would use and why. A quote that proposes building the engine from scratch should come with a specific reason your case does not fit the ones you can buy.

Failed cards are your biggest churn source

More subscribers are lost to expired cards than to anyone deciding to leave. A large share of those are recoverable, and whether you recover them is decided by the dunning setup — which almost never appears in a brief.

What good looks like:

• Retries on a schedule rather than immediately — cards often succeed days later, after a salary lands.
• An email to the customer that contains a link to update the card, not an instruction to log in and find the billing page.
• A warning before access is suspended, so nobody is surprised.
• A notification to someone at your end for accounts worth chasing by phone.
• A record of what was attempted, so a customer disputing it can be answered.

Ask every developer to describe their retry schedule and what the customer receives at each step. Vagueness here is expensive later.

Proration is where the bugs live

A customer on a $99 plan upgrades to $299 on the fifteenth of the month. What do they pay today, and what do they pay on the first?

Several answers are defensible. What is not defensible is an invoice the customer cannot understand, because that becomes an email to you, and at scale it becomes a person's job.

Before accepting a quote, ask to see a worked example invoice for:

1. An upgrade halfway through a period.
2. A downgrade halfway through a period — does the credit apply now or next cycle?
3. A cancellation on day three of a month already paid for.
4. Adding five seats on the twentieth.
5. A refund on a partly used month.

A developer who has built subscription billing will answer these without hesitating. One who has not will discover them during your project.

Monthly and annual are different businesses

Annual plans transform cashflow and reduce churn, and they bring their own work: a customer who upgrades in month seven of twelve, refund policy on a cancelled annual plan, renewal notices, and revenue that has been collected but not yet earned.

That last point matters to your accountant. Twelve months collected in advance is a liability until it is delivered, and if your board reads monthly revenue from the billing system, someone needs to have decided how that is presented. Settle it while quoting, not at year end.

Get the tax treatment decided before the build

Domestic subscriptions carry GST at 15 percent. Remote services sold to customers overseas are generally zero-rated, and selling into other countries can create obligations there — Australia and the EU both have thresholds for remote services.

This is your accountant's decision and it has to be encoded in how invoices are produced, which means it is a build requirement rather than an afterthought. Get them in the room for an hour during quoting. A developer who states your tax treatment without asking is guessing on your behalf.

Give customers a billing screen

Every hour your team spends changing a plan, resending an invoice or updating a card is an hour you are paying for something the customer would happily do themselves.

The screen should let them see the current plan and next charge, change or cancel, update the card, download past invoices, and change the billing email — which is almost never the same as the login email. Stripe's own customer portal gives you most of this for very little work, and is worth asking about specifically.

Comparing five quotes

Read for:

• Who named a billing platform and said what it would not cover?
• Who described dunning in detail without being asked?
• Who could produce worked proration examples?
• Who asked about overseas customers and GST?
• Whose quote includes a self-service billing screen?

Describe your plans, whether pricing is per seat or per usage, whether you sell overseas, and how many customers you expect in year one. Developers who have done this before will ask about failed cards before they ask about the signup page.