Beta Pricing & Creating a Subscription Billing System with Rollbase and PayPal

Beta pricing is now available through August 1^st, 2008. All contracts established prior to this date will be honored for the duration of the contract term which is one year for customers who sign up online. For details on beta pricing, see Rollbase Pricing.

Among the many different Rollbase-native applications we’ve built internally to manage our systems and processes as well as our business itself (the  topic of a future post), the latest addition to this is our subscription billing application.

As a SaaS vendor and long-time believers in the SaaS model, we’ve seen and experienced first-hand how difficult it can be to manage subscription billing, particularly so when there are a large number of variables in pricing, terms, billing frequency and payment options. This is precisely why we’re seeing serious new entrants in the SaaS billing space such as Zuora, offering a very flexible solution to the problem with an equally impressive user experience.

While Zuora is on our roadmap for in-depth evaluation as we scale operations, for now PayPal’s subscription billing service has proven to be particularly suitable for integration with Rollbase using standard Portal functionality without requiring custom server-side development.

After a few days of building a new Rollbase application and associated portal, we are happy announce that our initial billing solution went live over the weekend, providing the following core capabilities:

• Automated Subscription Signup: A new Portal allowing customers to choose and customize Rollbase subscription details, and then route them through a secure PayPal process to sign up via credit card.
• Quote Management: Ability to create Quotes based on a large number of subscription and services variables, and automatically generate an Excel document to be signed by the customer. This is used in cases where a customer or partner licenses a large number of users, procures professional services, or prefers to pay by check or money order.
• Manual Subscription Signup: Ability to email Quote information as HTML with integrated PayPal content using custom pricing information from the Quote, allowing customers to sign up online via credit card directly from their email. This is used in cases where a non-standard subscription is required.
• Invoice Management: Ability to create Invoices from existing Quotes or from scratch and generate Excel versions to send to the customer. This is used to invoice for non-recurring payments such as professional services, or for customers who prefer to pay by check or money order. This also includes the ability to email Invoice information as HTML with integrated PayPal content allowing customers to perform one-time payments via credit card.

The entire subscription billing application was built using Portals, Document Templates, Template and Formula fields, Workflow Actions, and a number of other standard Rollbase features combined with PayPal’s subscription billing service.  Interested in learning more about how we built this in Rollbase? Contact us today.

Below are a few screenshots of the automated subscription signup process: from free trial to paid subscription. If you happen to be a Rollbase Trial customer ready to sign up, follow these steps to activate your subscription:

Step1. Login to your Rollbase account and click “Subscribe Now” in the bottom of your sidebar

Step 2. Select a plan and any additional items such as more Users, Records, Storage, etc (here you are taken to a Rollbase Portal page for creating a new object record we've called "Transactions")

Step 3. Confirm subscription details and make changes if necessary (here we use Formulas and merge fields to inject the right values into PayPal’s payment button HTML code displayed here using a Template field)

Step 4. Click “Subscribe” and submit credit card information (here you are taken to PayPal's secure payment system to complete the transaction)

Step 5. Allow up to 24 hours for subscription to be processed once payment has been received (here you are taken back to a specific portal page upon successful completion of the PayPal transaction)

Comments

[Doug M]

Phil Wainwright wrote a great post on the vendors for subscription billing. It goes through the different companies and paints the landscape for features and market traction - worth reading.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/SAAS/?p=484#more-484

[Matt Robinson]

Hi Doug,

Thanks for stopping by. I agree, Phil's writeup is a good read. Paragraph 3 of our post here contains a link to the same: "how difficult it can be to manage subscription billing"

Matt