Comparison: Chargebee vs Maxio for Billing

What is Chargebee?

Chargebee, founded in 2010, is a recurring billing and subscription management platform that helps businesses automate and streamline their subscription operations. In 2021 and 2022, Chargebee acquired several new products (RevRec, Receivables, Retention) and evolved into a Revenue Growth Management (RGM) platform for subscription businesses. It now provides two services, including Billing and Retention.

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What is Maxio?

Maxio, formerly Chargify and SaaSOptics, is a Billing and Financial Operations platform. Chargify specialized in billing and subscription management for SaaS companies, while SaaSOptics focused on revenue management. In April 2022, they merged to create Maxio, offering comprehensive solutions for SaaS businesses.

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Chargebee vs. Maxio: Feature comparison

Subscription billing

Chargebeee and Maxio provide flexible subscription billing options, including fixed fees, tiered pricing, volume-based billing, stairstep pricing, along with dunning management and refund support. Businesses can set up recurring billing cycles, manage billing exceptions, and handle proration and discounts all within their platform.

Usage-based billing

Chargebeee and Maxio can effectively handle standard subscription pricing like Netflix and basic usage-based pricing like Twilio's per-message rates. However, when it comes to complex usage-based billing scenarios like PayPal's per-transaction pricing with a percentage and fixed fee, plus minimum and maximum limits, neither of these softwares can provide support.

Aggregating and sending usage

In Chargebee, the maximum number of usages that can be recorded for a subscription is 5,000, over its lifetime (see here). This means that you will not be able to send more than 5,000 usage records to bill a customer. Besides, Chargebee does not interpret events into proper units to be charged. You will need to perform additional data aggregation and metering before sending data to Chargebee.

Maxio does not specify its capacity for usage record but recommends contacting support for aggregating over 200,000 daily events. This could be a concern for businesses requiring high-volume processing. Additionally, Maxio supports a wide range of aggregation types, providing better support for usage-based billing.

Invoice and Email language‍

Chargebee offers multiple languages for invoices and emails including English, French, German, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese. This supports businesses operating in various countries or aiming for global expansion.

Maxio currently does not offer a translation feature, limiting its invoicing to English only.

Taxation

Chargebee includes a built-in taxation feature that allows you to calculate and apply taxes to your invoices. The taxation feature supports a wide range of tax types, encompassing VAT (including EU VAT), GST, and sales tax.

Maxio provides a taxation built-in feature, and enables users to set a tax by geographic region or on charge or plan levels. Maxio also offers the flexibility for users to handle taxation via Avalara, which can help you with tax compliance but also lead to additional costs.

Chargebee vs. Maxio: Pricing

Chargebee offers two services including Billing and Retention with separate fees.

For billing, Chargebee offers:

• Starter plan: No flat fee, with the first $225k of cumulative billing; 0.75% on billing thereafter. This plan includes basic billing features.
• Performance plan: $599 monthly flat fee for up to $100k monthly billing; 0.75% on billing thereafter. This plan offers access to some advanced features.
• Enterprise plan: Custom pricing.

Maxio’s pricing does not include a free trial, starting with the Essentials Plan at $599 per month, $1 million in annual billings included. However, the overage charge of approximately 0.9% of revenue could potentially add up significantly for high-volume users. For the Growth and Scales plans, pricing is upon request. According to the Fififinance’s review, Maxio’s 0.9% plans include a fixed fee and overage charge on revenue.

Which solution is the best for you?

Chargebee and Maxio cater to subscription and recurring billing, and offer comparable subscription billing features. Both platforms empower businesses to establish recurring billing cycles, manage exceptions, and handle invoicing operations efficiently. While Chargebee is not optimized for usage-based billing due to its 5,000 usage record limit, Maxio offers better support for handling usage-based billing scenarios. However, these softwares may not be flexible enough for handling complex pricing models and usage-based billing. In such instances, it's worth exploring alternatives that better accommodate intricate billing scenarios.

Lago, the Chargebee and Maxio alternative

Lago is an open-source metering and usage-based billing solution. It offers a self-hosted and cloud-based, scalable, and modular architecture to manage subscriptions, usage-based billing and all the nuances in between. It's the go-to choice for companies that require a powerful tool to handle complex billing scenarios, allowing you to build a comprehensive billing system from scratch with ease.

For further information and detailed comparisons:

👉 Chargebee vs. Lago comparison: here

👉 Maxio vs. Lago comparison: here

TL;DR: Table of comparison Chargebee vs. Maxio

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