Automated Billing for Startups

Automated billing is hard — very hard. When starting out the tendency is to try and guess how things might work when it comes to billing and to start building a module for it. Don’t. The best thing to do is to get the product in the hands of customers and then iterate based on their feedback.

More often than not the product pricing and billing nuances will change several times as you work towards product/market fit. Time spent on a billing module, that needs to be modified with each pricing change, will actually make you more reluctant to change the pricing model because it’ll involve more billing module rework.

The best thing to do is to bill by hand or use a semi-automated tool like CheddarGetter until you have enough paying customers that you’re confident it’s worth the time to build a billing module or write logic to integrate with a billing system’s API. Avoid the temptation to write a billing module too early.

What else? What are your thoughts on automated billing for startups?