Overview
Chargebee is a subscription billing system that sits between your app and your payment gateway. It manages plans and price points, trials, coupons, invoices, credit notes, dunning, a self-serve portal and usage-based charges, and connects to 40+ gateways so you can change or combine processors.
The Flow plan costs 0.80% of monthly billing value with no platform fee, or $99 a month plus 0.65% on the monthly commit variant. Both include 100 million usage events a month, SQL-defined meters and CRM, ERP and productivity integrations. Enterprise Plus adds multi-entity, account hierarchies and higher event volumes on an annual contract.
Add-on products cover quoting (CPQ for Salesforce and HubSpot), revenue recognition and retention experiments. Chargebee is not a merchant of record; tax is handled through integrations and your own registrations.
Before choosing a variant, compare your monthly billing value with the $66,000 point where the $99 commit plan becomes cheaper than pay as you go. Remember that gateway fees, such as Stripe's 2.9% + 30¢, come on top of either.
Pricing and plans
| Plan | Price | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Flow (pay as you go) | 0.80% of billing value | $0 platform fee; 100M usage events/mo included |
| Flow (commit monthly) | $99/mo + 0.65% | Cheaper than pay as you go above roughly $66,000 of monthly billing |
| Enterprise Plus | Custom | Annual; multi-entity, account hierarchy, contract terms, 500M events/mo |
| Growth Starter | $0 | Pricing tables, hosted checkout, portal and cancel pages; Billing customers only |
What it does
- Gateway independence
- Plug-and-play with 40+ payment gateways.
- Usage-based and hybrid billing
- Raw or pre-aggregated usage via API, CSV or S3, custom SQL meters, tiered, volume and stair-step pricing.
- Invoicing
- Calendar billing, consolidated invoices, Net-D terms, backdated invoices and eInvoicing.
- Growth tools
- Pricing tables, hosted checkout, self-serve portal and no-code cancel pages.
- CPQ and RevRec
- Quoting for sales-led deals and automated revenue recognition as add-ons.
Strengths and limitations
Strengths
- Keeps billing logic separate from any one processor
- Published pay-as-you-go rate with no platform fee
- Mature feature set for B2B and B2C SaaS
- In-app purchase management for mobile subscriptions
Limitations
- Billing fee is paid on top of gateway processing fees
- No permanent free plan for billing
- CPQ, RevRec and Growth Enterprise need sales conversations
- Not a merchant of record
Who it suits
Good for
- SaaS companies using or planning several gateways
- B2B products with invoices, net terms and quotes
- Teams adding usage-based pricing to subscriptions
Look elsewhere if
- Hobby projects that need free billing (see Stripe Billing pay as you go or Lago self-hosted)
- Sellers who want tax handled by a merchant of record
Alternatives to Chargebee
| Tool | From | Free option | Stages |
|---|---|---|---|
| Razorpay Payment gateway (India, plus US, Singapore, Malaysia) | Usage-based | ||
| Paddle Merchant of record for software | Usage-based | ||
| Stripe Billing Subscription billing | Usage-based | ||
| Recurly Subscription billing (DTC and consumer) | $249/mo | ||
| Lago Open-source usage-based billing | — | ||
| PayPal Braintree Payment processor (gateway and merchant account) | Usage-based |
Questions
How much does Chargebee cost?
The Flow plan is 0.80% of monthly billing value with no platform fee, or $99 a month plus 0.65%. Payment gateway fees are extra.
Does Chargebee have a free plan?
Not for billing. The Growth Starter tools and first 50 CPQ Lite quotes are free for Billing customers.
Does Chargebee process payments?
It connects to 40+ payment gateways such as Stripe and Braintree, which process the cards.
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