The Developer Guide to the Modern SaaS Monetization Galaxy
Right now, you are referring to far too many different things as ‘billing’. Some of them are in-fact billing, but most of them are actually not. It’s not your fault; too many vendors directly benefit from contributing to your confusion. And by the time you realize what’s not there, it’s too late - you’re locked. But don't worry, we made a pretty diagram for the rescue. 👇
The purpose of this guide is twofold
Decompose the modern SaaS Monetization Stack
With this guide, you’ll be able to have meaningful conversations about this part of your stack with the team, other departments, investors and most importantly, with ChatGPT. If we did our job right, this guide will be your red pill.
Design the right architecture for your GTM model
Sooner than later, you’ll be pulled in again to help build some or more of this into your product. This guide will help you make informed decisions and find the right tools for your stack, so you build your future architecture in a way that doesn’t suck.
experience
Portal (billing settings)
Customer portal is a customer settings space inside your web application where customers' subscription plans, payments, and billing data are managed. It typically involves creating database schemas for storing billing data, and developing intuitive frontend components for user interaction. It is responsible for dynamically displaying pricing plans, handling plan upgrades/downgrades, processing payment methods, and providing users with their payment history and upcoming billing details.
Show more- Gated behind additional price
- Supported frameworks (iFrame / React / Vue / ...)
- Modularity of the UI component
- Latency and availability of the data fetching
- How deep can you customize the design and branding
- Can it be edited without code
- User experience quality
- Does it support downgrades/upgrade
- Does it support invoices history
Checkout
A user-friendly interface that captures and validates customer billing address and payment methods, information, securely handles payment details via integrated payment gateways, and confirms purchases. It also requires a robust backend structure to track transactions and update the user's account status accordingly. Error handling and responsive design are key to ensure a smooth checkout experience across all devices.
Show more- Gated behind additional price
- Supported frameworks (iFrame / React / Vue / ...)
- Modularity of the UI component
- Latency and availability of the data fetching
- How deep can you customize the design and branding
- Can it be edited without code
- User experience quality
- Does it support downgrades/upgrade
- Does it support invoices history
- Do they support hosted links
- What are the supported payment options
- Currency localization support
- Do they support complex usage-based options
- Tax calculation support
- Add-on support
Upgrade / downgrade flows
Handle plan changes and proration logic in your billing system, potentially dealing with partial refunds or additional charges. It also requires updating database entries to reflect the new plan's features and permissions. On the frontend, you need to ensure a smooth user experience that clearly communicates the implications of the change, including any cost differences or feature modifications. When a customer upgrades or downgrades, their customer portal should reflect this change immediately, showcasing their new plan, its benefits, and new cost. It involves dynamically altering the UI based on their subscription level and ensuring the correct availability of features. Meanwhile, the checkout experience should seamlessly integrate the upgrade or downgrade process. If there's a price difference, it should be clearly displayed, and the new recurring charge should be confirmed before finalizing. The checkout should also handle prorations, informing the user of any immediate charges or credits due to the change. It's essential to provide transparency and ease of use in both these processes to ensure customer satisfaction.
Show more- Gated behind additional price
- Supported frameworks (iFrame / React / Vue / ...)
- Modularity of the UI component
- Latency and availability of the data fetching
- How deep can you customize the design and branding
- Can it be edited without code
- User experience quality
- Does it support downgrades/upgrade
- Does it support invoices history
Paywalls
Frontend components that clearly communicate which features are available or locked based on the user's current plan. It involves both a deep understanding of authorization concepts and the ability to dynamically alter the UI based on a user's subscription status. This requires creating robust middleware or a similar mechanism to check the user's plan details before granting or restricting access to certain parts of the application. The design should clearly communicate the features, costs, and differences of each plan. Additional considerations may include handling currency conversion, incorporating responsive design for various screen sizes, and optimizing performance for swift loading of the dynamic pricing components.
Show more- Gated behind additional price
- Supported frameworks (iFrame / React / Vue / ...)
- Modularity of the UI component
- Latency and availability of the data fetching
- How deep can you customize the design and branding
- Can it be edited without code
- User experience quality
- Does it support downgrades/upgrade
- Does it support invoices history
- Does it renders pricing plans and rates changes in real-time
Feature gating
Implementing checks in your codebase to conditionally render or enable specific features. This logic may reside in both the backend (for data-driven features and API calls) and frontend (for UI components). It's important to ensure these gates work reliably to maintain the integrity of your subscription plans, while also providing a seamless user experience that clearly indicates which features are accessible or locked based on the user's subscription status.
Show more- Gated behind additional price
- Supported frameworks (iFrame / React / Vue / ...)
- Modularity of the UI component
- Latency and availability of the data fetching
- How deep can you customize the design and branding
- Can it be edited without code
- User experience quality
- Does it support downgrades/upgrade
- Does it support invoices history
- Do they support hosted links
- What are the supported payment options
- Currency localization support
- Do they support complex usage-based options
- Tax calculation support
- Add-on support
Trial banners
Frontend components that alert users to their trial status. You'll need to ensure these notifications are visible and informative, showing key details like remaining trial days. On the backend, you'd track the start and end dates of a user's trial period to accurately display this information. It's also essential to handle the transition when a trial ends, either prompting the user to subscribe or limiting access based on your application's trial policy. User experience and precise time-tracking are crucial in this implementation.
Show more- Gated behind additional price
- Supported frameworks (iFrame / React / Vue / ...)
- Modularity of the UI component
- Latency and availability of the data fetching
- How deep can you customize the design and branding
- Can it be edited without code
- User experience quality
- Does it support downgrades/upgrade
- Does it support invoices history
- Do they support hosted links
- What are the supported payment options
- Currency localization support
- Do they support complex usage-based options
- Tax calculation support
- Add-on support
Usage consumption progress bars
Dynamic UI components that visually reflect a user's current consumption of their plan's limits. This requires setting up real-time data tracking and binding it to the frontend display. This progress bar needs to update based on the user's consumption of resources, clearly indicating how close they are to hitting their limit. Additionally, predictive analytics could be employed to estimate when the user might reach their limit, prompting them to consider upgrading. It's essential to ensure accuracy and responsiveness in these components for transparency and promoting user trust.
Show moreWhat to watch for when buying:
- Gated behind additional price
- Supported frameworks (iFrame / React / Vue / ...)
- Modularity of the UI component
- Latency and availability of the data fetching
- How deep can you customize the design and branding
- Can it be edited without code
- User experience quality
- Does it support downgrades/upgrade
- Does it support invoices history
- Do they support hosted links
- What are the supported payment options
- Currency localization support
- Do they support complex usage-based options
- Tax calculation support
- Add-on support
Instrumentation (Usage metering)
Instrumenting your code to record user activities and interactions with specific features, typically through logging or event tracking APIs. This data is then stored, often in a time-series database or similar structure, for real-time or near real-time analysis. Connectivity with other applications in the stack, such as the frontend UI and billing systems, is essential to reflect this usage data accurately to users and to adjust their billing or access based on their consumption. Ensuring scalability and performance of these data operations is crucial for a reliable implementation.
Show more- Cost
- What are the ingestion options (S3, Segment, API, ...)
- De-duplication
- Scale
- How flexible is the schema
Processing and aggregation (Usage data)
Involves taking the raw usage logs or events and transforming them into a more understandable and actionable format. This may involve creating batch jobs or real-time processing systems using technologies like MapReduce or stream-processing systems, depending on your stack and requirements. These processes would aggregate the usage data, calculate the total usage for each user or feature, and potentially analyze trends or usage patterns. The aggregated data is then typically stored in a separate database or data warehouse, ready to be queried for reports, billing calculations, or feeding into further analytics pipelines. Ensuring accuracy and efficiency in these operations is key to providing reliable insights.
Show more- What calculation options are available
Entitlement management
An entitlement management platform is a system that controls user access to features or services within a SaaS application. As a developer, you'll implement logic and database structures to manage entitlement configurations, govern access controls, and handle provisioning of services. This platform also deals with the intricacies of plan migrations, versioning, and billing nuances like grandfathering and proration. It's a critical component that ties together user subscriptions, feature access, and billing operations.
Show moreRequired for
- What entitlement types available
- Where does access enforcement happens
- Scale
- Latency in entitlement checks
- How easy it is to make changes to the configuration
- What entitlement types are supported
- Multiple development environment support
- Gradual / Segmented rollout
- Webhook support
- Supported BE frameworks / SDKs
- What happens in downtime
- How easy it is to integrate
- SLA
- Supported integrations
Product Catalog
Organized collection of all products, plans, and add-ons available for purchase, along with their associated prices. You'll build structures to store and manage this information, interfacing with the entitlement management platform to link purchases to granted entitlements. It plays a critical role in defining what customers can subscribe to, what additional features they can opt for, and how much they're charged for their selections.
Show more- What pricing models are supported
- Grandfathering support
- Plan versioning support
- Addons support
- Can you create multiple subscriptions
- Overage support
- Integration and extensibility to the rest of your stack (CRM, Data pipelines, Billing)
- Plan migrations
- Multiple product support
- Programability / API-first support
- Trial support
- Reverse trial support
Experiments
Testing different pricing structures, product bundles, and offers to optimize business outcomes. A system that can dynamically adjust pricing and package offerings based on experiment parameters. This might also include geofenced pricing, where prices or offers are altered based on the geographic location of the user. This requires not just adjusting the display of prices, but also ensuring correct billing, entitlements, and reporting across the variations in your experiment.
Show moreRequired for
- Complete pricing plan experimentation
- Geo-fenced pricing support
- Soft-launches
- Progressive launch
- A/B testing
- Updates and sync all the stack: Billing, CRM, Paywalls, Provisioning
Email automation
Trigger and send targeted emails based on user behavior or changes in pricing plans. This might involve integrating with an email service provider and using their API to dynamically populate email templates with relevant data such as new plan details, price changes, promotional offers, or reminders about subscription renewals. Accuracy and timeliness of these automated emails are crucial to ensure a positive customer experience and maintain trust in your SaaS service.
Show more- Can it be integrated to your monetization stack with ease
Promotions
Implement and manage promotional pricing or discounts. Creating functionality that can apply promotional codes, time-bound discounts, or other forms of price reductions at the checkout or within the billing process. This includes updating the displayed prices, ensuring correct billing, and tracking the usage of promotions for analytical purposes. It's critical that these systems interact seamlessly with the rest of the application, including product catalog, billing, and entitlement management systems.
Show more- API-first programmatic access
- Extensibility and integrations to the rest of the stack
- Time-windows scheduling
Public pricing page website
Showcase the various pricing plans or products a SaaS company offers. A dynamic, responsive web page that accurately reflects the current offerings from your product catalog, including pricing, features, and any available promotions. This page has to interface with your backend systems to ensure real-time accuracy and must be optimized for performance and UX, guiding potential customers towards making a purchase or initiating a free trial.
Show more- Is it connected to the BE logic
- Can it be edited without code
- How deep can you customize the design and branding
- Does it support your website CMS
- Can you run experiments with it
- Does it support localized currency
- Does it support localized Can it be integrated to reward and promotion tools
CPQ
CPQ stands for Configure, Price, Quote. It's a type of software that helps companies define the price of their goods or services in line with a predefined set of rules. A system that allows for flexible configuration of products/services, dynamic pricing based on variables like volume, location, or customer type, and automatic quote generation. This involves intricate logic, integration with product catalog and customer databases, and interfaces with other sales and billing platforms. The goal is to streamline and automate the sales process, reducing errors and enhancing efficiency.
Show moreStakeholders
Required for
Enabled by
What to watch for when buying:
- Payment collection options
- Fees
- Modularity of the quote
- Integration options with provisioning
- Integration to entitlement management
- Where the product catalog is managed
- Are there ways to gate what sales reps can modify according to certain logic
- Can you easily apply discount strategy gates
- Can it be easily integrated with your CRM
- Payment collection Can it be easily integrated with your eSign tool
- Can it be integrated with revenue recognition tools
- Does it automate invoice creation
eSign
An eSignature tool is a software solution used to electronically sign documents.
Show moreEnabled by
Recurrent payments (subscriptions)
Recurrent payments, in the context of subscription management, involve automatically charging customers at regular intervals for ongoing subscription services. recurring billing logic that includes scheduling and processing payments with proper error handling and retries. To ensure reliability, you'll need to build in redundancy and failover mechanisms, as well as thorough testing to validate the end-to-end payment flow. Additionally, logging and monitoring are essential to track payment statuses, detect anomalies, and ensure smooth customer experiences.
Show moreEnabled by
- Support in complex proration logics
- Integration with the rest of the stack
- Support of multiple payment gateways
- Support of wide variety of payment options
- Grace periods support
- Time-windows scheduling
- Billing period changes
Financial reporting & revenue recognition
Generate accurate financial reports, including revenue tracking, invoice generation, and account receivables management. This entails integrating with accounting software or APIs, handling data synchronization, and ensuring proper data structures and algorithms for efficient reporting and tracking of outstanding customer payments. It's crucial to prioritize data accuracy, security, and automation in these financial processes.
Show more- Integration with the rest of the stack
- If finance is happy
Tax
Tax refers to the levies or charges imposed by governmental authorities on the sale or consumption of services. Accurately determine the applicable taxes based on factors like customer location, tax regulations, and exemptions. This involves integrating with tax service providers or APIs, maintaining up-to-date tax rates and rules, and ensuring proper tax application during invoicing and payment processes. Compliance with tax regulations is crucial to avoid legal issues and ensure accurate financial reporting within the SaaS application.
- Fees
- Supported regions / geo-locations
- Integration options
Chargebacks, failed payments, dunning
Chargebacks occur when a customer disputes a payment and requests a refund from their financial institution. Tracking and managing dispute cases, providing necessary evidence, and updating user entitlements accordingly. Dunning refers to the process of handling failed or overdue payments. Automatically notify customers about payment failures, initiate retries, and potentially enforce access restrictions until payments are resolved. Implementing robust chargeback and dunning workflows ensures smooth financial operations and customer relationships.
Show moreEnabled by
- Approval rates
Invoicing
Invoicing refers to the process of generating and sending detailed payment documents to customers. Generate accurate and customizable invoices based on subscription details, pricing plans, and usage information. This includes integrating with customer information, automating invoice generation, and providing options for customization and branding. Additionally, you'll need to ensure proper handling of taxes, discounts, and invoice delivery methods to meet regulatory requirements and provide a smooth invoicing experience for customers.
- Invoice structure customization
- Invoice design customization
- Timezones
- Integration options
- Pricing models support
Currency localization
Adapting the display and handling of currencies based on the user's geographic location. Automatically detect the user's location and present prices and currency symbols in the appropriate format. This involves integrating with currency conversion APIs or services, ensuring accurate exchange rates, and handling proper rounding and formatting for localized currencies.
- Region / Geo limitations
- Bundle multiple countries under the same currency
- Programmability
Credits
Credits refer to a form of virtual currency or monetary value that can be applied to a customer's account to offset future charges or purchases. Track and manage the allocation, usage, and expiration of credits. This involves updating the customer's balance, ensuring proper credit application during billing, and providing visibility to users regarding their credit balance and usage. Proper handling of credits helps enhance customer satisfaction, facilitates promotions or refunds, and adds flexibility to the billing and pricing structure of the SaaS application.
- Integration with cloud marketplaces
- Credit-based trials
- Support of complex refund scenarios
Cloud marketplaces (AWS, GCP, Azure)
Integrating your SaaS offering with a Marketplace involves packaging your application in a format compatible with the marketplace infrastructure, defining pricing models, and configuring billing integration. This enables customers to easily find, evaluate, and subscribe to your SaaS product through the Marketplace, leveraging its vast user base and streamlined procurement processes for increased visibility and reach.
- Cloud provider support
- Integration options
- Time to integrate
- Cost
Churn prevention
Retain customers and reduce the rate of customer churn, or subscription cancellations. By offering discounts, extended trial periods, or exclusive features, these tools incentivize customers to continue their subscription, providing them with added value and addressing their specific concerns to increase overall satisfaction and loyalty.
Fraud detection
Identify and prevent fraudulent activities related to payments and subscriptions. Fraud detection techniques, such as IP analysis, user behavior monitoring, and transaction pattern analysis, to identify suspicious activities. Integrating with fraud detection APIs or services can provide additional layers of protection. It's important to continuously update and improve fraud detection mechanisms to minimize financial losses and maintain the security and integrity of the billing and pricing processes.
Payment processing (gateways)
Payment processing via payment gateways refers to the handling of financial transactions between customers and a SaaS application. Payment gateway APIs allow to securely collect payment details, such as credit card information, and process transactions. This involves handling tokenization, encryption, and adhering to industry-standard security protocols. While payment gateways primarily handle the transactional aspects of payments, billing solutions encompass a broader set of functionalities related to the overall financial management of a business, including pricing, subscriptions, and revenue tracking. Often, a billing solution integrates with one or more payment gateways to facilitate the payment processing aspect of the billing cycle.
Show more- Supported regions / geo-locations
- Fees
- Approval rates
- Compliance
- Routing options
Wires / ACHs
ACH (Automated Clearing House) and wires are methods of electronic funds transfer used for payment processing. ACH is a network that enables direct bank-to-bank transactions, typically used for domestic payments, while wires refer to direct transfers between banks for both domestic and international transactions.
- Fees