IP Applications Billing and Payments blog

One of the challenges we faced as we set about bringing our SaaS billing product to market was how to explain our application's wide range of capability to potential customers.  It sounds simple but it's not.  We've already found that companies who've built their own billing solution are far more interested in our solution than those who haven't tried it yet.  The latter think billing's easy, the former have enough experience to know better.

After talking to a range of software companies and reflecting on the billing and subscriber management business we already do, we concluded that every client has different needs.  Our application is an integrated billing system.  At the start of the exercise, our application was like a restaurant with one prix-fixe menu.  Even if all you want is the salad course, the fish course and desert, we'll still bring you the beef tartare, the duck breast and the cheese.  Of course, our application is flexible enough that you don't have to take or pay for all of its functions, but they'll be there every time you look at it, whether you're using them or not.

We figured that to make it more attractive we'd have to make the presentation simpler so we set about clustering the application components into logical groups.  The prix-fixe analogy still works but now we have three separate menus - the short one, the medium one and the complete one that includes flights of wine.

There are three questions to aim you at the right menu:

1) Do you need Enterprise billing or Consumer billing?  "Enterprise" means we produce one complex invoice covering a collection of end user.  "Consumer" means one simple invoice per end user.

2) Are you going to operate with or without Session Control?  "With Session Control" means that unpaid bills automatically suspend service.  "Without Session Control" means that unpaid bills have to be handled manually outside the application.  Each is appropriate for some categories of client.

3) Are you marketing through a channel or direct?  Channels are structured ecosystems that are complex to bill and administer.  However, many software companies find they can make more money that way.

We're pretty confident that as the SaaS business matures, most vendors will follow Time-Warner's lead and host their customer and user records with a billing service and use its application and its business logic to manage their SaaS business.  I'm using Time-Warner for this example because over the last five years they've worked with us to implement a top-notch subscription and billing management application that we own and that they run a sizeable chunk of their internet business on.  There isn't a lot they don't know about subscription marketing and delivery. 

So, if SaaS delivery is part of your product plans, spend the time pondering the three questions and figuring out your whole go-to-market problem.  Read everything you can find and talk to lots of people who've already done it before you set your developers to work.