Chargebee Explained: Subscription Billing & Alternatives

Key takeaways:

Chargebee’s payment processing and subscription billing software has advanced features like automated invoicing and full customer lifecycle management
Fully customizable invoicing allows businesses to choose how and when they charge customers, offering exceptional flexibility for different business models
Integrating Chargebee with advanced analytics platforms like Baremetrics— or leveraging Baremetrics with a more cost-efficient payment processor like Stripe— can provide more detailed insights and accurate performance data

Chargebee is a subscription billing and payment software system ideal for SaaS and subscription-based companies. It is a complete cloud-based billing system that is both innovative and simple to use.

Chargebee assists companies that offer subscription services in automating their billing procedures by enabling you to modify pricing, provide coupons, and conduct campaigns—all without the assistance of a developer.

How Chargebee Works

The software enables you to interact with subscribers through self-service portals, generate possibilities, and profit from recurring income. Furthermore, it provides customized price choices and the ability to suspend subscriptions (an intelligent alternative to canceling subscriptions).

Custom pricing enables you to prolong renewal periods before they expire. An automated process is given for sales and marketing activities for invoice creation, payment collection, email alerts, customer relationship management, and follow-ups. All of these services are offered as a cloud-based SaaS plug-and-play solution.

You can see our reviews of Chargebee and how it stands up to direct competitors here:

How Baremetrics Improves Chargebee Data

On the contrary, Baremetrics is a monitoring tool for business metrics that serves as a dashboard for your organization. MRR, ARR, LTV, and total customers are all visible immediately in your Baremetrics dashboard. You can visit this sample account here for a better look.

Baremetrics allows you to integrate with billing systems, such as Chargebee, to view all of your revenue in a smart, SaaS dashboard. You can view client segmentation, get greater insights into who your customers are, predict the future, and use automatic payment recovery solutions.

Features of Chargebee

Chargebee assists subscription companies in smoothly scaling across countries by helping you with the following:

Billing your consumers on a recurring basis
Create streamlined invoicing procedures and processes
Collecting payments from consumers in an automated manner.
Supporting various subscription plans.
Providing a centralized view of all subscription and customer data
Obtaining insightful information about your subscription company
Tracking billing history

Let’s take a look at some of the features in detail.

Automated Invoicing and Dunning Management

Chargebee enables subscription-based companies to automate potentially time-consuming recurring billing procedures by handling invoice creation, follow-ups, and payment processing.

Additionally, the app has a dunning management feature that manages credit card rejections caused by out of date credit card information, inadequate funds, temporary freezes, credit limit exhaustion, and illegally obtained cards. Chargebee’s retry schedule is entirely customizable. Additionally, customized email notification templates are available.

Customer Platform and Dynamic Payment Pages

Chargebee offers flexible and customized checkout pages that include custom fields and theme support. When consumers join up, they enter their account and billing information on the checkout/payment page, including payment method, email address, first and last name, and home address.

Chargebee also offers a self-service customer portal system, which allows your clients to handle their accounts at any time. They can access it from any location, on any connected device, without contacting your customer support staff.

Customers may upgrade or lower their memberships at any time, change their billing and credit card information, check their previous payments, or even terminate their subscription.

The customer portal, similar to the checkout page, is a hosted page solution that is mobile-ready and can be modified as required.

Subscriptions Management

Chargebee includes trial management, proration, metered invoicing, cancellations and reactivations, refunds, credits, and taxes, among other functions. If your company provides free trials, Chargebee enables you to select the duration of a trial period. When the trial time expires, the account is switched to a regular subscription automatically. If the owner’s credit card information is not accessible, the account is immediately terminated.

Chargebee’s metered billing functionality guarantees that your clients are only paid for the services they utilize. Additionally, many other types of add-ons may be established, monitored, and turned on or off, such as premium support, recurring and nonrecurring subscriptions, and quantity-based subscriptions.

Data Analysis

Chargebee offers an in-depth analysis of such indicators as subscriber tally, monthly plan income, monthly add-on revenue, average revenue per user (ARPU), monthly recurring revenue (MRR), renewal summary, transaction summary, transaction trends, missed opportunities, and refund summary.

Individual reports may be exported as .csv in zip format. You may choose which fields should be included in the generated reports.

You can also use filters to ensure that your reports have the appropriate amount of information. Chargebee also offers a custom reporting option, with which clients may request customized SaaS metrics reports on demand.

Multiple Payment Options

Chargebee’s relationship with significant payment gateways enables you to take online payments from your consumers in addition to offline payment methods like cash, cheques, and ACH (Automated Clearing House).

The software may be used with Authorized.net, Braintree, Stripe, eWAY, Pin Payments, and WorldPay, depending on the region in which your company is situated. Details about the payment gateway may be selected on the Settings page. Chargebee simply enables authorization, refunds, and capture, which means that the payment gateway handles all settlements directly with you.

Additionally, Chargebee supports offline and alternative payment methods such as PayPal Express Checkout and Amazon Payments. You can track all payments on a centralized dashboard.

Chargebee Pricing Criteria

Chargebee’s pricing plan includes a variety of options for its customers. Chargebee offers the following pricing options:

1. Annual

Rise ($249 per month, charged yearly) includes ten users, various payment methods, and multiple tax regions.

Scale ($549 per month, charged yearly) includes everything in the Rise plan as well as 25 users, advance invoices, and custom user roles.

Customized has a pricing structure that is specific to the requirements of the company.

2. Monthly

Rise ($299 per month) includes ten users, different payment gateways, and several tax regions.

Scale ($599/month) includes everything in the rise plan plus 25 users, advance invoices, and customer user roles.

Customized has a pricing structure that is specific to the requirements of the company

Chargebee RevenueStory

RevenueStory provides a 360-degree view of your business’s subscription statistics. It enables you to discover the key performance indicators that drive revenue, licenses, registrations, activations, and churn, as well as the various other data necessary for making informed choices. It connects your product data with revenue statistics and consumer behavior, enabling your company to thrive.

RevenueStory includes over 150 pre-built reports that enable you to get meaningful insights on new sales, payments received, Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR), activations, and churn. These reports are accessible through the RevenueStory tab.

RevenueStory is a premium feature accessible on the Rise, Scale, and Enterprise plans only.

Comparing Chargebee to Baremetrics

Baremetrics provides business metrics at a lower price than Chargebee. Additionally, it is $50 per month, while Chargebee begins at $299 per month. Hence, Baremetrics has excellent value for money. Chargebee has some extra capabilities, but the Baremetrics price structure makes it ideal for those looking to explore at a lower cost while maintaining the same metrics and measures.

Baremetrics is a monitoring tool for business metrics that serves as a dashboard for your company. MRR, ARR, LTV, and total customers are all immediately available on your Baremetrics dashboard.

You can integrate Baremetrics with your income sources to view all of your revenue on the smart dashboard. Additionally, you may see client segmentation, get greater insights into who your customers are, predict the future, and use automatic payment recovery solutions.

You can use Baremetrics to calculate key metrics from your Chargebee data, including:

Baremetrics provide vast features, which include:

Control Center: You can see the central hub of Baremetrics, enabling you to monitor and respond to virtually everything that occurs.
People Insights: We can verify customized segmentation, detailed customer profiles, manual subscriptions, and much more using People Insights.
Smart Dashboards: You may see hand-crafted dashboards for anything from recurring revenue to customer churn via Smart dashboards.
Comparisons: You can make complicated data comparisons with ease. It recognizes how your numbers compare to each other. Moreover, you can compare dates, plans, or even several client segments in real-time.
Cancellation Insights: With Cancellation Insights, you can discover why consumers cancel, assess income lost due to cancellations, and send automated emails to re-engage customers.
Forecasting: Forecasting using Baremetrics is like having a magic crystal ball that assists you in predicting and planning for the future.

Get The Most Out of Chargebee with Baremetrics

Chargebee’s billing tool provides a flexible and robust billing system that enables your business team to organize special promotions. It provides the tools your team needs to bill accurately and respond more quickly to billing concerns. It allows you to collect online payments via the payment gateway of your choice.

It has an intuitive and user-friendly API enables you to create a deeper connection as your business grows. Additionally, it allows you to stay on top of your operations by providing actionable data through alerts and reports.

In comparison to Chargebee, the Baremetrics toolkit is more cost-effective. Baremetrics tracks subscription income for companies that rely on subscription-based services to generate revenue. Baremetrics can connect straight to your payment gateway, such as Stripe, and gather data about your customers and their behavior on a simple-to-understand dashboard.

Metrics, dunning, engagement tools, and customer analytics are all available via Baremetrics. MRR, ARR, LTV, total number of customers, total expenditures, and quick ratio are just a few of the indicators that Baremetrics analyzes.

Tired of wasting time on spreadsheets? Get a free trial of Baremetrics today!

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Chargebee and what does it do for subscription businesses?

Chargebee is a cloud-based subscription billing and payment management platform built for SaaS and recurring-revenue businesses.

It automates recurring billing procedures including invoice creation, payment collection, dunning management, and customer lifecycle management. SaaS teams use it to handle trial management, proration, metered billing, coupons, and multi-currency pricing without needing developer support for every change. Chargebee connects to major payment gateways like Stripe and Braintree and offers a self-service customer portal so subscribers can manage their own accounts. It is designed as a billing and subscription management tool rather than an analytics platform, which is why subscription businesses often pair it with a dedicated metrics layer.
What is the difference between Chargebee and a subscription analytics platform like Baremetrics?

Chargebee handles subscription billing and payment processing, while Baremetrics turns that billing data into real-time revenue metrics and forecasts.

Chargebee is built to automate invoicing, manage pricing tiers, and collect payments. It surfaces basic reporting like MRR and transaction summaries, but its primary job is billing operations. Baremetrics connects to your payment processor and gives SaaS founders and finance teams a live view of MRR movement, churn rate, LTV, expansion revenue, and cohort-level trends. You can integrate Baremetrics directly with Chargebee to layer deep subscription analytics on top of your existing billing setup, without rebuilding anything.
What platforms offer automated failed payment recovery for subscription businesses?

Baremetrics Recover is a dedicated failed payment recovery tool that automatically retries declined charges and sends targeted emails to reduce involuntary churn.

Involuntary churn caused by failed payments is one of the most common and preventable sources of MRR loss for subscription businesses. Baremetrics Recover addresses this by running smart retry logic on failed transactions and sending customizable dunning emails timed to card declines. Chargebee also includes a dunning management feature with a customizable retry schedule and email notification templates. For SaaS teams focused on reducing revenue leakage, having automated failed payment recovery built into your analytics or billing stack is essential.
How can I measure and reduce involuntary churn caused by failed payments?

Measure involuntary churn by tracking the share of churned MRR that comes from failed payments rather than voluntary cancellations, then use automated retry logic to recover that revenue.

Start by separating churned MRR into voluntary and involuntary buckets. Involuntary churn driven by expired cards, insufficient funds, or payment gateway errors is recoverable if you act quickly. Baremetrics shows you exactly how much MRR is at risk from failed payments and its Recover feature automatically retries declined charges and triggers dunning email sequences. Even a modest recovery rate on failed payments can meaningfully reduce your overall churn rate and protect net revenue retention.
How do I separate new MRR, expansion MRR, contraction MRR, and churned MRR in my subscription metrics?

MRR movement analysis breaks your total monthly recurring revenue change into four components: new MRR from new customers, expansion MRR from upgrades, contraction MRR from downgrades, and churned MRR from cancellations.

Tracking each component separately is critical because they signal very different things about your subscription business health. High expansion MRR alongside elevated churn, for example, means your retention strategy is working for existing accounts but acquisition or onboarding may be failing new ones. Baremetrics automatically calculates and surfaces all four MRR movement components in real time, so finance leads and growth teams can isolate exactly where revenue is being gained or lost across any billing period or customer segment.
How can I benchmark my SaaS churn rate against similar subscription companies?

You can benchmark your churn rate against comparable SaaS companies using Baremetrics Open Benchmarks, which aggregates anonymized data from hundreds of subscription businesses.

Knowing your churn rate in isolation tells you very little. Context matters: a 5% monthly churn rate looks very different at $50K MRR versus $500K MRR, and varies by pricing tier, billing interval, and customer segment. Baremetrics publishes open benchmark data so you can compare your churn, LTV, ARPU, and MRR growth against businesses at a similar revenue stage. This gives SaaS founders and finance teams a concrete baseline for evaluating whether their retention metrics are competitive or need immediate attention.
How does Chargebee handle subscription billing without developer resources?

Chargebee is designed so non-technical teams can modify pricing, run promotions, and manage subscriber lifecycle events without writing code or relying on engineering.

The platform provides hosted checkout pages, a self-service customer portal, and an automated invoicing workflow that business teams can configure directly. SaaS operators can set trial durations, apply coupons, adjust plan pricing, and manage cancellations or reactivations from the Chargebee dashboard. Its customizable retry schedules for failed payments and email notification templates also require no developer involvement. For recurring billing tool setup, this no-code flexibility is particularly valuable for early-stage subscription businesses that need operational control without engineering overhead.

What Is Chargebee?

Table of Contents