Update: A few commenters have pointed out that Spreedly actually do support the migration of credit card data to another platform.
I can’t quite believe the news that recurring billing platform, Spreedly have over doubled their pricing.
I’m all for fair and sustainable pricing but over doubling your prices? Something must have been going severely wrong at Spreedly HQ for a decision like this to be necessary.
I’d be pretty miffed if I was one of their 300 customers - and here’s why. A recurring billing platform is immensely sticky. Once you start taking payments through your chosen platform and decide to switch to someone else, you will have to go through the immensely painful process of getting your customers to enter their payment details on the new platform. Not pleasant. It’s like you’re dunning your entire customer base with the blind faith that they will sign up again. The process is bound to result in attrition and lost revenue.
Spreedly’s FAQs state that they’ll actually help you move to a different service:
What if I need to move to a different service?
We’ll work with you to get you a full export of data, including credit card information. For obvious reasons we have to do some high-ceremony security before releasing the data, but we will make it happen.
So perhaps this doesn’t make them as sticky as other platforms.
We had Spreedly on our short list of platforms but ended up going with Recurly (which was more at expensive at the time - now it’s looking cheap). So I’m feeling like we dodged a bullet there.
Personally, I think they should be rewarding their early adopter customers by grandfathering their plan rather than presenting them with this dilemma. In fact, one of Spreedly’s co-founders, Nathaniel Talbott, even suggested this just over a year ago when Chargify modified their pricing.
What are your thoughts on this move?
Add your comments below or add to the thread on Hacker News.