Payment gateway startups India

A lot of businesses today offer services that require customers to sign up online, and many are both startups as well as karge enterprises. As the customer base grows for these enterprises, managing their billing becomes a tougher task.

With this increasing fast, it becomes a challenge for businesses to manage these signups on their own especially if the startup or enterprise has a global offering or service. Keeping track of recurring bills manually is certainly not an option. Businesses should focus on providing their product or service to customers and can save money and time if they're able to resolve the hassle that comes with managing these online subscriptions. That's where Chargebee comes in.

The Chennai-based startup is your off-the-shelf plug-and-play billing tool that's delivered on the cloud. You can connect with ChargeBee via API (application programming interface) if you are technically inclined or use PCI-compliant hosted payment pages to collect payments, and go live in a matter of minutes.

ChargeBee says it provides a robust and flexible billing system to enable your sales and marketing team to run special promotions, as well as the right tools for your support team to bill accurately and respond faster for billing queries. And it helps collect payments online from payment gateway of your choice.

I had a word with Krish Subramanian, co-founder and CEO of Chargebee, over an e-mail interview where he gave an idea of what his product does and how it helps various startups and enterprises.

Q: How did the idea for Chargebee come about?
Krish: Zoho was one of the early companies that saw the opportunity in cloud and transformed itself from a Network Management Service provider (then called Adventnet) to a cloud-based services provider. That is a well documented story.

KP Saravanan was one of the early employees of Adventnet, and Rajaraman Santhanam and T. Thiyagarajan had been with Zoho for over 10 years. So the opportunity was very clear to us. Rajaraman and I were classmates during engineering days and we have always wanted a startup of on our own. So that is how we all came together and decided to start ChargeBee.

We could see rapid SaaS (software-as-a-service) adoption as an area which requires subscription, besides the fact that the world is moving toward a subscription economy.

Sample of the subscription economy:

• Online TV, digital magazine, retail subscriptions, health center, school fees-all of them have an element of recurring payments about them.
• Today you no longer need to buy a BMW or Audi to use it. You can lease it. The pay-as-you-go model is not new to car rental, real estate rental, media or insurance industries.
• Adobe, one of the big players in traditional installable software is soon moving away from the one-time licensing model and taking the leap toward subscriptions.
• With large-scale adoption of SaaS and supporting services coming up online, we see this as a huge opportunity to build a platform that serves the SMB segment in providing billing services. The application of online subscription billing as a model is tremendous across multiple verticals, as the business model by itself is quite nascent. It has a long way to mature.