Billabear
Subscription Management and Billing System
Install / Use
/learn @billabear/BillabearREADME
BillaBear is a standalone Subscription Management and Billing System that integrates with Stripe. It provides a REST API allowing you to integrate it easily.
You can get the managed hosted version at https://www.billabear.com. The managed cloud hosted version gets updates on a regular basis while the open version on GitHub gets a new feature release every 6 months.
Documentation
- User Documentation - How to use BillaBear as a user
- Technical Documentation - Technical information for hosting and integration
- Swagger - The REST API docs for integration
Features
More features than you can shake a stick at, including:
- Tax System (Thresholds, Multiple Tax Types, Country Tax Rules, State Tax Rules)
- Workflow system
- Plan Management
- Subscription Management
- Slack Integration
- Invoice System
- Hosted Checkout
- Paylinks
- Quotes
- Mass Subscription Change System
- Reports (Subscription, Lifetime Value, Churn)
- Email Service Provider (EMSP) API integration (SendGrid, Mailgun, PostMark)
- Email Template Management - Either via EMSP templates or twig templates
- Document Management (Invoice, PDF, Quote) - Via Twig templates
- Multiple Brand support
- Multiple Currency Support
- Multiple Language Support
- Subscription Add-ons
- Webhooks
- Dunning
- Vouchers
- Credit notes
- And more
Workflows
Workflows are a powerful feature of BillaBear. They allow you to integrate important tasks that have to be done during a process that, if it fails, you want to be able to retry later and resume with the rest of the process. This avoids manual developer intervention which can be time-consuming and frustrating.
For example, you might want a microservice to be called on a subscription creation to allow for the creation of resources.
Another example of where workflows are useful is when you're issuing refunds and for some reason the connection/API request fails. You can retry the refund later without requiring manual intervention.
Templates
BillaBear uses Twig templates for the generation of documents such as invoices, quotes, and emails. This allows you to customise the look and feel of these documents to match your brands. It also allows for using the email service provider's templates. Both of these allow other departments other than tech to make minor changes - no more minor tickets to change the wording in an invoice or an email.
Tax Management
BillaBear has a powerful tax system that allows you to set up tax rules for countries and states. This allows you to configure your tax system to match the legal requirements for your specific product type.
EU Tax laws such as reverse charge and one-stop-shop are supported. And there is an integration with VAT Sense so you can automate the syncing of tax rules for the EU and countries other than US and Canada.
The system is aware of thresholds which are configurable per country and state. This allows you to set up the system to charge tax only when you reach a certain threshold. And you can configure it to receive notifications when a threshold is reached.
Pricing
BillaBear allows you to have the pricing you want.
Pricing Examples:
- A fixed price for a plan.
- Sell packages, say 200,000 euros of revenue. Which can also be sold in usage so they are billed based on their previous month's usage.
- Have tier volume pricing where the price per unit decreases as the volume increases.
- Have stair pricing (called tier graduated) where the price per unit decreases as the volume increases but only after a certain volume.
- Have tiered volume with a fixed fee and per unit fee.
- Seats pricing where you charge per seat.
Customer Facing Frontend
BillaBear allows you to use Stripe.JS by providing you a token that is registered with Stripe to be used with the customer. This allows you all the normal flexibility that Stripe.JS allows for.
Integrations
- DocRaptor - PDF Generation
- SendGrid - Email Service Provider
- Mailgun - Email Service Provider
- PostMark - Email Service Provider
- Stripe - Payment Provider
- VAT Sense - Tax Rules
- Slack - Notifications
- Xero - Accounting
- EasyBill - Accounting
- Mailchimp - Marketing
- EmailOctopus - Marketing
- FreshDesk - Help Desk
- Zendesk - Help Desk
Feature Comparison Matrix
| Feature | BillaBear | Lago Open Source | Lago Cloud | Stripe | ChargeBee | Recurly | KillBill | |-----------------------------------|-----------|------------------|------------|--------|-----------|---------|----------| | Usage Billing | <img src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3b/Eo_circle_green_checkmark.svg" alt="Yes" width="20"> | <img src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3b/Eo_circle_green_checkmark.svg" alt="Yes" width="20"> | <img src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3b/Eo_circle_green_checkmark.svg" alt="Yes" width="20"> | <img src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3b/Eo_circle_green_checkmark.svg" alt="Yes" width="20"> | <img src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3b/Eo_circle_green_checkmark.svg" alt="Yes" width="20"> | <img src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3b/Eo_circle_green_checkmark.svg" alt="Yes" width="20"> | <img src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3b/Eo_circle_green_checkmark.svg" alt="Yes" width="20"> | | Tiered Pricing | <img src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3b/Eo_circle_green_checkmark.svg" alt="Yes" width="20"> | <img src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3b/Eo_circle_green_checkmark.svg" alt="Yes" width="20"> | <img src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3b/Eo_circle_green_checkmark.svg" alt="Yes" width="20"> | <img src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3b/Eo_circle_green_checkmark.svg" alt="Yes" width="20"> | <img src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3b/Eo_circle_green_checkmark.svg" alt="Yes" width="20"> | <img src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3b/Eo_circle_green_checkmark.svg" alt="Yes" width="20"> | <img src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3b/Eo_circle_green_checkmark.svg" alt="Yes" width="20"> | | Stair Pricing | <img src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3b/Eo_circle_green_checkmark.svg" alt="Yes" width="20"> | <img src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3b/Eo_circle_green_checkmark.svg" alt="Yes" width="20"> | <img src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3b/Eo_circle_green_checkmark.svg" alt="Yes" width="20"> | <img src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3b/Eo_circle_green_checkmark.svg" alt="Yes" width="20"> | <img src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3b/Eo_circle_green_checkmark.svg" alt="Yes" width="20"> | <img src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3b/Eo_circle_green_checkmark.svg" alt="Yes" width="20"> | <img src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3b/Eo_circle_green_checkmark.svg" alt="Yes" width="20"> | | Package Pricing | <img src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3b/Eo_circle_green_checkmark.svg" alt="Yes" width="20"> | <img src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3b/Eo_circle_green_checkmark.svg" alt="Yes" width="20"> | <img src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3b/Eo_circle_green_checkmark.svg" alt="Yes" width="20"> | <img src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3b/Eo_circle_green_checkmark.svg" alt="Yes" width="20"> | <img src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3b/Eo_circle_green_checkmark.svg" alt="Yes" width="20"> | <img src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3b/Eo_circle_green_checkmark.svg" alt="Yes" width="20"> | <img src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3b/Eo_circle_green_checkmark.svg" alt="Yes" width="20"> | | One-off Charges | <img src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3b/Eo_circle_green_checkmark.svg" alt="Yes" width="20"> | <img src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3b/Eo_circle_green_checkmark.svg" alt="Yes" width="20"> | <img src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3b/Eo_circle_green_checkmark.svg" alt="Yes" width="20"> | <img src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3b/Eo_circle_green_checkmark.svg" alt="Yes" width="20"> | <img src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3b/Eo_circle_green_checkmark.svg" alt="Yes" width="20"> | <img src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3b/Eo_circle_green_checkmark.svg" alt="Yes" width="20"> | <img src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3b/Eo_circle_green_checkmark.svg" alt="Yes" width="20"> | | Payment Providers | | | | | | | | | Stripe | <img src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3b/Eo_circle_green_checkmark.svg" alt="Yes" width="20"> | <img src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3b/Eo_circle_green_checkmark.svg" alt="Yes" width="20"> | <img src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3b/Eo_circle_green_checkmark.svg" alt="Yes" width="20"> | <img src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3b/Eo_
