Chargify LogoI usually don’t jump on and write blog entries (I leave that to better writers in the company). However, as the CEO and engineer behind OrangeSlyce, I know that this will help some startups looking to simplify billing with Chargify. For those of you who don’t know, Chargify is an easy-to-use service to manage recurring billing, with features such as hosted payment pages, subscription management and simplified payment gateway setup. What initially attracted OrangeSlyce to Chargify was the customizability of the hosted payment page. There are plenty of services that offer hosted payment pages, including PayPal, but none offer much in the way of style customization. Chargify gives you the ability to add custom CSS and even Javascript to your payment page, finally making it possible to match your entire brand. PayPal seems to think slapping a logo on the page is “brand matching” – we obviously disagree.

Chargify specifically targets web-based services and SaaS companies with a recurring billing revenue model, e.g. $30/month (possibly with multiple tiers). This works great for most startups, but what if you sell one-time services? At OrangeSlyce, we sell freelance job postings for a one-time fee. This model is obviously applicable to all job boards who only charge per post. We were interested in using Chargify, but it took us a while to hack together a way for single item payments. Chargify outlines this solution for one-time purchases, but unfortunately coupon codes simply don’t work with it.

We finally came up with the exact setup to create single item products for one-time payments, with working coupon codes:

  1. Setup a new product family like you would for a recurring item. Note: Chargify used to have a drop-down for “product type” with only one option of “recurring.” It seems they got rid of this.
  2. Create a new product within the family using the following setup (Important! This is the only configuration that will work with coupon codes).
  3. Set the “one-time, up-front charge” to $0. (I know, you’d think this is where you’d put the one-time fee, it got us too).
  4. Set a trial period of 1 month that costs whatever one-time fee you want to charge.
  5. Set the “after the trial, a recurring price of” to $0 and to reoccur every month.
  6. Set the “recurring charge will expire” to 1 day.

Here is screenshot of what your Billing Structure should look like:

Chargify single item one-time payment configuration

This is the only configuration (trust me, we tried them ALL) that will simulate one-time, single-item charges AND allow coupon codes to work. Other configurations will charge correctly, but the coupon codes won’t have any effect.

Sounds great, doesn’t it? Well there’s one slight problem that we still need to fix. On the hosted payment page, your “purchase summary” will display your hackerish options:

  • 1 month trial at $49.99 (or whatever you set as your fee).
  • $0.00 recurring every 1 month thereafter.

I know if I saw this confusing purchase summary, it would make me second guess the company and probably close out the window. Thankfully, Chargify’s custom CSS options gives us control. Simply add these 2 lines of CSS code to the custom CSS box and it will hide the confusing, unnecessary purchase summary text:

.section_one { display: none; }

.tint { display: none; }

This will hide all references to monthly billing or recurring payment. Personally, I think Chargify is an excellent, much needed service so I’m hoping they release official one-time payment product types soon.

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