Used For

• +**Your payment retries are failing and you're losing $4K+ quarterly to dead cards** → Smart dunning recovers 20-30% more payments automatically with email sequences
• +**You're manually creating invoices and your billing error rate hit 15%** → Automated invoicing drops errors under 2%, customers handle upgrades themselves
• +**Your pricing model is too complex for basic Stripe** → Handles tiered, per-user, usage-based, and hybrid pricing without custom code
• +Grandfathering feature locks in old pricing during changes — keeps high-value customers happy during price increases
• +Customer portal reduces support tickets from 10/day to 1 — people upgrade/downgrade without bothering your team

Best For

• >Your Stripe webhooks keep failing and you're losing 15% of revenue to payment errors
• >Spending 10+ hours weekly on manual invoicing and chasing failed payments
• >Customers constantly emailing to upgrade/downgrade instead of doing it themselves

Not For

• -Solo founders under $50K revenue — you'll hit the free tier limits fast and pay 0.75% overages that eat into thin margins
• -Bootstrapped startups wanting predictable costs — pricing scales with your revenue so success gets expensive quickly
• -Companies needing full control — it's cloud-only with limited customization unless you pay enterprise prices

Pairs With

• *Stripe (processes the actual payments while Chargebee handles the subscription logic)
• *QuickBooks (where your accounting team wants clean revenue recognition data)
• *Salesforce (for sales reps to generate quotes with complex pricing)
• *Zapier (to connect billing events to your other tools without coding)
• *HubSpot (to trigger email campaigns based on subscription status changes)
• *Slack (where you get alerts about failed payments instead of 3am surprises)

The Catch

• !The 0.75% overage fees kick in way sooner than expected — users report surprise $150-900 monthly bills when they grow
• !Free tier has no tax automation, so you'll pay accountant fees for EU/international sales compliance
• !Custom development and integrations are billed hourly at $150-250/hr, often adding 20-50% to your total cost

Bottom Line

Saves you from billing chaos but costs scale with your revenue — great until you're successful, then expensive.