Are you a company offering subscriptions and usage-based billing to your clients for different services? If so, you undoubtedly use a rating and billing solution. Maybe you developed your solution in-house, or perhaps you purchased it as a one-time fee or as a service? Companies such as Zuora, Chargebee, and Chargify, specialize in offering rating and billing services. Zuora is most certainly one of the more recognizable service providers specialized for enterprise businesses. When you want the optimal solution for your case, however, you also check out the services of other Zuora competitors.
Your feature requirements might have changed since you started using your current solution. Marketing strategies, new pricing definitions, and support for new services always develop the need for new rating and billing functionalities. The worst thing that can happen is that your billing and rating solution starts limiting your company’s growth. Perhaps your competitors are offering some new offers and plans. Offers and plans, which you are unable to set up in your current system. When you notice such occurrences, this should be the red alert for you to start looking for a new billing solution.
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Zuora Billing and Tridens Monetization
Here at Tridens, we specialize in rating and billing of both subscription and usage-based services. Our solution, the Tridens Monetization, allows our clients to set up intricate offer designs. Furthermore, offer designs can be set up with little to no limitation regarding rating parameters. Our clients can set up different subscription packages, one-time fees, add-ons, discounts, and rated services. Secondly, our clients can define their custom rating units, tariff intervals, zoning hierarchies, and several other innovative features potentially required by their use-case.
Tridens Monetization, like Zuora, is a cloud-based software sold as a service. While both solutions offer in-depth customization, our solution also has some significant non-rating features worth pointing out. We prefer our clients to use our solution online as intended, but we can also deploy it locally. We achieve deployment versatility thanks to our container-based and modularized architecture. Tridens Monetization also has additional optional components, such as the Tridens Payment Gateway and the Tridens Tax Gateway. The Payment Gateway allows our clients to collect payments via different payment providers, including Braintree, Paypal, Wirecard, Stripe, Authorize.Net, Cybersource, and many more. Clients from the United States, or anywhere where tax collection is very complex, can also make great use of the Tridens Tax Gateway. The Tax Gateway allows Tridens Monetization to integrate with Avalara or Suretax – renowned providers of tax calculation services.
Getting Started with Tridens Monetization
Switching to a new billing and rating solution, especially when you already have an existing customer base, can be time-consuming. Cases like that are one of the reasons why we take the time-to-market factor very seriously here at Tridens. We’ve successfully performed billing and rating environment migrations for a number of our clients. Switching to Tridens Monetization is easy, due to the system being highly configurable and offering great API support for integration.
Our team quickly finds optimal ways on how to support your use-case in our solution, while still taking into account your needs and requirements for the future. We are also eager to help with the integration on your end. These aspects enable you to launch in a matter of weeks and not months, as it often occurs. We prepare your essential product catalog and pricing, then allow you to take over. There is, of course, a learning curve when using Tridens Monetization. To minimize that curve, we also organize workshops for your employees.
True, many solutions like Zuora have been around a while offering numerous sophisticated features. Their clients, however, sometimes don’t find their interfaces very user-friendly or even describe them as laggy and old. Non-intuitive interfaces usually lead to difficulties with new users, require more time to learn, and obstruct progress, increasing launch times. Tridens Monetization keeps up with ongoing trends. It provides a user interface based on the impressions and advice of our clients and end-users. Users can also perform more complicated operations, such as setting up subscription terms, general ledgers, and charts of accounts, filtering reports, and gathering analytics. In many cases, we require our users to have some domain knowledge, but we try to keep our interface intuitive and straightforward, while still providing all expected features.
Real-Time Rating for Prepaids
When comparing Tridens Monetization with Zuora, Chargebee, Chargify, and other similar solutions, we need to point out our support for real-time usage rating. Many other providers offer synchronous usage rating as well but often lack prepaid support. To handle prepaid cases properly, we need to introduce sessions into the mix. Each session consists of an authorization event, re-authorizations events, and the final stop-session or stop-accounting event. This flow allows the billing and rating engine to make reservations on the balances of a prepaid account, ensuring another service does not spend them.
Quite often, our end-users are using two services at once; for example, in the telecom industry, a user can have a data session and a voice call going on at the same time. In such cases, lacking the triple-A (AAA – Authentication, authorization, and accounting) gateway support, sooner or later, results in rating issues. Once you support it, however, you can also apply it to other non-prepaid cases. Keeping track of ongoing sessions adds additional features, such as in-session notifications and limits.
REST API Integration and Event Delivery
Our clients can use our REST API to initiate and manage sessions, but they can also deliver usage event data via different methods, such as a CDR (Call Detail Record) drop off in different formats, or by using specific protocols, like diameter. Also, we maintain our REST APIs well and support different formats for requests and responses, like JSON or XML. Such features allow our clients to integrate with us quickly and to migrate to our solution easily. When looking into Zuora, Chargebee, GetCheddar, and other providers, we found many client reviews, complaining about the API being non-intuitive, not well-documented, and generally old – not supporting the latest trends and technologies. We believe, when dealing with start-ups who build their solution on new technologies and practices, that providing a well built and simple API is vital.
Zuora Competitors Pricing and Support
Taking into account the features and requirements described above, we all know that, in the end, pricing is also essential. Many providers described above offer a wide variety of features, thus raising the price of their solution. When looking for a billing and rating solution sold as a service, you likely find three or four pricing plans. These monthly fees vary based on the number of customers you intend to serve or the number of usage events. Sometimes they also focus entirely on enterprises, which additionally limits their pricing options. Providers always promise customer support in different tiers and prices, though many customer reviews indicate that these providers sometimes don’t carry out support as they should. That is where we strive to handle things differently.
When offering Tridens Monetization to the billing and rating world, we decided to make our pricing and support models as flexible as possible. We take your use case into account, and we only charge for the features which you end up using. Tridens Monetization is fully capable of supporting large enterprises but still configurable and flexible enough to offer start-ups very competitive prices, based on their current requirements and growth plan. Instead of offering our solution at predefined rates regardless of your use-case, we choose to take a detailed look at your case and provide you with manageable prices, while our solutions grow together.
Did you already think about your Zuora support? Perhaps you also glanced at Chargebee or Chargify? If you would like to know more about a low-cost, efficient alternative, feel free to contact us. We can help you out with a demo of our solution, while you can present your use-case, helping us to find the optimal way of configuring our solution for you.
Perhaps you would like to hear more, or maybe you have a use-case which you would like to see in Tridens Monetization. If that’s the case, feel free to contact us today, and we will help you out.
