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Germany: Which recurring billing platform to use for subscription SaaS?

Hey folks, I was wondering which of the many many domestic and international recurring-billing platforms to use if you're running a German company (Einzelunternehmen right now, UG in the future).

What I need to be able to do is to have a hosted payment page and take payments from internal customers (DE, EU & non-EU) via the usual routes (CC, Swift, SEPA, etc), but also to have "offline" invoices on an annual basis. Couple that with the fact that I have to create an EÜR at the end of the year and have to post UStVa every month right now, and file German taxes at the end of the year.

I was wondering which platform best enable this workflow. So far I've looked at Chargebee and Stripe, but only superficially, so I'm hoping for some first-hand experience.

  1. 2

    I (Austria) also use chargebee on top of stripe. chargbee offers a lot of options, while being yet easy to use. And since you don't pay until you reach 50k in revenue, it’s perfect for indie hackers imo

  2. 1

    Hi John,

    We have just launched Abowire, to solve exactly what you posted. Abowire is an all-in-one Subscription Management software for European Businesses. We handle payments, banking integration (through Open banking), recurring billing, Taxes (VAT Compliance & Moss Reports), Invoicing, customized checkout and some basic analytics.

    I am one of the Co-founders of the startup and we are looking for early adopters to work together through this phase, especially Startups with SEPA or banking payments.

    Let me know if you are interested, I'd be more than happy to share our product. Just drop me an email to [email protected]. We are based in Berlin.

  3. 1

    I generate the invoice PDFs myself with a small script. That one also generates a CSV which I import into Agenda (a bookkeeping software). Agenda will match that up with incoming credit card and bank account payments and produce monthly reports on how much is owed by each customer.

    Agenda can also predict all the end of year taxes and generate drafts for all the tax filings. Those drafts I then sign to confirm that I agree with them and hand them off to my accountant together with the Agenda data export.

    Costs me about €120 monthly for Agenda and €1500 annually for the accountant.

  4. 1

    We use Chargebee on top of Stripe as the processor.

    There is a lot of flexibility in Chargebee and I'm pretty sure they handle just about all the use cases you mentioned.

  5. 1

    I'm in Switzerland as an Einzelunternehmen right now. I'd go with Stripe, they have great local representations, can pay out to your bank account directly and doing subscriptions (incl. disputes / refunds) is super easy. They also provide some basic tax forms and look into compliance for you. Fees are reasonable as well.

  6. 1

    I don't have experience with them, but have in my bookmarks also https://paylane.com/ - I saved them becasue they accept payments from a lot of countries, but mostly because Stripe is not yet active in Poland.

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