Frequently Asked Questions
Cheddar is incredibly flexible, and we support multiple pricing models, including:
- Subscriptions and recurring payments
- One-time payments
- Per-user
- Subscription & overage
- Metered and usage-based billing
The external payments feature within Cheddar allows you to accept multiple forms of payments methods that aren’t integrated with your Cheddar account, such as:
- ACH payments
- Direct deposit
- Checks
Cheddar's pricing depends on the payment processing option you choose. If you use Cheddar's built-in payment processor, the fee is $99 per month and 2.9% + 30¢ per transaction. If you bring your own compatible payment processor, Cheddar's fee is $99 per month plus 30¢ per transaction. See Cheddar's pricing.
Thousands! We’re integrated with Zapier, a platform that supports thousands of apps and allows you to build your own custom integrations with little or no coding knowledge. Having this integration with Zapier essentially means you’re unlimited in the amount of integrations you can do. We don’t want to anticipate your needs by building limited integrations. You know your product best and we want to support that by giving you full freedom and control over your integrations.
Usage-based billing is the buttonext iteration of SaaS. Software-as-a-service has been traditionally based on flat tiered models, such as charging a flat, recurring $99/month subscription fee. Now customers are starting to expect to pay for what they use. Think Uber and Lyft, where you pay for door to door service. Think Netflix - you can watch as much as you want for $9.99/month, but if you want to share an account, you pay per device used. This is billing based on usage.
Cheddar helps you track customer activity so you can make smarter decisions about how your customers use your service, and you can quickly and easily make pricing changes based on those discoveries. Customers expect to pay for what they use, and companies can earn additional revenue by charging for what customers use. Cheddar's architecture was built to easily track activity and quickly add or change pricing plans. Read more about usage-based billing.
Yes. Cheddar offers multiple options to accept payments: we have a built-in payment processor, CheddarPay, or you can bring your own payment processor. You can also use PayPal. For more information, reach out to our support team.
As a billing platform, Cheddar can calculate and send out invoices in any currency. The currencies you can accept depend on your payment processor - the service that Cheddar communicates with to actually process transactions. If you have further questions, please reach out to support.
Yes! If a transaction declines, Cheddar will automatically retry the transaction according to the dunning settings you configured in your product. Our dunning features allow for you to recover revenue that would have otherwise been lost, and saves you an enormous amount of time chasing down customers for updated payment information.
By default, your Cheddar account will be in free developer mode - and it stays that way until you're ready to start accepting payments. With a free Cheddar account, you'll have full access to all features, including our API, your admin dashboard, email templates, and webhooks. All transactions will be simulated until you're ready to go live. You can stay in Developer mode for as long as you need.
Cheddar was inherently built for metered, or usage-based, billing. Any activity in your platform that you can attach to a customer is a potential tracked item. Things such as: api calls, downloads, streams, text messages sent, minutes used, and anything you can think to track! Our tracked items feature makes it quick and simple to set up a usage-based billing model in as little as one day.
Cheddar supports over a dozen payment gateways. You can see our comprehensive list here. If you see a gateway that is not supported, or if you have additional questions, please reach out to our support team.
Cheddar is a billing API that integrates seamlessly on the back end with your application, meaning, your customers can sign up for a pricing plan without ever leaving your site. If you decide not to connect to our API, we also offer hosted payment pages - static pages hosted on our servers, that can be set up within minutes, where your customers can enter in their credit card information.
Cheddar has an admin dashboard to keep track of all metrics, such as monthly revenue (MRR), churn, customers, and more. Therefore, your team won’t need to do much work as soon as Cheddar is connected. You can add and edit data from the dashboard and add new team members.
Simply put, payment processors are companies that collect customer payment data and process payments. When your credit card is run, your payment processor is responsible for verifying the payment details, checking for possible fraud, and seeing if the transaction should be accepted or declined. Billing, on the other hand, is the system that handles all the other aspects of charging customers. Cheddar will automatically ask the payment processor to run the payment to see if it is approved or declined, and for what amount. When a credit card transaction fails, the processor simply returns to Cheddar that it was declined. A payment processor can indicate it was declined, but Cheddar's billing system has the logic for retrying the payment. Cheddar's billing system will also automatically email the customer to ask for new payment details. Cheddar and payment processing must work together to make a complete billing system. You can learn more here.
Yes! Customer communications are important to your billing system. You can set up email notifications in Cheddar. The emails are automatically sent to the customer. Some examples of notification are:
- Card is declined
- Customer needs to set up payment information
- New subscription added
- Billing reminders
- Cancellation confirmations
- Payment receipt notification
- New invoice is generated
- Refund confirmation
You can completely customize email templates and when to send. You have full control.
We integrated with Zapier to give you freedom and control to integrate with thousands of other apps in ways that only you can imagine. You can integrate with several accounting systems, including Quickbooks and Xero. If you have additional questions, please reach out to our support team.