Revenue management typically involve a tangled mess of systems owned by multiple stakeholders such as finance, sales, product and engineering. For engineering and product, there tends to be a strong focus on development of forward, revenue driving features and capabilities. Over time, billing capabilities tend to become obsolete or tightly coupled to a single core offering. This becomes a serious bottleneck for key growth initiatives, particularly launching new products or experimenting with pricing and packaging of existing products driven by go-to-market stakeholders. From an engineering standpoint, code either tends to become unowned and incoherent with several teams patching in different requirements.

Maple solves for the end-to-end workflow for revenue management by powering the needs for engineering, product, revops, sales and finance teams.

Stripe Billing is a known offering in this space, however, it is auxiliary to their core payments business. There are several key capabilities that make Maple a more versatile solution for any type of billing model for your application. Maple also covers aspects of PandaDoc, DocuSign and Baremetrics in an all-in-one, connected billing operations workflow.

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Usage/Seat-Based Billing

Stripe requires your application to track metrics and quantities and report final computed usage amounts for invoicing. This means your application will need to accurately track customer usage and push computed metrics to Stripe with high availability. Stripe also enforces API rate limits that may further require you to collate usage at regular intervals before you send it. This makes it impossible to support live usage tracking to your customers if you have a high volume of usage from your customers.

Maple handles all of the computation and scaling for high-volume usage or property changes to ensure accurate live tracking for your customers.

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Pricing and Billing Interval Flexibility

Stripe allows for pricing only at a single frequency for a subscription, even if there are multiple products that are being billed together. For instance, for an API product, it would be not be possible for you to set up a plan that has a yearly license fee with monthly overages in Stripe.

Maple offers a ton of flexibility by making it possible to bill different metrics at different frequencies within the same subscription, with true-up capabilities and minimums that are key requirements of enterprise pricing.

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Flexible Payment Processing

Stripe locks you into their payments ecosystem. This makes it difficult to support different locale specific payment methods and takes away the advantages of better processing rates with other providers. Stripe already make it quite hard to disable credit card payments, especially if you are looking to support only ACH or bank transfers for your recurring or manual invoicing.

While Maple can drive payments through Stripe Payments, we also provide out-of-the box support for other leading payment providers such as Authorize.net (from Visa). This keeps you in charge of your processing rates regardless of your locale. Maple is continuously adding support for more providers so you do not have to put in more engineering resources to support payment processing from other providers in the future.

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Sales-Led Flows

While Stripe has basic support for quotes, Maple offers a robust contracts features with built-in signature flows, custom pricing, minimum charges and discount management that is geared for the needs of sales-led motions, all while handling the complexity of plans and feature entitlement by automatically translating completed contracts into subscriptions and triggering accurate revenue tracking as soon as the contract is signed. The depth of the CRM integrations ensures that the sales team stays focused in their CRM tools while ensuring accurate translation to billing and continued visibility of pipeline progress, account management and customer relationships.

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Revenue Recovery and Dunning

Stripe offers standard invoice payment failure emails, but Maple goes above and beyond in terms of proactive dunning to prevent payment failures and customer churn from happening in the first place. For example, Maple provides credit card expiry notifications and highly configurable invoice reminders. Maple also provides customer self-serve portals (launching soon), to enable customers to help themselves, update their information and billing methods.

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Revenue Recognition and Business Metrics Tracking

Stripe offers limited metrics that often take time to accurately map to their analytics dashboards without attribution especially on MRR changes. Maple offers a robust set of business metrics that are highly valuable in understanding aspects of your business.

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Pricing

Stripe charges a percentage of your revenue, which means that the moment you are ready to close bigger deals, your billing system will fray. With Maple, our goal is to be the system of record on your billing regardless of your sales motion. This means better pricing. We charge a fixed price per paid subscription which makes your cost to manage billing far more predictable. Even more importantly, you can manage all your large deals in the same place as smaller deals and continue to track holistic business metrics.