Chargify's Customer Support

This article isn't really about Chargify and what it offers, but rather a short anecdote from my experiences with their customer support. Customer support for a service like Chargify is important, since it is the medium through which your customers get billed and through which you get paid.

We have a Launch account at Chargify ($60 a month). Recently I was trying to customize our Chargify hosted pages with a logo for our product. Uploading the logo to Chargify's system resulted in a 500 error, which I was able to reproduce consistently. I contacted customer support about the issue, and this was their response:

"Best I can do is make sure the developers are aware of this issue and just get you to work > through it until they can correct the issue."

Ok fair enough. What can support do? Certainly they aren't just going to wave a wand and magically clear that 500 message. It's fine, I get it. Eventually, I just gave up on the whole custom logo thing for another day.

During some more Chargify setup I encountered a question I wanted to ask concerning adding custom JavaScript to hosted pages. This was their response:

"Wow, at first glance, we in Level 1 support are a bit confused.

We don't host any page beyond the customer's signup page. Any thank-you page is not hosted by us, though I do see what appears to be a Chargify-hosted page in your screen shot.

We can send this up the line to our only Level 2 guy, but he's only available if you're on a $99/mo+ plan.

Sorry."

This time, the message was from the co-founder of Chargify, who will remain unnamed here, but I'm sure you can easily figure out who that is. As you might be able to understand, this message made me very angry. A paying customer (me, paying $60 a month) asks a simple question "does your 'Payment Complete' page support custom JavaScript?". Instead of receiving a simple yes or no answer, which I would have been fine with, I get a pitch for upgrading to their "Level 2" support, only available on the $99 a month plan.

Let's take a step back for a moment and allow me to better explain my frustration with this response. I am one of two developers trying to get a business off the ground. I pay for your service (in this case Chargify). We don't have boatloads of money to throw around (yes, cry me a river I know). We are working day and night to be able to take payments. We ask support (a support we are already paying $60 a month for) a simple yes or no question and get a pitch for a plan upgrade. Is it just me or would that leave a sour taste in the mouth of any user of any service?

Suddenly it hits me. I remembered the big Chargify pricing debacle story from a year past from blogs around the net. I did a search to refresh my memory and found this: Subscription Billing System Chargify Missteps As It Switches From Freemium To Premium. The guy who responded to me in that support ticket is the same guy behind this pricing hijacking. Seems perfectly in character to me!

Here's the best part: I get the automated "Were you satisfied with our customer support?" email, click the "No, I'm dissatisfied" option to submit my feedback, and get a "Sorry, that ticket has been closed." error message. I love it so much.

Oh and the day after I got my panties all up in that bunch, I get an email about yet another Chargify pricing hike, from none other than the anonymous Chargify co-founder:

"PRICE INCREASE IN MAY, AND WE'D LIKE YOUR INPUT"

There are many choices out there. Braintree is one great alternative to Chargify that I have had positive experience with in the past. I actually made the decision to not use Braintree because I liked Chargify's tools better.

I'll tell you what, I won't be making that mistake again.

In the end, I'm glad I had this experience, because while I certainly don't know everything, I know one more thing not to say to my customers. Cheers to good customer support!

It's 1:30 AM, but a beer sounds amazing right now. Maybe I'll hit up some of that Long Island Mead.