by gregoriol on 10/20/22, 9:48 AM
We have been using KillBill for many years for our SaaS product.
While it is very nice to own our data, we have had a huge lot of issues with it too.
Beware that this is an "industrial" tool, meaning that it is very complex, written in Java, with a lot of quirks and sharp edges. The core team also seems to mainly work on some closed-source version of it, for some not-very-clear-what big corp(s). They let you know sometimes that there exists a more feature-full closed-source version when asking questions in the support google group or on github issues, but it's not very transparent.
If you are a startup with a small team or small budget and no real Java development skills, you'll probably want to be careful in considering to use it: many custom things you'll want to do will require contracting with one of their partners because it's too complicated to do yourself, and support will be limited, and debugging issues will be hugely complicated if you are not used to that tech stack...
Just this week, we have had a major issue with it: after doing an `apt upgrade`, docker was updated and restarted. It restarted KillBill's docker images fine but KillBill itself restarted only the Stripe plugin, not the Avatax one, for an unknown reason. So the tool happily generated invoices and payments for a few hours without any taxes (!), until we noticed and started the plugin manually from the interface. This is the kind of issues we regularly have to deal with, and while the tool does a good job most of the time, it is mindblowingly annoying sometimes.
by frankjr on 10/19/22, 10:04 PM
> Does Kill Bill support taxes?
> Kill Bill does not support taxes. Instead, we partner with Avalara to outsource tax compliance. Our AvaTax connector provides real-time and on-demand calculationsto prevent overcharging or undercharging tax.
I expected as much. Handling taxes internationally is a major PITA and it changes all the time as politicians get new ideas how to make things even more complicated. I'm pretty sure that many SaaS companies are unknowingly not compliant with all the rules.
by jonahbenton on 10/19/22, 5:35 PM
Met with this team probably 8 years ago for consideration on a (at the time) large subscription product. Didn't go with it because of issues in the organization I was working with, but KillBill folks were good people, impressive, good product. Glad to see them still around.
by Whitespace on 10/19/22, 3:27 PM
Submitted the github link because I couldn't find it from their marketing site:
https://killbill.io/by TedDoesntTalk on 10/19/22, 4:49 PM
Wish i'd known about this before signing up with Recurly and, later Stripe Subscriptions. Now existing subscriptions are locked in and I can't move to other vendors without losing those existing subscriptions.
by AngeloAnolin on 10/19/22, 4:53 PM
This is the type of project that should gain more traction / support.
Good name as well. Catchy!
by sdfhbdf on 10/19/22, 6:09 PM
It’s interesting to see that even though the project seems to boast being about 10 years old it still doesn’t have 1.0 version. For some this might not be important but it does seem to subtly convey a message of instability of the product. I haven’t read much into it but have to wonder what is stopping them from releasing a “stable” 1.0
by pipeline_peak on 10/19/22, 4:00 PM
Normalize open sourcing things companies monetize that aren't really that special.
Competition breeds innovation
by mattjaynes on 10/20/22, 8:59 AM
Man, I really had to search to find which payment gateways they support. I guess it makes their docs evergreen to not mention any, but it's one of the first questions many new users will have. After searching their docs with no luck, I finally just had to look at their github repos for plugins and there you can see some of them:
https://github.com/orgs/killbill/repositories?q=pluginby kingsloi on 10/19/22, 4:17 PM
by halfjoking on 10/19/22, 5:08 PM
If this supported tons of payment gateways through their plugin system out of the box then it would be worth considering. But if you go to the page about payment gateways they don't have a listing of 50 integrations you could easily drop in. Instead they basically say you'll probably have to write the integration yourself:
https://docs.killbill.io/latest/userguide_payment.html
No thanks - I'll just use a payment processor that has a good API for subscription billing, and a flag on my users table that the subscription is up to date.
by manv1 on 10/19/22, 9:27 PM
We're hunting for a subscription product, but our use case means that we may have to do a few hundred thousand provisioning checks in a few seconds.
Not a lot of products can do this, which means we're going to use redis (or it's ilk) as a cache for subscription information. However, there doesn't seem to be a supported way to subscribe to changes to subscriptions. Is that a roadmap feature or is something that "we should do ourselves?"
by nwilkens on 10/19/22, 4:49 PM
by modeless on 10/19/22, 4:39 PM
Maybe this is a good place to ask. I'm considering trying a subscription model for some client side software I'm developing as as a side project. I think something like this would be overkill for me. For a single developer project, what would be the easy way here? Using something totally managed like Patreon? Would Patreon even be a reasonable choice?
by chromatin on 10/19/22, 11:58 PM
As much as I dislike Java, I very much appreciate the Kill Bill authors' approach to features -- via plugins. Unfortunately, the plugins mostly need to be written in Java, although I learned on this HN thread that there maybe a gRPC interface, so I'll take another look!
by doorsopen on 10/19/22, 11:54 PM
Maybe an uninformed question, but I tool a look at the documentation, the stripe plugin demo, and then looked at what stripe offers. As someone who uses neither but might be interested in subscription + shop type purchases, what do I get with KillBill+Stripe that I don't with just Stripe?
by javier2 on 10/19/22, 9:10 PM
This sounds like a awesome idea and a great project, and I work with subscription billing. Attempted to try it out for a while, and my first impression is that the UI is terribly ugly, even as I literally could find only 3 buttons to click a side from the Log out button.
by tmpz22 on 10/19/22, 4:14 PM
Is Groupon/HP/Square/etc really using this or is it just a fake marketing page?
by jmacd on 10/19/22, 5:25 PM
They have a cloud offering. [1] Which is a good way to check things out without needing to deploy and run Java code.
1: https://cloud.killbill.io
by incomingpain on 10/19/22, 4:19 PM
Say I had an project that produces a file that people will subscribe to get access to said file. Is this what you would use to sell it? Why not say shopify?
by PointyFluff on 10/21/22, 6:06 PM
The name is cute, but I would change it out of concern of being sued by the movie industry.
by princevegeta89 on 10/20/22, 12:50 AM
Came here to say I simply love the name
by mpaepper on 10/19/22, 7:04 PM
If you use this in combination with Stripe, then what do you gain in addition to Stripe?
by seaourfreed on 10/19/22, 10:07 PM
If/when people get censored by their merchant processor, they can switch to this.
by miniBill on 10/20/22, 1:28 PM
Please don't kill me :(
by billsix on 10/20/22, 12:06 AM
Off topic but Kill Bill 1 and 2 were great but I hope they stop at Kill billfive
by lakomen on 10/20/22, 9:03 AM
Yet another Repo where I don't know if I own the data or what it really is.
Lots of marketing and no substantial information
by onebot on 10/19/22, 4:08 PM
Nice to see stuff like this. But won't use it since built on Java. I try to avoid the JVM as much possible.
by aylons on 10/19/22, 4:31 PM
I'm sorry I don't have anything further to contribute to the discussion, but this is an amazing name for the project. The double-pun in the logo with the duck is the cherry on the top.
Actually, here's a small contribution: I do not work with web apps or nowhere near this kind of development (yeah, I also wonder why I'm a regular at HN), or have a use to the end product, but the name and logo grabbed my attention enough to click the link, see the discussion and read the front page. There's power to clever branding.
by ranger_danger on 10/19/22, 5:38 PM
Very unprofessional name, this is not something I could even bring up in a commercial setting if I wanted to use it. Please consider a different name.