GoCardless vs Zoho Billing

GoCardless compared with Zoho Billing

Zoho Billing at $39 to $79 a month gives you the invoicing, subscription catalogue, and dunning that GoCardless deliberately lacks, and GoCardless gives Zoho a collection rail an order of magnitude cheaper than cards. For a United Kingdom or European small business invoicing business customers, the pairing is close to optimal: a flat software fee plus a capped 1 percent collection cost, with no percentage of revenue going to a billing vendor at all.

Zoho Billing compared with GoCardless

Complementary rather than competing, and an unusually good pairing. Zoho Billing supplies the plan catalogue, invoicing, proration, tax handling, and dunning that GoCardless deliberately lacks; GoCardless supplies a collection rail at roughly 1.5 percent with a per-transaction fee cap, against the 3.5 percent a card gateway charges. For a United Kingdom or European small business invoicing business customers, $79 flat plus capped 1 percent collection is close to the cheapest credible subscription stack available.

GoCardless

Per-transaction percentage plus a small fixed fee, capped per transaction, across three self-serve tiers with no monthly platform fee. Custom pricing is negotiable above roughly 1 million pounds of annual revenue.

• Standard1% + 20p
• Advanced1.25% + 20p
• Pro1.4% + 20p
• CustomNegotiated

Work it at a $50 average ticket, roughly 40 pounds. On Standard you pay 1 percent, about 40 pence, plus 20 pence, so 60 pence per transaction, or about 76 cents. At $10,000 a month across 200 transactions that is roughly $152, an effective rate of 1.52 percent. At $100,000 a month across 2,000 transactions it is roughly $1,520, again 1.52 percent, because the cap does not bite at this ticket size. Set that against Stripe Billing at 4.2 percent, Paddle at 6 percent, and Gumroad at 11 percent on the identical ticket. GoCardless is between three and seven times cheaper than everything else in this category, and on large invoices the fee cap makes the gap absurd: a 4,000 pound annual contract costs 4 pounds to collect against roughly 120 pounds on a card. The reason everyone has not moved is that direct debit is slower, harder to sign up for, geographically constrained, and does not touch tax compliance at all. You are not buying a billing platform. You are buying a much cheaper rail for the payments that suit it, and the right answer for most businesses is to run it alongside cards rather than instead of them.

Zoho Billing

Flat per-organization monthly subscription with user limits, invoice ceilings, and an annual revenue cap, rather than a percentage of billing volume. Payment processing is charged separately by whichever gateway you connect.

• Standard$39
• Premium$79
• EnterpriseCustom

Work it at a $50 average ticket. At $10,000 a month across 200 transactions you pay $79 for Premium plus roughly $350 in Stripe processing, totalling $429, an effective rate of 4.29 percent. That is essentially identical to Stripe Billing at 4.2 percent, which is unimpressive until you scale. At $100,000 a month across 2,000 transactions you pay the same $79 plus roughly $3,500 in processing, totalling $3,579, an effective rate of 3.58 percent, against Stripe Billing's unchanged 4.2 percent and Paddle's 6 percent. The software fee has become a rounding error. The catch is that $100,000 a month is $1.2M a year, which breaches the published revenue cap, so that particular calculation lands you in an Enterprise quote rather than on the $79 plan. The honest read: between roughly $20,000 and $80,000 a month, Zoho Billing on Premium is one of the cheapest complete subscription platforms available, and the flat fee is worth several hundred dollars a month against any percentage-based competitor. Below $10,000 a month the arithmetic is a wash and you are choosing on features. Above the revenue ceiling you are negotiating like everyone else.