Recurring revenue, especially for startup businesses, is what keeps business growing and expanding. In this case, many startup businesses have already adopted the subscription model, which adds extra revenue to the business within a set timeline. It can be monthly or yearly.

However, managing subscriptions can be challenging, especially for clients who want to renew their subscriptions, cancel their subscription plans, upgrade to top-tier subscription plans, and make payments. However, with a custom subscription management software solution, it becomes easy to handle all the processes in a streamlined manner. That is why this guide explores all the insights you need to know about custom subscription management software development, including the benefits, key features, and challenges, among many other insights.

What is a custom subscription management software?

A custom subscription management software is a platform or a solution developed to help businesses manage their customer actions, including payments, billing cycles, subscription plans, and retention measures, among many other tasks that streamline business growth.

By automating some common tasks, a custom subscription management software solution enables businesses to handle and complete customer requirements in a seamless manner.

Stripe Connect, Chargify, and Chargebee are good examples of subscription-based software solutions.

Importance or Benefits of Subscription Management Software

So, why would you need to build a custom subscription management software? Below are some notable benefits of a custom subscription management software solution you should know:

• Enhanced customer experience.

A good custom subscription management software will keep your customers engaged. With the correct customer data, it becomes easy for you to strategize how to meet customer needs, ensuring their satisfaction. Of course, such a platform will collect customer data and generate reports through which you can use the insights on the generated reports to enhance customer experience.

• Saves time

A custom subscription software solution saves time by automating many tasks. What’s more, task automation ensures you serve the customers in a timely & efficient manner, ensuring customers are satisfied.

Above all, custom subscription management software allows you to explore and implement emerging trends & technologies to meet customer needs. This is because the systems automate more tasks, thus allowing you adequate time to take your business to the next level.

• Tasks automation

A custom subscription management software automates most of the tasks, such as recurring billing. Of course, billing invoices to different customers after a set period can be complex, time-consuming, and prone to errors when done manually.

By automating the billing and payment processes, the custom subscription management software solution ensures all the payments are completed in a timely manner, thus saving the staff’s time to focus on other business objectives.

• Reduces your costs 

A custom subscription management software eliminates the need to employ more staff to perform manual operations, which is costly. You will need to pay more workers in this case.

What’s more, you will require a generic payment system to process the subscription requirements of your business. This approach requires manual efforts and is costly.

By investing in a custom subscription management software solution, you eliminate or reduce the admin overheads while enhancing efficiency at the same time.

• Reduce customer churn

A subscription-based business model relies heavily on customer retention for accelerated business growth. Again, even if you retain customers who fail to pay, this can impact your business negatively.

A reliable subscription management software solution will keep your customers engaged plus invested in your business for a long, thus creating a solid basis for your business as you invest in measures to attract more customers.

• Better transparency

A custom subscription management software solution offers a platform with transparency and openness. Ideally, customers can see the fruits of their payment plans through such a platform. Above all, customers can track their expenses through such a platform without questioning the whys since such a platform has all the history of the customer’s transactions and processes.

Again, it is easy for customers to cancel, upgrade, and pause their subscription through such a platform. Such levels of transparency are what keep customers loyal to your brand.

You can respond to customer concerns faster and with accurate information, which can help diffuse a situation with a customer that can turn them away from your company permanently.

The right subscription management software, therefore, enhances your customer communications and presents your company as transparent.

• Facilitating scalability and growth

At some point, your subscription-based model business will grow and expand, and you will need to accommodate the growing userbase without facing any forms of challenges.

Some of the functionalities that will need to scale up as a result of business growth include analytics, currency management, and billing, among many others. A custom subscription management software offers the perfect solution to scale your expanding business seamlessly. You can easily manage payments and track subscription progress through such a platform when your business starts growing.

• Improving customer retention and satisfaction

Apart from better customer experience as described above, custom subscription management software enhances customer satisfaction and retention. Ideally, modern customer prefers solutions that allow them to perform self-service actions according to their preferences.

Therefore, a custom subscription management software with a feature that allows customers to complete some actions by themselves, such as updating their payment methods, customizing notification preferences, and activating coupons, creates a sense of customer satisfaction and improved retention rates, which benefits the business largely.

• Creates a motivating working environment

By automating most of the tasks, a custom subscription management software solution creates a streamlined working process. This gives employees extra time, which in turn motivates them to implement solutions that will see the business grow and scale to new heights.

• Simplifies compliance guidelines

A custom subscription management software handles most of the compliance requirements automatically. This saves the business the headache of reviewing and calculating the tax requirements. What’s more, such a platform ensures compliance with PCI DSS rules and guidelines, thus safeguarding business confidential data and safeguarding customer details in all aspects. This ensures data security is in place and no room for data breaches. Again, you won’t face the legal consequences in case in not comply with the set laws with such a platform.

• Simple third-party integrations

It is easy to integrate a custom subscription management software solution with other systems for advanced functionality and excellent performance. The integrations create a streamlined environment for tracking data and managing user details effectively.

Must-have features of custom subscription management software

It is evident that a custom subscription management software solution is a great tool to serve your customers and streamline business operations. Before we analyze how to build such a solution, it is vital to include the following core features:

• Invoice reminders

Once your business starts to gain momentum, you will start to deal with many subscribers, hence the need for a powerful system that will streamline the invoicing processes. Ideally, the system should email the subscribers once they complete their payments. This process should be automated for efficiency and customer satisfaction.

Again, invoice reminder features should notify users when their subscription fee is due or almost due. This process showcases good customer service, plus it eliminates any chances of disruptions, especially when the customer needs to update their payment methods in advance.

• Payment methods

Processing payments is always a major part of any business setup. Therefore, when building a custom subscription management software solution, include different payment methods to meet the needs of different users globally.

While including different payment methods will enable you to reach a wider userbase, the same approach will create convenience among users. For instance, if one payment method fails, a user can easily use another payment method to complete their transactions.

In the end, your business will keep thriving while giving users convenience when it comes to making payments.

• Subscription management

You need to ensure the subscription process is easy and quick to simplify user’s work. For instance, a user should simply click to subscribe to the available options, unsubscribe when they no longer need the services, resume the subscription when ready, and upgrade the subscription according to their needs. That is why you will need to include a subscription management feature to streamline all these processes.

• Multiple pricing tiers

Not all users are the same. While some can afford premium tiers, some can only manage the basic tier. Therefore, include a multiple pricing tier feature into your custom subscription management software to suit the needs of different users with different potentiality.

• Third-party integrations

For a streamlined and productive workflow, custom subscription management software requires seamless integrations with other systems and departments. For instance, customer support and sales teams may need access to the billing details of a customer for service delivery. That is why it is significant to design a custom subscription management software solution to integrate easily with other systems.

• Analytics and reports

The analytics and reports feature will help you track the effectiveness of your custom subscription management software.

The insights and analytics you collect about the platform users will help you identify areas that need improvement. What’s more, you will be able to measure the profitability and revenues you generate through such a software solution. This will give you an overview of your business proceedings, whether you are on the right track or not, for making informed decisions. That is why you shouldn’t miss the analytics and reports feature when building a custom subscription management software.

• Tax and compliance tools

The process of calculating taxes and related expenses manually can be time-consuming, complex, and prone to errors. Therefore, when building a custom subscription management software, include tools that can automate the calculation processes to simplify the work and eliminate errors.

• Customer database

You will need a centralized database to hold all the subscribers’ details, including their account status, transaction history, and contact details, among other key details.

The customer data should be secure and easily accessible when needed for different actions, such as resolving billing issues, applying promotions, and issuing refunds, among other actions.

• Customer Support

What if customers have issues that need immediate resolution? Besides, customers can have questions and need to be engaged with the support system. That is why you need to include the customer support feature when building a custom subscription management software for resolving issues and attending to customer requests at any given time.

Step-by-step building subscription management software

You now understand the viability of a custom subscription management software for your business, plus the features you must include. The process of building such a solution can be complex, but with the steps below, you can complete the entire process easily:

• Define your customer base

Every business venture is unique in different ways, and this is what defines the target user base. Before you figure out the process of building a custom subscription management software solution, think of the users you are targeting in relation to your business dealings.

Do some research at this stage, identify a viable opportunity or missing gaps in the subscription field, collect data on user needs and plan how to build a custom subscription software solution that will solve the existing issue in the market.

• Validate your concept to the target audience

Once you have your concept and define your target audience, you will need to validate your idea to the end users. This phase is vital in ensuring the end users understand the core values and benefits of your software solutions, and this will streamline the software acceptance and the prices once released.

• Build an MVP

This is a simpler version of your custom subscription management software solution. Include the basic features and functionalities in the MVP. Building an MVP will help you test your software solution with real uses as you collect feedback for improving the software.

During this phase, identify any issues and bugs and implement solutions. Most importantly, focus on the feedback collected from users and identify some features that need to be added to make the software solution viable.

• Custom subscription management software development

Next, build a value-based pricing structure that will keep you connected with your customers. In this case, the prices should be included in different tiers to motivate the customers to invest in your business according to their potential. Design the value-based structure for regular adjustments based on the customer’s potentiality and willingness to invest in your business. This will help you grow as a business while maintaining a good relationship with your software users.

With the value-based pricing structure in place, you will need to implement a billing system to streamline the billing processes, which is a complex task. The billing structure should be able to handle the new customers while completing billing processes for the already existing users.

Now, integrate all other features and functionalities that will enhance the platform’s functionality.

• Testing

After the development is complete, with the core features and functionalities in place, you will need to perform some tests to ensure your custom subscription management software works seamlessly and delivers the services as expected.

Should there be any bugs or issues, fix them at this stage to avoid any complexities after releasing the software solution to users.

With the testing complete and after resolving issues, if any, you can then launch the software and continue monitoring it.

• Analyze and improve regularly

Keep monitoring the software performance in relation to customer needs. Analyze the reports and devise plans on how to keep advancing the software solution for good and long-lasting customer relationships.

Conclusion

A custom subscription management software solution is a beneficial platform for businesses that want to keep their customers fully engaged as they build long-term relationships.

Through such a platform, businesses can handle all billing requests and other tasks that can be automated easily.

While there are challenges such as privacy concerns, compatibility issues, higher bounce rates, and higher fees, all you need is a proper action plan that includes the project’s dynamics and an expert software development company like Aalpha to handle all the processes using custom subscription management software best practices.

Custom Subscription management software development FAQs

What is the cost of building a custom subscription management software?

The cost of building a custom subscription management software varies based on the project’s complexity, tech stack used, features needed, ongoing maintenance, size of the development team, hiring model, engagement model, and location of the development team, among many other features.

In this regard, the costs of building a custom subscription management software solution can range between $50,000 and $ 500,000 or even more.

What challenges should I expect when building a custom subscription management software?

While building a custom subscription management software solution comes with many benefits, the process and business venture come with some challenges. The good thing is that you can always find practical solutions to the challenges. Such challenges include the following:

A higher bounce rate –this happens when customers keep leaving, especially when they can find your products beneficial to them. A higher bounce rate can impact your business continuity badly.

To resolve this issue, identify reasons why customers keep leaving and find practical solutions to keep them committed.

Tax compliance challenges – in this case, chances are that your customers are located in different regions with different tax and regulatory requirements. Such rules and guidelines can change over time, and keeping them updated can be tiresome and complex.

Again, failing to comply with such guidelines can pose some risks and hefty penalties to your business. To overcome such challenges, include tools and technologies that automate tax regulation processes during the early stages of software development.

What is the ideal development team structure for custom subscription management software development?

To build a reliable and solid custom subscription management software solution, you will need a team of experts made up of a project manager, a UX designer, a frontend developer, a backend developer, and a backend quality controller.

How can I save on the costs of building a custom subscription management software?

Building a custom subscription management software solution can be costly. However, there are some measures you can take to reduce the costs. Below are some practical tips that will lower custom subscription management software solutions:

• Outsource the development team from Aalpha
• Do early research to validate your idea
• Prioritize the key features
• Involve target users
• Build a scalable custom subscription management software solution

What is the process of building a custom subscription management software solution?

The steps to follow when building a custom subscription management software solution include the following:

• Defining business goals
• Doing market research
• UX/UI design
• Defining features and choosing the ideal tech stack
• Software development
• Testing
• Launching
• Monitoring and improvement

What are the benefits of custom subscription management software?

With a custom subscription management software solution, you can modify the software according to business needs, you have total control, and you can tailor your software to align with your business’s unique needs.

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