Our new billing system is built around the idea of automatic monthly charges that can be synced up with your real life savings. To do that, we built it with automatic payments in mind so that we automatically charge your card the correct amount each month. We think of it like paying your subscription to Netflix. However, we know that isn’t the perfect system for everybody. Heads up: this article is about our new billing system right on your dashboard. If you’re a longtime customer, you might be looking for information on our legacy system at Freshbooks.
Why do you want to charge me automatically?
There are a lot of reasons for this—some to make things easier for you and some just selfish.
Let’s start with the selfish part. The honest, selfish reason is that we’re a business. We pay our team to negotiate your bills (and to answer your questions and write our code and all sorts of things) and only make our money back over time when you pay us back for the negotiations. Without having a card on file, it’s a lot easier for people to either “dine and dash” or simply forget to pay. We tend to believe most people are good, but we’ve had people skip out when it was time to pay us even though we had verified they were saving money, so we needed something that was safer for us.
The other part is that we’re trying to make it a really easy, straightforward system. Our goal is to save you money and time dealing with your bills. So, we didn’t want to become just another bill you have to file and pay every month. With this new system, you don’t have to log in to your BillFixers account every month or write a check and put it in the mail, just set it and forget it. Generally the risk of a subscription like this is that you sign up for it and forget about it for years, without getting any value. Since we charge only based on a split of savings, and cap our residential charges for a year, there’s no risk of that. So, we think it’s fair.
Okay, but I prefer to pay with a check or Paypal. How can I do that?
We try really hard to be accommodating and this is no exception. Reach out to us and we’ll make it work. We built the ability to mark manual payments in our system, so we can work with you if you pay by check or however else. We’re working on the ability for this to be easier, but since it’s very uncommon, it might be a little while. In the meantime, some of the dashboard or the emails from us might be a little wonky, since they’re built around the idea of a credit card. If you can bear with us on that, we can work around it. Alternately, we can put you on our legacy system for now.
What if I just want to pay manually with my card each month?
This is surprisingly challenging to accommodate. But if you’re somebody who is specifically looking for this information, we know you’re not trying to rip us off—you just don’t like having your credit card saved places. We get it. Depending on your concern, we might be able to help address it. For example, if you’re worried about security, you should know that we never actually have access to your credit card details—they’re handled by one of the largest and most secure vendors for that kind of thing. But you might just not like it and that’s completely fair.
For now, if you’re dead set on it, we can move you to our legacy system. Just email us and ask to be moved to Freshbooks and we’ll take care of it.
What if I want to pay via my bank?
Good news! This is coming soon! You’ll be able to directly link your bank account and pay via ACH.
What if my question isn’t answered?
You might want to check out:
How to Pay BillFixers?
Adding or updating a card for payment