Product Hunt Daily Log | ChimpCharge
Product Hunt is a great platform to discover newly launched products on the web. I’ve been a Product Hunt addict for several years now. Checking the front page is a daily must for me. On top of that, I always like to go in and play with most products that get posted there.
I thought I’d start writing about my favorite product(s) of the day. I’ll generally start with a product tour, then a little analysis, and a few similar products.
Date of Posting: 08/29/20
ChimpCharge
What is it?
ChimpCharge is a simplified invoicing software built for freelancers in mind. Their whole value proposition seems to be around the simplicity of use. Instead of tracking down payment using a variety of different platforms such as Venmo, Cash App, or Zelle, you can simply send your clients a straightforward link that will allow them to pay quickly by credit card.
They do offer a 14-day trial, but on initial sign up they ask you for a credit card to access the trial. I get this from their perspective, but it definitely turns me off as a user on a brand new product like this. I’dI’d really like to poke around before having to go through entering my card information.
ChimpCharge is built on top of Stripe, so you’re going to pay your standard 2.9% + 30c per transaction plus their monthly fee of $9.99.
After entering your credit card information to activate the trial, you’re prompted with connecting your Stripe account to their platform. This is pretty standard with all payment products out there that integrate with Stripe unless they’re using custom accounts, which essentially allows for an entirely white-labeled experience with Stripe.
After you get your Stripe account connected, you’re prompted to create a payment link. The whole platform seems to be centered around these. Instead of a standard invoice, you’re going to send a unique link to your client to pay you. You have an option to name your link as well as add a description and an amount. You can also determine whether you want the payment to be a one-time payment or recurring in nature.
Once you create your link, you can see it listed within your Payment Links tab. You can then copy the link, view the link, or edit the link. As with any product built on top of Stripe, you can only edit the link’s name and description, not the price.
The payment page itself is relatively simple. Just the name, description, and then a Stripe.js element to enter in your card information. You can see my example page here.
On top of one time payments, they also offer a few pages to view your current customers and active subscriptions. You can then manage those customers and subscriptions from those respective pages.
My Thoughts
I really like the simplicity of this product. It cuts through the noise and feature bloat of a lot of other invoicing software on the market. If you want to send people links so that they can pay you instead of having to jump through hoops with Venmo or Cash App, this is it.
At the end of the day, though, it’s not necessarily anything you couldn’t do with an existing standard Stripe account. Stripe allows you to generate payment page links for invoices that you can send to customers to pay on the one-time payment side of things. The only real advantage with ChimpChange is that you can have fixed links for services instead of generating a new invoice.
On the subscription side of things, it offers a slight advantage to the standard Stripe experience by letting users sign up from a fixed link instead of adding them to a subscription in the Stripe dashboard manually.
Stripe does *kind of* have a solution for this with their Stripe Checkout feature. It’s a little more involved than sending a link, though. You have to add a code snippet to your site and then initiate it on a button click. That’s not as easy of an experience as sending a static link.
Similar Products
Going Forward
I’m going to challenge myself to write these summaries of the top two or three products on Product Hunt daily.
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