Launched at SXSW this year, SaaSy is a platform to manage online payments that is started by the same guys behind FastSpring (who’re in the top 50 of the Inc. 500 and is the No.1 e-commerce service for Mac software publishers).
SaaSy founder and CEO Dan Engel, said they were inspired to start the all-in-one payment and subscription management service after speaking with countless SaaS (software-as-a-service) company CEOs who complained that they could spend years developing a similar infrastructure just to sell their web-based subscription services. At the same time, FastSpring‘s existing business clients started to ask for such features specifically for them to launch subscription services to complement their desktop software application sales.
“The ideal SaaSy customer is a company with an existing subscription-based online service or that is planning to launch a new subscription service and who would rather spend the next few years growing their company, rather than developing a new or trying to add on to an existing e-commerce infrastructure,” says Engel, who was previously with Google leading online consumer acquisition for AdSense and AdWords, and digital photo software company Picasa before that. “Up until now, if you wanted to sell a subscription-based web service, you had to invest *years* into building, improving on, and maintaining your own subscription e-commerce infrastructure either from scratch or by building tons of functionality around a basic recurring billing service.” In fact, the founders of SaaSy believe that their services can help entrepreneurs in companies looking to sell subscription services, because they can now outsource this component of their infrastructure and focus on growing their profits through sales and marketing and product development.
“Thanks to SaaSy, companies can now outsource practically everything to us instead of building complex subscription management and payment infrastructure, leaving firms to focus on growing their company as fast as possible,” he adds. He says the challenge for the company is to continue to stay unique as more and more competitors emerge, but that they won’t sacrifice their morals for growth – they don’t support any content, products, or services that deal in adult or other inappropriate material, tobacco, pharmaceutical sales, and gambling, for example.
