We recently released Kill Bill version 0.24. We’re using this blog post to discuss the more notable changes for Kill Bill 0.24:  Support for Java 11 Group subscriptions on specific invoices Longer billing periods Specify DateTime for subscriptions Replaced Guava dependencies  Changed usage amount to BigDecimal You can see the complete 0.24 release notes on GitHub. About the Kill Bill Release Trains As a reminder, Kill Bill has two release trains: The latest release with an even minor number (e.g., 0.22.x) is stable and APIs are backward compatible.  Odd-numbered minor release ..read more

When it comes to international subscription billing, customers prefer to receive communications in their native language. Kill Bill supports translating invoices and emails into multiple languages.  The number of languages Kill Bill can support is virtually unlimited. Adding a new, supported language involves adding a few files to the system.  Here’s a basic graphic that shows how Kill Bill translates emails and invoices: Translating emails (or invoices) in Kill Bill Sending emails to customers does require the email notification plugin (here’s a sample). The language support for inv ..read more

The holidays can put quite the squeeze on one’s wallet, what with buying gifts, traveling, and entertaining friends and family. It’s a natural time of the year to offer your customers a lower price – like coupons or discounts – on your service or product, and Kill Bill can help you do that. As a business, you have several different ways you can offer savings. For example, you can offer coupons with reduced prices or run campaigns with free trial periods. That’s straightforward, but the real question is, how does Kill Bill handle discounts, coupons, and trials periods? That’s what this blog pos ..read more

It’s time to fluff and refresh Kill Bill’s most frequently asked questions (FAQs)! If your question isn’t covered here, make sure to check Part 1 and Part 2. General Questions About Kill Bill I’m a software consultant/shop. Can I implement Kill Bill for my customers?  Yes, others have used Kill Bill as white label software. The source code has a permissive Apache Version 2.0 license, and you can hide the Kill Bill brand from the API and user interface. If you need further information, please feel free to contact us. What is Kaui? Kaui is a browser-based application that enables back-offic ..read more

No subscription billing system is complete without analytics. Understanding your billing data is imperative to the day-to-day decision-makers in marketing, business intelligence, finance, and product management.  Setting up analytics in Kill Bill is DIY, but it’s simple to install and configure for your own needs. Remember that when you use Kill Bill as your recurring billing and payments platform, you actually own your data and have real-time, unlimited access to it. This is in stark contrast to some SaaS billing vendors who set restrictions on the number of API calls and the amount of d ..read more

Dunning. It’s not a pleasant sounding word, is it? For that matter, dunning isn’t exactly an agreeable activity. After all, you’re trying to collect the overdue funds from a customer. (Granted, sometimes the customer isn’t even aware their bill is overdue, but still.) Dunning needs to be performed with a measured approach and plenty of caution lest you offend a customer you want to keep.  The good news is, if you have the right subscription billing software, dunning customers for overdue bills can be a completely automated process.  How Businesses Typically Manage Dunning If you bill ..read more

When Stéphane and Pierre began developing Kill Bill in 2010, the open-source software they created was a direct result of their experiences in working with the billing and payments startup and enterprise organizations. From the very beginning of this project, they considered the subscription billing APIs one of the most important aspects of Kill Bill – if not the most important.  Nowadays, API design-first is common, but we still think it’s important to stress the fact that the Kill Bill co-founders designed it to be software for building your own billing and payments platform. The APIs a ..read more

In this post, we’re going to go through our list of open-source plugins for Kill Bill and give you all the information you need to dig deep into plugins. But first, some exciting news!  Our software development partner, Wovenware, recently released a new open-source plugin to connect Kill Bill to Adyen, a popular and well-known payment gateway. Adyen supports a multitude of payment methods, from Amazon Pay to Zip. You can find the new plugin on GitHub here. To read the press release, go here.  Wovenware also developed and released an open-source payment plugin for Braintree last ..read more

For those of you running Kill Bill on AWS, we now have full documentation on how to get up and running with the performance monitoring and error tracking tools:  Datadog New Relic CloudWatch Sentry Rollbar In this blog post, we’ll provide a brief description of these tools and show you where to get details. Why Track Performance and Errors? Once you get these set up, you’ll be able to optimize Kill Bill’s performance and detect any problems early. Secondly, if any errors or anomalies occur, these tools will help you trace them back to their origins and make any necessary corrections.&nb ..read more

When you look at the marketing slides for various SaaS billing software, you usually see colorful charts with checkmarks and Xs, similar to this feature comparison of the Kill Bill platform with SaaS billing systems.  Feature comparisons are okay, but the main difference between Kill Bill and other billing systems is not the features. It’s actually woven into the billing system design and architecture, an open model that we adopted from the beginning:  Open source Open data Open architecture So, while Kill Bill is a billing and payments system, it’s also a platform for building bil ..read more