kdeldycke/awesome-billing

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💰 Billing & Payments Knowledge for Cloud Platforms

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Oct 16th

Payments

moov - Open-source infrastructure for financial technology.

Fintech Open Source Foundation - Another set of open-source projects for financial projects.

Oct 8th

Accounting

Bookkeeping

Ledger stars170 - A scriptable financial ledger, designed to make it easy to model complex financial transactions.

Akaunting stars4.6k - Open source software designed for small businesses and freelancers.

Sep 27th

Business Intelligence

Metrics

The SaaS Financial Model You'll Actually Use - A complete tour of the financials of a statup, which gives you extra-context on how the metrics you produce fit into the larger picture.

Sep 7th

Accounting

Bookkeeping

Go DB Ledger stars376 - An open source accounting system that aims to make the recording of double entry bookkeeping transactions programmable.

Payments

Online Payments

Optimizing payments with machine learning - Describes a classic payment workflow, then how machine learning can replace hard-coded business rules and fine-tune the payment failures/retries loop to increase the success rates of charges.

Jul 27th

Coupons and Vouchers

The coupon code is a slap in the face - Point the negative consequences of users encountering a blank coupon field without having a coupon. See the update at the end of the article with research backing up this anecdote.

Basics

Open guide to AWS stars30.4k - Links to the Billing and Cost Management section.

Use-cases for cloud services - To optimize ROI, keep all regular workload in traditional architecture and reserve cloud computing for elastic and experimental projects.

Product Catalog

GCP Product Catalog - All GCP SKUs available as an API.

Pimcore stars2.3k - An open-source UI and database to manage product metadata, written in PHP Symfony.

OpenPIM - A streamlined open-source project, focusing on PIM-only features.

Comparing 3 open source PIM solutions - Comparative study of the 3 projects above.

Calculator

Cloudorado - A comparison matrix which use ECU (Amazon's vCPU) as a CPU power measure unit.

Cost Forecast

GCP Cost Forecast - An example of consumption trend line for resource consumption.

AWS Forecast - A full-featured hosted product to perform forecasting on any time-series.

Payments

Receipt

The long, long history of long, long CVS receipts - “CVS is a drugstore much like other drugstores, with one important difference: The receipts are very long.”

Competitive Analysis

DigitalOcean Billing changelog - All the latest billing updates on DO.

Jul 3rd

Finance

What is FinOps - A framework for tech finance and business leadership teams to share the same language and processes of cloud operations and management.

Taxes

Streamlined Sales Tax Governing Board - A multi-states US initiative to automate and standadize sales tax accounting and collection.

Jun 27th

Contracts

Is this what Enterprise mean? - A use-case of badly designed contract management alienating big enterprise customers. See the associated HN comments on bulk license purchase.

Invoice

EU eInvoicing - European standard on electronic invoice.

Pricing

Usage-based Pricing

Socially Optimal Pricing of Cloud Computing Resources - “The socially optimal operating point is unique, and can be sustained by a linear, usage-based tariff, which charges a fixed price per unit resource and unit time.” This paper justify usage-based pricing for cloud resources.

Payments

Bank Accounts

Swift Codes - Swift / BIC codes for personal use only.

May 20th

Basics

5 things I learned while developing a billing system - A great introduction on all the various aspects of a billing system, from currency to invoices, including great illustrations about plans change logic. All these topics are later detailed in dedicated sections below.

Pricing

Usage-based Pricing

Subscription-based pricing is dead: Smart SaaS companies are shifting to usage-based models - Usage-based pricing is more optimal and more fair: it “allows a customer to start at a low cost, minimizing friction to getting started while still preserving the ability to monetize a customer over time”.

Pricing

Strategy

The cup-of-coffee pricing fallacy - Explains why it is a sloppy analogy.

Pricing

Market Research

Jeremy Howard - From Predictive Modelling to Optimization - “In insurance, the price is the product. (…) How do I change price to make shitload of money?” Or how to deliver results (optimal price for a customer) instead of delivering data (calculating a customer's risk, which had been the standard approach used by actuaries previously).

Gabor–Granger method - Used in surveys to determine the price for a new product or service. The results can be used to produce a demand chart and a revenue curve.

Van Westendorp's Price Sensitivity Meter - PSM is a market technique for determining consumer price preferences. Allows for drawing a revenue curve to estimate the price point delivering the maximum revenue.

Pricing niche products - “The most compelling argument against simply picking a price, though, is that it limits how much you can learn about your market.” Then the author setup vickrey auction to discover price.

Finding the max revenue price mark for digital products - “To find the optimal price that provides maximum revenue for your product you will need to field-test several price points; you then reconstruct the revenue curve and find the peak.”

Personalised pricing and EU law - Some cases of price personalisation are prohibited in EU due to consumer protection and data protection rules.

Contracts

CUDs vs. Commit Contracts vs. SUDs in Google Cloud - Explain the differences between various types of discounts and commits in GCP.

Quantity discounts on a virtual good: The results of a massive pricing experiment - “Implementing price reductions ranging from 9–70% for large purchases, we found remarkably little impact on revenue, either positively or negatively.”

Payments

Online Payments

Idempotency in the context of payments - “Idempotency prevents race conditions. Idempotency dictates that multiple identical requests from the same client do not result in a different final state.”

Feb 4th

Pricing

Strategy

"There are two ways to make money. You can bundle, or you can unbundle." - Jim Barksdale.

Dec 18th, 2020

Accounting

“The Accounting department is usually backwards facing. The Finance department is usually forwards facing.” (source)

Accounting

Currencies

Tutorial on multiple currency accounting - An excellent resource for implementing multi-currency accounting systems.

Finance

Accounts Demystified: The Astonishingly Simple Guide To Accounting - Helps you learn how to analyse and monitor your company's financial performance.

The Games People Play With Cash Flow - “Malone created a new accounting metric, something he called ‘earnings before interest, depreciation, and taxes’, or EBITDA.” This is how a cable company CEO made sense of cash flow, like real-estate business did. The article starts with this example and describes other cash flow games for SaaS models.

Financial Intelligence for Entrepreneurs: What You Really Need to Know About the Numbers - Allows you to fully understand how to use financial data to make better decisions for your business.

Algebraic Models for Accounting Systems - Advanced abstract algebra applied to the analysis of accounting systems.

Dec 7th, 2020

Accounting

Bookkeeping

So, you want to learn Bookkeeping! - Focus on the daily operations of recording and maintaining the transactions of a business.

Fraud

Cards

How I Stopped a Credit Card Thief From Ripping Off 3,537 People – and Saved Our Nonprofit in the Process - Describe a fraud technique known as "card testing", in which massive batch of stolen cards are checked for their validity against your API.

How credit card thieves use free-to-play apps to launder gains - To prevent abuses, service provider must strengthen both credit card verification and the account creation process.

Training an ML model to score chargebacks - An example of a platform's network effect, which allows to predict the likelyhood of winning a dispute.

History

Engineering and Operations in the Bell System - Starting at page #445, the "10.5 Billing Equipment and Systems" section describe the history and technical evolutions of Bell's phone calls metering and pricing.

The vanished grandeur of accounting - Accounting paintings were a significant genre in Dutch art.

Cost Forecast

How to save money on your AWS bill - “The biggest cost savings there are: 1. Turning things off that you're not using; 2. Then spot instances; 3. Then reserved instances.”

Marketplace

Vickrey auction - Hinted by an HN comment, in which yes, “‘Asking people what they'd pay for and how much rarely works.’ (…) [but] using a Vickrey auction, similar to Google's ad auction mechanism, can elicit a person's maximum willingness-to-pay.”

Marketplace

Cloud Resources

GCP Preemptible VMs vs AWS Spot Instances - “Google's prices are fixed, whereas AWS uses a market model”.

“Look at the 3-month spot price history to estimate cost and to discover combinations of availability zone and instance type with extra capacity.” (source) - Users are seeking more transparency on the spot market.

Taxes

Global VAT & GST on digital services - List of countries requiring application of taxes on foreign provided online services.

“British supermarkets (…) charge you a fee for their backend card processing, but they subtract that fee from your checkout price.” (source) - Which allows them to claim the VAT on processing fees as input tax.

Taxes

European VAT

How to correctly setup SaaS subscriptions to charge VAT in Europe - “If you think you can just setup a simple Stripe integration and move on, like us, you'd be sadly mistaken.”

Business Intelligence

Customer Lifetime Value

You're all calculating churn rates wrong - “On the surface, churn rate may seem like a natural proxy for changes in customer lifetimes. Let's dig into why that is not true.” Churn rate is not a meaningful metric to compute CLV, as during the customer lifetime the churn probability is not constant. Most of the time because of your free trial and vouchers.

Competitive Analysis

AWS Cost Management announcements - The source of all new features added to the billing perimeter.

AWS reserved instances vs saving plan - A feature matrix of the different scheme and their average dicounts.

GCP billing release notes - Latest changes of GCP billing features.

Nov 12th, 2020

Fraud

Trust Score

Awesome Credit Modeling stars45 - How to use statistical methods to classify applicants into categories to reduce risks. Lots of inspiration and reasearch papers there to improve general scoring.

Nov 11th, 2020

Business Intelligence

Metrics

Thinking about growth and profit - Discuss the relationship between investments, profit and growth, and how it influence decisions on pricing, free trials and plan structure.

Startup growth calculator - Simple yet effective interactive profitability calculator for startups.

Business Intelligence

Customer Lifetime Value

How to project customer retention - A seminal paper, with a stronger approach compared to the one above: the exponential distributions is replaced by a geometric model, better suited to monthly contracts.

RFM (customer value) - A refined model of CLV, used to segment users based on Recency, Frequency and Monetary value.

Churn Prediction - “How to use Python in a simplistic way to fuel your company's growth by applying the predictive approach to all your actions.” Relies on XGBoost binary classification.

Lifetimes stars1.2k - A full-featured Python package to analyze your users based on their "alive" and "dead" states.

retentionizer - Python package to show the projected retention rates for each cohort and calculate the LTV of a given customer in that cohort.

Nov 5th, 2020

Taxes

European VAT

Council Directive 2006/112/EC - European Union reference on the common system of VAT.

What does the "Reverse Charge" refer to? - Answer: a provision in which a business transfer the responsibility of VAT handling to the customer.

Pricing

The Network Monetization Map: Aligning Incentives with Revenue - 6 models of monetization relying on network effect.

Pricing

Usage-based Pricing

A Survey of Profit Optimization Techniques for Cloud Providers - “The strategy of improving user service quality is discussed first, followed by the pricing strategy for cloud resources to maximize revenue.”

Sep 30th, 2020

Product Catalog

Akeneo PIM stars804 - The open-source variant of the commercial Akeneo products.

Sep 29th, 2020

Invoice

Universal Business Language - Most invoicing software can read and write UBL documents (XML) for data transfer.

Payments

Bank Accounts

A (shallow) dive into the American banking system - Collection of miscellaneous notes primarily focused on the common cases of routable accounts, i.e. checking and savings.

Payments

Online Payments

UPI 101: The Basics - “In this article, we will learn about India's Unified Payments Interface. A four-year-old payment scheme that has been accounting for 40-45% of digital payments across India.”

Sep 28th, 2020

Invoice

Factur-X stars74 - Python library to support the e-invoicing standard for France and Germany.

Sep 22nd, 2020

Pricing

Subscription Plans

Pricing low-touch SaaS - “In low-touch SaaS, the most common way packages are presented are as different columns in a pricing grid, with each column corresponding to a plan, offered at a different price, with differential access to features or maximum allowable usage along some axis interesting to the business.”

Sep 21st, 2020

Invoice

Volcano stars152 - Flexible, gateway-agnostic billing system.

Cost Forecast

Forecasting with sktime - A tutorial on how to use past data to make temporal forward predictions. And read the difference between sktime and the Prophet project mentionned above.

Sep 19th, 2020

Accounting

Bookkeeping

Sequence stars394 - API that store, validate and reports asset movements. Also known as a Ledger. Sequence is immutable, scalable, and easy to use.

Sep 1st, 2020

Invoice

Ruby Invoicing Framework stars257 - For generating and displaying invoices (ideal for commercial Rails apps). It allows for flexible business logic; provides tools for tax handling, commission calculation etc.

InvoiceGenerator stars126 - Library to generate a simple invoices.

InvoiceNet stars1.9k - Deep neural network to extract intelligent information from invoice documents.

Accounting

Software design and implementation

Managed accounts for Django stars180 - A 'managed account' is an allocation of money that can be debited and credited.

Moonpig: a billing system that doesn't suck - Design decisions behind a billing and accounting system. Key takeaway: some companies still pays by checks; do not use floats; complex customer workflows; date and time issues; mutable data.

Books, an immutable double-entry accounting database service - Explain the basic data model of a double-entry accounting system relying on Google Spanner for internal use at Square.

Django Hordak - Core functionality of a double entry accounting system for Django.

Triple‐entry accounting with blockchain: How far have we come? - “Triple‐entry accounting is a new and a more efficient way to address fundamental trust and transparency issues that plague current accounting systems. Triple‐entry accounting with blockchain, when properly implemented, can fundamentally improve accounting.”

Accounting

Bookkeeping

Luca stars57 - YAML accounting and JSON tax forms.

Plain text accounting tools - Extensive list of open-source personal finance projects that might be great to look into for inspiration on double-entry accounting and bookkeeping.

And a list of graphical accounting tools: GNUCash (GTK+), Grisbi (C), Firefly III (PHP).

GnuCash Tutorial and Concepts Guide - A complete tutorial on personal finance tracking with GnuCash.

Frappe Books stars1.3k - Free Desktop book-keeping software for small-businesses and freelancers.

Jul 31st, 2020

Accounting

Double-Entry Model

Accounting for Developers 101 - A general introduction to history and vocabulary of accounting.

Accounting for Computer Scientists - Describes how to view accounting in the form of graphs in which money flows, then how these movements are materialized in the financial statements of a small company.

The Double-Entry Counting Method - Same premise as above, but way more detailed and complete, as it adds reporting and implementation details.

Jun 18th, 2020

Pricing

Usage-based Pricing

“Designing billing for a service can be really challenging” - Personal anecdote on the design of the pricing plan for AWS Simple Email Service.

Jun 8th, 2020

Business Intelligence

Tools

falcon - Free, open-source SQL client for Windows and Mac with builtin graphs.

Jun 2nd, 2020

Business Intelligence

Metrics

An Overview of Visa - Great breakdown of Visa business models and metrics.

May 4th, 2020

Business Intelligence

Metrics

Startup financial models - 12 templates compared for SaaS - A great source of inspiration to get better visibility in your operations.

May 3rd, 2020

Pricing

Subscription Plans

f-license - Open-source license key generation and verification tool in Go.

Apr 29th, 2020

Pricing

Usage-based Pricing

Why I Love Usage-Based Pricing - “The most important reason I like this pricing model is that it heavily incentivizes both the customer and the service provider to act in everyone's best interest.” Also details issues with other pricing models.

“Billing is not complex on purpose: it's the price to pay for elasticity.” (source) - Or why you're likely to get an endless stream of complaining users if choosing utility pricing scheme: while accurate to the (milli-)cent, this model is frustrating for customers not ready to invest time grasping the underlaying concepts.

Cost Forecast

Forecasting: Principles and Practice - “Comprehensive introduction to forecasting methods and to present enough information about each method for readers to be able to use them sensibly.”

Marketplace

19 Tactics to Solve the Chicken-or-Egg Problem and Grow Your Marketplace - “Which comes first, the supply or the demand? Chicken or egg?”

Marketplace

Cloud Resources

Incentive Engineering for Computational Resource Management - Paper exploring the “mechanisms for the allocation of processor time and storage that are compatible both with programming practice and with market mechanisms.”

Pricing of Service in Clouds: Optimal Response and Strategic Interactions - “How should the consumer modulate its demand to optimize its profits? (…) How should the provider and consumer negotiate the specific pricing structure they will employ?” Covers non-linear models, tiered pricing, elastic demand, consumer et provider strategies.

Dynamic Cloud Pricing for Revenue Maximization - “Amazon's spot price is unlikely to be set according to market supply and demand. Rather, price oscillates within a very narrow band most of the time, which is more likely to be an artifact of some pricing algorithm with predetermined reserve price.”

Usage Patterns and the Economics of the Public Cloud - “We examine the economics of demand and supply in cloud computing. (…) These results explain why fixed prices currently prevail despite the seeming need for time-varying dynamics. Examining the actual CPU utilization provides a lens into the future. (…) demand fluctuations would be on par with the three classic industries where dynamic pricing is important (hotels, electricity, airlines) and dynamic prices would be essential for efficiency.”

Maximizing Profit of Cloud Brokers under Quantized Billing Cycles: a Dynamic Pricing Strategy based on Ski-Rental Problem - “The key idea of our algorithms is to use pricing signal to regulate user demand. One may argue that such an algorithm gives poor service to the user as it pushes tasks out of the queue in order to maximize cloud broker's profit.”

Present or Future: Optimal Pricing for Spot Instances - “Pricing policy of spot resources should be carefully designed and the impact on both present and future should be considered.”

“You always pay the spot market price, not your bid.” (source) - Simple explanation of the bidding mechanism.

Deconstructing Amazon EC2 Spot Instance Pricing - “Cloud providers possessing large quantities of spare capacity must either incentivize clients to purchase it or suffer losses. Amazon is the first cloud provider to address this challenge, by allowing clients to bid on spare capacity and by granting resources to bidders while their bids exceed a periodically changing spot price.”

Coupons and Vouchers

China's Pinduoduo reports theft of online discount vouchers to police - The next level of fraud: “an online collective exploited a loophole on its platform to ‘steal’ tens of millions of yuan worth of discount vouchers”.

Payments

Online Payments

The untold story of Stripe - In which we learn that “once turnover hit a certain level, Paypal automatically put the business on a 21 to 60 day rolling reserve, meaning that up to 30 per cent of a company's revenue could be locked up for up to two months.”

Fraud

Detecting fraudulent activity in a cloud using privacy-friendly data aggregates - Discusses a method to detect fraudulent activity (launching DDoS attacks, Bitcoin mining, …) by using non-intrusive, privacy-friendly data: billing data.

Fraud

Statistics

Huber loss - “A loss function used in robust regression, that is less sensitive to outliers in data than the squared error loss.”

Business Intelligence

Data Engineering

AI vs Data Science vs Data Engineering - “Data Engineers build data pipelines and infrastructure to ensure a constant availability of transformed data. Data Scientists analyze and build models from these data to develop new product features or drive the bottom line of the business.” As for AI professionals, their focus is on cognitive automation.

Ten Ways Your Data Project is Going to Fail - You don't need data scientists. “For ETL, hire data engineers. For reporting, hire BI analysts. The end.”

Cargo cult data science - “Data science is best viewed as a form of company culture, rather than a set of technologies. However, many firms will try to create that company culture by acquiring data-science technology, rather than working on their culture.”

Never Use Floats for Money - “This is precisely the problem we have when trying to represent 10^-1, or 0.1 in binary. There is not an exact binary representation of 0.1 or 0.01.”

Apr 28th, 2020

Fraud

Billing

Fraud in Telephony Networks - Most of telephony frauds gravitates around billing and the metering of micro-transactions. This paper feature a taxonomy (on page 6) differentiating the root causes, vulnerabilities, exploitation techniques, and the way fraudsters can benefits from them.

Mar 11th, 2020

Marketplace

Papers we love: Auctions and Bidding - A collection of papers on bidding and auctions.

Taxes

2017 Tax Software Developer's Guides - A list of test cases for developers to test their tax code against.

Fraud

Statistics

Integer percentages as electoral falsification fingerprints - In the same spirit as above, this paper show that frequency of reported round numbers in election is a signal of man-made anomalies. Might be applicable in some fraud-fighting area.

Competitive Analysis

More choice, less complexity: New Compute Engine pricing options on tap - A wrap-up of recent GCP pricing features.

Commercial Solutions

16 Online Subscription Billing Tools - An up-to-date list of subscription and recurring billing services.

Laravel Spark - Package that provides scaffolding for all of the stuff you don't want to code: subscription and team billing, invoices, but also user accounts features.

Bullet Train - Same as above, but for Ruby on Rails.

ASP.NET Zero - Multi-tenancy, authentication and authorization, invoices and payments.

Chargebee - Subscription billing & revenue operations.

Armatic Billing & Invoicing Software - Invoices, accounts receivable.

Sensus Billing Access Application - Billing and metering solutions for utility companies.

Quaderno - Calculate sales tax, VAT, and GST; automate receipts.

Orbitera - GCP's billing subsidiary.

Pricing

Usage-based Pricing

Reconcile Your Monthly GCP Invoice with BigQuery Billing Export - Behind the quest of this developer to track its expenses, you get a glimpse on cloud billing difficulties. While not explicitly pointed out, pricing cloud resources is hard and the result of quantization, granularity and rounding, between space, time and currencies.

Payments

The Best Payment Gateway for Startups - A benchmark of top payment providers, their pricing and models.

Payments

Bank Accounts

Open IBAN - Free and public IBAN validation and calculation webservice.

Fraud

Trust Score

Digital Ocean's Update on Customer Shutdown Incident - Aggressively shutting down user servers is good from a business point of view to prevent fraudster abusing free resources, until it's not.

Business Intelligence

Tools

Metabase stars26.6k - Metabase is an open source solution to explore and visualize data and supports lots of databases.

Pricing

Business Model Patterns - A list of 11 different ways to sell products and services.

Axial - Business models - 38 models for inspiration.

Mar 5th, 2020

Invoice

Refact - A design project trying to revamp a phone bill with infographics.

Mar 1st, 2020

Commercial Solutions

OpenCell - Monetization platform originating from an open-source telco billing project.

keygen - Sell and manage license keys.

Business Intelligence

Data Engineering

Why not use Double or Float to represent currency? - Because of precision: floats and doubles cannot accurately represent the base 10 multiples that we use for money.

European Spreadsheet Risks Interest Group - Horror Stories - A collection of cases in which uncontrolled and untested spreadsheet models led to lost revenue, mispricing, poor decision making, fraud and systemic financial failure.

Feb 23rd, 2020

Coupons and Vouchers

Council Directive 2016/1065 as regards the treatment of vouchers - European directive on the application of VAT when vouchers are involved.

Cost Forecast

Transforming Financial Forecasting with Data Science and Machine Learning at Uber - Discusses how Uber apply data science and machine learning in their financial planning platforms.

Time Series Prediction - A short introduction for pragmatists - Facebook's Prophet (which uses Stan underneath), seems to be worth checking to implement a cost forecast tool while taking care of seasonality.

Komiser stars2.7k - Open-source tool to stay under budget by uncovering hidden costs, monitoring increases in spend, and making impactful changes based on custom recommendations.

Feb 20th, 2020

Accounting

Double-Entry Model

Accounting Memento For Entrepreneurs (US GAAP) - An interactive form to play with accounting concepts.

Business Intelligence

Metrics

A Quantitative Approach to Product Market Fit - Metrics produced above have a greater reach, as they're used as important signals to validate product-market fit.

Payments

Avoiding Double Payments in a Distributed Payments System - RDBMS were build for banks around transactions to solve that specific issue. Then NoSQL came forcing us to carefully implement systems to avoid double spending.

Monzo's bank transfers post-mortem - Or why you should be prepared for and work around gateway provider's outages.

Why was I charged? - Under a constant stream of user complaints about payments, WordPress created a dedicated subdomains to help customers understand unexpected transactions. The trick is to add the URL of that kind of site directly in the bank statement.

Pricing

Usage-based Pricing

Allen's interval algebra - Implementing usage-based pricing is tricky, and this algebra will help you organize temporal reasoning. Also see this Stack Overflow question with clean schema.

Feb 19th, 2020

Pricing

Usage-based Pricing

Riemann sum - The starting point about quantization of usage.

Marketplace

Customized Regression Model for Airbnb Dynamic Pricing - This paper describes the pricing strategy model deployed at Airbnb.

How to Kickstart and Scale a Marketplace Business: Constrain the marketplace; Decide which side of the marketplace to concentrate on; Drive initial supply; Drive initial demand. A 4-parts series with dozen of interviews of people with direct experience building and scaling marketplaces.

Pricing

Strategy

The 7 factors to consider when pricing your startup product - Pricing is an offensive tool to reinforce your product value and underscore the company core marketing message.

Pricing Psychology - Which numbers should you use? How high should it be? Should it be rounded? This guide has 42 tricks to help you choose the best price.

Pricing

Hybrid

The Three Part Tariff - Beyond linear pricing, there is a place for an additional platform fee and free-tier component in the pricing structure.

Google Ads API: BillingCap enum - Capped actuals: monthly with rollover, an optimized pricing scheme to limit surprises from customers, in which we more or less sell quotas.

Pricing

Don't just roll the dice – Software pricing guide - Not only huge and complete collection of pricing scheme, but also the psychological effect and impact on revenue model.

Fraud

Billing

The Challenges of Operating a Computing Cloud and Charging for its Use - Skip the first 90% of this presentation by an AWS VP (which is about general system reliability). The last four slides are a good summary of what billing cloud services entails, especially the use of soft quotas to limit fraud.

Feb 18th, 2020

Payments

Handling system failures during payment communication - Dropbox's experience trying to account for an unreliable payment provider.

Payments

Bank Accounts

Swift Codes Repository stars139 - A repository that seems to scrape the website above.

Feb 17th, 2020

Payments

Credit Cards

pci-blackbox - PCI-DSS compliant card system built on PostgreSQL and PL/pgSQL.

Business Intelligence

Tools

Apache Superset stars42.1k - Enterprise-ready business intelligence web application.

Meltano - Open source convention-over-configuration product for the whole data lifecycle, all the way from loading data to analyzing it.

Practical Business Python - A blog collecting and spreading ideas on how to use Python more effectively in the business setting.

redash - Connect and query your data sources, build dashboards to visualize data and share them with your company.

insights - Insights is a tool to visually explore a PostgreSQL database, with an emphasis on generating graphs that show business performance over time.

Feb 8th, 2020

Fraud

Statistics

Peak Detection in the Python World - Simple way to detect outliers.

Benford's law - Digit distribution can be a signal of accounting fraud.

Fraud

Trust Score

The Secret Trust Scores Companies Use to Judge Us All - Nearly everything we buy, how we buy, and where we're buying from is secretly fed into AI-powered verification services that help companies guard against credit-card and other forms of fraud.

Fraud

Billing

More than 600 million users installed Android 'fleeceware' apps from the Play Store - A new kind of fraud, in which apps silently keep charging users after the end of the trial period.

Jan 25th, 2020

Business Intelligence

Metrics

16 Startup Metrics - The 2 critical metrics being Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) and Customer Lifetime Value (CLV).

Jan 21st, 2020

Marketplace

Online Ads

Samsung's online ads platform/exchange war story - How to scale to 5M bid request/s, 2ms Max Response Time.

RTB Budget Pacing Summarized stars3 - A collection of budget pacing resources for targeted online advertisements.

RTB4Free - Open Source Bidder and Demand Side Platform (DSP).

Jan 18th, 2020

Pricing

Usage-based Pricing

AWS EC2 T2 Instances Demystified: Don't Learn The Hard Way - An example of really tricky burstable instances which accrues and limits its own amount of CPU usage credits.

Calculator

Cloud Cost Calculator stars83 - Web-based tool for finding the cheapest cloud servers for a given set of requirements.

EC2Instances.info - Easy Amazon EC2 Instance Comparison.

Marketplace

Cloud Resources

The Eternal Cost Savings Of Netflix's Internal Spot Market - When you're big enough that creating an internal secondary market for instances makes economic sense.

AutoSpotting stars2k - Tool that easily and reliably converts (all) your existing AutoScaling groups to cheaper spot instances.

Coupons and Vouchers

Raising Prices is Hard - Backblaze post-mortem on raising prices on their main offer. They wanted to create an extension program based on credit system. This became a full-time job for a handful of their most senior engineers, and resulted in a six month project.

Details on Expiring DigitalOcean Credits - The reason you have to add an time limit on credits: unused ones accounts as liabilities on our balance sheet.

Hacking Scooters: How I Created $100k Worth Of Free Rides - A cautionary tale on how promo codes can be exploited to get unlimited free rides.

Taxes

{Digital,Cloud,Electronic,Online} Services VAT Rate Database stars78 - Centralize applicable VAT rates on foreign online services, for each country of residence (including territorial exceptions).

Invoice

On GCP invoiced billing - Invoiced billing (B2B-friendly payment by the customer after the service is consumed and an invoice issued) is a pain on GCP.

Digital signatures: how Sleek leverages Cloud HSM to guarantee the integrity of legal documents - Here is a great way to rely on GCP's HSM to digitally sign documents and provide an immutable audit-trail. Might be applied to invoices as well as contract agreements.

OpenTimestamps - Go beyond the solution above, and timestamp immutable document directly on Bitcoin's blockchain.

Manta stars5.2k - Flexible invoicing desktop app with beautiful & customizable templates.

InvoicePlane stars1.9k - A self-hosted open-source application for managing your invoices, clients and payments.

Payments

How to Build an Insurance Company - The importance of payment ops architecture.

EU's Late Payment Directive - European rules on applicable fees for late payments.

High failure rate of Point Of Sale devices in the upper Midwest - The root cause? People wearing a lot of wool in low humidity air, generating a lot of static.

How ACH works: A developer perspective, part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4.

Payments

Receipt

The humble receipt gets a brilliant redesign - When a Netflix data engineer revisit receipts.

Payments

Credit Cards

'Is that even legal?': Companies may be sharing new credit or debit card information without you knowing - Some credit and debit card companies have "updating service" that allows new account numbers and expiry dates to be shared with merchants. Visa's implementation is called VAU and Mastercard's is ABU.

Strong Customer Authentication - Payment Services Directive 2, explained.

Address Verification System - A system checking the matching of customer's billing addresses with the one associated with the credit card.

Fraud

Cards

How Candy Japan got credit card fraud somewhat under control - Suggestions involved either warning signals for trying to guess which orders might be fraud, or countermeasures to try to make things harder for the fraudsters.

Five Fun Fraud Facts - Another tiny collection of features we can feed to a ML system to detect fraud. Comments on HN also unearthed more qualifying signals and derived geodata on the transaction.

Credit Card Fraud Detection using Autoencoders in Keras - Tutorial on how to rely on anomaly detection to implement suspicious card transactions.

Fraud

Trust Score

GCP improved account management policies to better support customers - Or why relying too much on fraud automation might lead to disgruntled users.

Fraud

Billing

CEO Fraud - A billing team responsible for collecting payment is prey to this kind of fraud, in which the CEO is impersonated to commend exceptional payment transactions.

UX/UI

Apple Subscriptions HIG - Guide and recommendation on how to make auto-renewable subscriptions user-friendly.

Which has a higher conversion rate: A single long ecommerce checkout form or a multi-step one? - Focus first on other things in the cart, like easing anxiety and second-guessing by adding reassurance (trust marks, testimonials) near the credit card and completion steps, as well as some guarantee language that you may have used earlier in the product exploration process.

Competitive Analysis

EC2 Spot Price Tracker stars126 - Web app that collects and graphs EC2 Spot Prices.

GCP billing news - From the unofficial Google Cloud Platform newsletter.

Last Checked At: 2021-11-26T18:32:58.009Z

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