What tools does anthropologist use?

What are the best set of marketing/payment tools for use in startup with a subscription webapp?

• The company I work for is venturing into a new subscription model based web application. Pretty standard stuff - users signup and they pay a monthly fee to keep using the service. We are a little worried on the payment gateways and marketing tools to use. There are lot of tools out there like Ontraport and InfusionSoft that claims to do it all. Then there are tools like Intercom, Stripe, BrainTree, MailChimp etc which seems to do only part solutions. I am worried some of the do it all systems are really geared towards traditional e-commerce systems. I am also worried the other mentioned services will create a large amount of overhead trying to integrate everything. We have very few devs and resources. Our requirements are that we have a system or a combination of systems that - handle payments, do invoicing receipts etc and report back to our RoR API on anything relevant. - allow us to track our users and put them on different mailing lists and offer tips etc etc. - increase engagement over time - manage leads, interested parties etc. We've signed up for Google Analytics for tracking usage but things like Intercom offer some interesting data themselves. There's a lot of overlap between tools. Some of us think all in one system is the best way to go. My personal opinion is BrainTree + Intercom, which seem most geared towards managing a modern online business. Thoughts, advice or anything on the matter would be great! Or even pointing me towards some new tools that may help would be great. Cheers!

• Answer:

  Stripe has excellent support for subscription payments, including helping manage recurring payments and pro-rataing for upgrades to plans half way through a billing cycle etc. I believe BrainTree offers similar tools. For email stuff, I strongly recommend looking in to http://www.mailgun.com/ - they offer fantastic tools for advanced email sending. They don't have the same user-level engagement tools as something like Mixpanel or Intercom though.