## The Two Paths To Connect Chargebee To Your Data Warehouse

There are two ways to sync data from Chargebee into your data warehouse for analytics.

### Method 1: Manually Developing A Custom Data Pipeline Yourself

Write code from scratch or use an open-source framework to build an integration between Chargebee and your warehouse.

### Method 2: Automating The ETL Process With A No-Code Solution

Leverage a prebuilt connector from a cloud-hosted solution like Portable.

![Two Paths To Connect Chargebee To Your Data Warehouse](https://drive.google.com/uc?id=1567xSmaT3hgYKwo8ipVHTWDUAeziw91G)

## How To Create Value With Chargebee Data

Teams connect Chargebee to their data warehouse to build dashboards and generate value for their business. Let’s dig into the capabilities Chargebee exposes via their API, outline insights you can build with the data, and summarize the most common analytics environments teams are using to process their Chargebee data.

### Extract: What Data Can You Extract From The Chargebee API?

Chargebee is a subscription management platform used for recurring billing and revenue management.

To help clients power downstream analytics, Chargebee offers an application programming interface (API) for clients to extract data on business entities. Here are a few example entities you can extract from the API.

- Customers
- Invoices
- Orders
- Transactions
- Quotes
- Coupons
- Subscriptions
- Etc.

You can visit [the Chargebee API documentation](https://apidocs.chargebee.com/docs/api) to explore the entire catalog of available API resources and the complete schema definition for each. As an example, here are some of the details for the customers endpoint in the Chargebee API documentation.

![Chargebee customers API](https://drive.google.com/uc?id=1ccZ73P7lQrMIDhbSETqIDfadVUgyHUBf)

As you think about the data you will need for analytics, don’t forget that Portable offers no-code integrations to other similar applications like [Recurly](https://portable.io/connectors/recurly), [SaaSOptics](https://portable.io/connectors/saasoptics), and [Billsby](https://portable.io/connectors/billsby) that can be useful for comparison purposes.

Regardless of the SaaS solution you use, it’s important to find a subscription management platform with robust data available for analytics.

### Load: Which Destinations Are Best For A Chargebee ETL Pipeline?

To turn raw data from Chargebee into dashboards, most companies centralize information into a data warehouse or data lake. For Portable clients, the most common ETL pipelines are:

1. [Chargebee to Snowflake Integration](https://portable.io/connectors/chargebee/snowflake)
2. [Chargebee to Google BigQuery Integration](https://portable.io/connectors/chargebee/bigquery)
3. [Chargebee to Amazon Redshift Integration](https://portable.io/connectors/chargebee/redshift)
4. [Chargebee to PostgreSQL Integration](https://portable.io/connectors/chargebee/postgresql)

![Common Data Warehouses](https://drive.google.com/uc?id=1dwU6fS5EI2GNuhrY_W6rgEv7ME2UMvLF)

Once you have a destination to load the data, it’s common to combine Chargebee data with information from other enterprise applications like Jira, Zendesk, Mailchimp, HubSpot, and LinkedIn.
 
From there, you can build cross-functional dashboards in a visualization tool like Power BI, Tableau, Looker, or Retool.

### Develop: Which Dashboards Should You Build With Chargebee Data?

Now that you have identified the data you want to extract, the next step is to plan out the dashboards you can build with the data.
 
As a process, you want to consume raw data, overlay SQL logic, and build a dashboard to either 1) increase revenue or 2) decrease costs.
 
Here are three Chargebee dashboards you should consider as a starting point.

1. **Monthly Subscription Summary** - When your clients pay via a recurring subscription, it's important to understand month-over-month trends to see how revenue is growing. There is no more important dashboard than subscription revenue over time.
2. **Referral Attribution (By Coupon Code)** - Chargebee offers coupon codes that can be applied to subscriptions and invoices. What's the best way to summarize how your referral program is working? By showing the most leveraged coupon codes by frequency and revenue to understand where to double down and where to move on.
3. **Customer Revenue Summary** - By breaking down revenue by customer, you can bring in transaction data, subscription data, and invoices data to understand which clients and growing and which are shrinking. This data is critical to creating a customer 360 view and can easily be joined with other data sources.

Beyond the dashboards above, replicating Chargebee data into your cloud data warehouse can unlock a wide array of opportunities to power analytics, automate workflows, and develop products. The use cases are endless.

Now that we have a clear sense of the insights we can create, let’s compare the process of developing a custom Chargebee integration with the benefits of using a no-code ETL solution like Portable.

## Method 1: Building A Custom Chargebee ETL Pipeline

To build your own Chargebee integration, there are three steps:
 
1) Navigate the Chargebee API documentation
2) Make your first API request
3) Turn an API request into a complete data pipeline
 
Let’s walk through the process in more detail.

### How To Interpret Chargebee’s API Documentation

When reading API documentation, there are a handful of key concepts to consider.

#### Authentication

There are many common authentication mechanisms. OAuth 2.0 (Auth Code and Client Credentials), API Keys, JWT Tokens, Personal Access Tokens, Basic Authentication, etc. For Chargebee, it’s important to identify the authentication mechanism and how best to incorporate the necessary credentials into your API requests.

Chargebee uses HTTP basic authentication for each request. You can [obtain your API keys](https://www.chargebee.com/docs/api_keys.html) in the admin console.

![Chargebee Authentication](https://drive.google.com/uc?id=1WbZs7Rxq0wxaZPxrEla5yWzseBgkP4QQ)

#### Authorization

In addition to understanding how to authenticate with the Chargebee API, it’s also important to understand the permissions and scopes necessary to make calls to various API endpoints and how access is granted to users and systems.

When it comes to authorization and permissions, there are a few best practices you can use when interfacing with the Chargebee API. First, use different keys for different apps. That way if an account is compromised, you only have to change it for that specific app. Only provide the minimum amount of access necessary - i.e. if read-only access is all that is needed, do not provide additional scopes.

#### Resources

It’s important to identify the Chargebee API endpoints you want to use for analytics. Most APIs offer GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE methods; however, for analytics, GET requests are typically the most useful. At times, POST requests can be used to extract data as well.
 
For Chargebee, the customers endpoint is a great place to get started.

```
GET https://{site}.chargebee.com/api/v2/customers
```

#### Request Parameters

For each API endpoint, you would like to use for analytics, you need to understand the method (GET, POST, PUT, or DELETE) and the URL (i.e. https://{site}.chargebee.com/api/v2/customers) but there are other considerations to take into account as well. You should look out for pagination mechanics, query parameters, and parameters that are added to the request path.

Chargebee uses limit and offset parameters for pagination.

![Chargebee Pagination Overview](https://drive.google.com/uc?id=16T0f4RewaZs9bf0l2TgyIqh16GOaOCYE)

Most requests require a site ID, and some API endpoints require unique identifiers from a previous API response to be included in the URL path. For instance, to list all contracts for a subscription, you need a site_id and a subscription_id that is returned from another endpoint.

![List All Contracts For A Subscription Request Parameters](https://drive.google.com/uc?id=1KJFXHbAWphAFAbWq1i5npxYiTJFlq5qm)

### How Do You Call The Chargebee API? (Tutorial)

1. Follow the instructions above to read the Chargebee API documentation
2. Identify and collect your credentials for authentication
3. Pick the API resource you want to pull data from
4. Configure the necessary parameters, method, and URL to make your first request (Either with curl or Postman)
5. Add your credentials and make your first API call. Here is an example request using curl (without real credentials):

```
curl  https://{site}.chargebee.com/api/v2/customers \
     -G  \
     -u {site_api_key}:\
     --data-urlencode first_name[is]=""John"" \
     --data-urlencode last_name[is]=""Doe"" \
     --data-urlencode email[is]=""john@test.com""
```

### How Do You Maintain A Custom Chargebee ETL Pipeline?

Making a call to the Chargebee API is just the beginning of maintaining a complete custom ETL pipeline. 
 
Here is a getting started guide to building a production-grade pipeline for Chargebee:

- For each API endpoint, define schemas (which fields exist and the type for each)
- Process the API response and parse the data (typically parsing JSON or XML)
- Handle and replicate nested objects and custom fields
- Identify which fields are primary keys and which keys are required vs. optional
- Version control your changes in a git-based workflow (using GitHub, GitLab, etc.)
- Handle code dependencies in your toolchain and the upgrades that come with each
- Monitor the health of the upstream API, and - when things go wrong - troubleshoot via the status page, reach out to support, and open tickets
- Handle error codes (HTTP error codes like 400s, 500s, etc.)
- Manage and respect rate limits imposed by the server

We won’t go into detail on all of the items above, but rate limits are a great example of the complexity found in a production-grade data pipeline.
 
For rate limits, Chargebee sets thresholds on requests per minute and concurrent requests. They provide response codes when you exceed the limit and it's recommended that you adjust the request rate using an exponential backoff if you hit rate limits. You will receive a HTTP 429 error code if you hit the rate limit.

![Chargebee Rate Limits](https://drive.google.com/uc?id=1nLSOo246AL9CIlYIUgplEfjkdpgg5jw7)

If you don’t respect rate limits, and if you can’t handle server responses (like 429 errors with a Retry-After header), your pipeline can break, and analytics can become out-of-date.

### What Are The Drawbacks Of Building A Chargebee ETL Pipeline Yourself?

You can probably tell at this point that there is a lot of work that goes into building and maintaining an ETL pipeline from Chargebee to your data warehouse.
 
If you want less development work,  faster insights, and no ongoing responsibilities, you should consider a cloud-hosted ETL solution.
 
Let’s walk through the setup process for a no-code ETL solution and its benefits.

## Method 2: Using A No-Code Chargebee ETL Solution

No-code ETL solutions are simple. Vendors are specialized in building and maintaining data pipelines on your behalf. Instead of starting from scratch for each integration. Companies like Portable create [connector templates](https://portable.io/connectors) that can be leveraged by hundreds or thousands of clients.

### Step-By-Step Tutorial For Configuring A Chargebee ETL Pipeline

Off-the-shelf ETL tools offer a no-code setup process. Here are the instructions to connect Chargebee to your cloud data warehouse with Portable.

1. [Create an account](https://app.portable.io/login) (no credit card required)
2. Add a source - Search for and select Chargebee
3. Authenticate with Chargebee using the instructions in the Portable console
4. Select your warehouse (Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, or PostgreSQL) and authenticate
5. Set up a flow connecting Chargebee to your analytics environment
6. Run your flow to replicate data from Chargebee to your warehouse
7. Use the dropdown to set your data flow to run on a cadence

## What Are The Benefits Of Using Portable For Chargebee ETL?

### No-Code Simplicity

Start moving Chargebee data in minutes. Save yourself the headaches of reading API documentation, writing code, and worrying about maintenance. Leave the hassle to us.

### Easy To Understand [Pricing](https://portable.io/pricing)

With predictable, fixed-cost pricing per data flow, you know exactly how much your Chargebee integration will cost every month.

### Fast Development Speeds

Access lightning-fast connector development. Portable can build new integrations on-demand in hours or days.

### Hands-On Support

APIs change. Schemas evolve. Chargebee will have maintenance issues and errors. With Portable, we will do everything in our power to make your life easier.

### Unlimited Data Volumes

You can move as much Chargebee data as you want without worrying about usage credits or overages. Instead of analyzing your ETL costs, you should be analyzing your data.

### Free To Get Started

Sign up and get started for free. You don’t need a credit card to manually trigger a data sync, so you can try all of our connectors before paying a dime.

ETL Chargebee to your data warehouse for analytics

Select your warehouse to see the benefits of connecting Chargebee for analytics

Stop waiting for your data.Start using Portable today.