A good article on Bill.com’s competitor Ramp (although the author admitted that he once shorted Bill.com’s stock),
Endoscopist,
I agree NotBoring’s writeup is a good read. Yes, he is quite biased as he has used BILL’s product for his business before and he absolutely hated using it, and he now uses Ramp as well as is invested in Ramp.
But I do agree with him that Ramp’s products are “objectively” better than Divvy and Bill.com in almost all aspects by a country mile.
I am going to paste below what I wrote to some elsewhere about Ramp vs BILL:
When I held BILL at 30% allocation sometime in early April, I did huge amount of digging to compare BILL / divvy with its competitors.
From what I can tell Ramp has the best product, best product innovation, and best product pace. There is just no question about it.
After realizing BILL is far from being the best out there and Ramp was catching up very quickly to Divvy’s run rate, increasing recession risk (and the increased perception of it by the market) I quickly decided to trim BILL down to 6%. And now after (in my view) the disappointing earnings I am totally out.
BILL has the (current) biggest scale and huge network effect like you say. The market is also very massive.
That will no doubt allow BILL to grow for a very long time. But the disrupting nature of Ramp could slow its growth down in the future.
Not the best compare of all of BILL directly with Ramp right now. Maybe in the future as Ramp takes on more share in the Bill Pay category, but right now BILL’s divvy is directly comparable to Ramp, because both of them focus the most on card spending.
Divvy’s run rate as of March 2022 is 253M. Divvy launched in Jan 2018.
Ramp launched in February 2020, right before COVID started…and they just hit 100M revenue run rate in early March 2022.
There is no question that Ramp’s growth has been the most explosive ever. I think they are doing everything right in the card spend space: https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_p…
Also Ramp is clearly landing the bigger card spenders; either by inducing them to spend more via the Ramp card, and/or just bigger enterprises overall (Ramp has 5000 businesses, so at 25M in the past quarter they take $5000 in revenue per customer, meanwhile Divvy did 63.4M in the past quarter with 18100 businesses, that’s $3502 in revenue per customer.)
Ramp is the undisputed technology and product leader. Remember, Divvy has been around since 2016 (founded 2016, beta testing 2017, launch Jan 2018) Ramp launched in Feb 2020 (founded 2019)…yet Ramp has HUNDREDS of integrations with other software, while Divvy only has THREE!!! integrations: quickbooks, oracle netsuite, sage intact. Divvy STILL doesn’t even have integration with Xero!!
Ramp had Xero/netsuite/quickbooks within launch year, and Divvy couldn’t even get their 3 integrations until 2021, 5 years after founding.
Link to Ramp integrations: https://ramp.com/integrations
vs divvy’s: https://getdivvy.com/integrations/
Note also when you go to their websites, that you have to ‘request a demo’ and wait for Divvy to reach out to you, while with Ramp you sign up by clicking a button and you’ve literally started as a full blown customer within minutes.
Other difference to note: Ramp has 1.5% cashback, Divvy is generally 1% overall based on their point system, and Divvy’s rewards are locked up for 1 year
You can also see the viral nature of Ramp on G2 reviews. Ramp has a lot more reviews, 460, 4.8 stars, since 2020
While Divvy has 272 reviews, 4.6 stars on G2 reviews, existed since 2018!
There are also other slick advances that make Ramp a smoother product and other value features:
“By far the best business product I use every day is @tryramp”
https://twitter.com/iamjakestream/status/1499086876866609152…
“ This is such a nice touch from @tryramp.
Noticed that I forwarded a receipt from personal to work email to forward to Ramp, automatically reached out to let me know I didn’t have to do that, and linked me to the exact place to add my personal email in one-click.”
https://twitter.com/packyM/status/1419085275482017799
“ I mean, @tryramp is just insane”
https://twitter.com/ShaneMac/status/1479948037183180806
Finally we know Ramp is targeting BILL in the bill pay space. Of course BILL should not be too affected much, for now, as the market is huge and they have strong FI/accountant network. But…Ramp is offering their bill pay product as completely FREE. Will that eventually put pricing pressure onto BILL?
Not only that, Ramp’s bill pay was launched in late Oct of 2021, and has better reviews than BILL’s product…despite it being 6 months old. While BILL has been around since 2006 and many people still dislike it…
And the tech features Ramp has, taken directly from NotBoring’s writeup:
Ramp Reimbursements, an Expensify killer that Ramp customers get for free just for using the card. We also previewed other things Ramp might be able to do, like “automate negotiations with vendors.”
Ramp recently launched Ramp for Travel, a cool but seemingly minor new solution that lets companies manage Travel spend automatically, in a decentralized way. I think it’s huge. I think it’s the first example of transactions as mini-apps.
Another of Ramp’s mini-apps is Buyer, which Ramp acquired in August. Buyer by Ramp has begun negotiating software contracts on its customers’ behalf. It’s not a big leap to make to imagine a world in which customers hand over software buying decisions to Ramp. The product’s landing page already says, “Eliminate the headache of buying software—let Ramp do it for you.”
HRIS Integration. Easily give new employees cards with the right access during onboarding.
Already this year, it’s launched integrations with Gmail, Amazon, Lyft and others to automatically verify receipts and the ability to request repayments for out–of-policy spend from employees.
The launch of Bill Pay means that Ramp has visibility into spend that doesn’t touch the card, too. With this data, it should have the ability to tell who’s paying too much on a line-item basis, and one day, to redirect customer spend to better-priced vendors… I’ve used the product and it’s so much better and faster than Bill. It reads and itemizes invoices with 99.9% accuracy. And it’s growing. Without marketing the product beyond current customers, it’s grown 70% MoM since launching publicly, and it’s already starting to show synergistic effects with the card. Card customers are much less likely to churn, for example, if they’re using Bill Pay.
BILL/Divvy are completely outclassed in tech/innovation by Ramp. This is kind of like a Fastly vs Cloudflare comparison in this manner. And it is showing up in Ramp’s explosive growth. Not hard to see why VEnture capitalists readily raised funds for Ramp at 8.1B valuation in March 2022 (they were 3.9B in Aug 2021)…despite the ongoing tech stock crash.
The major advantages BILL has is its currently larger scale, distribution network. And a big market for all to grow (for now - remember there are many other private startups competing, like Brex -it’s not just Ramp)