If you are a business that sells its services or products by subscription, you are looking for a solution that manages different types of subscriptions and allows you to systematically scale your business. Recurly may be the best choice for you.
What is Recurly?
Recurly subscription billing software is cloud-based billing and invoicing solution. It’s an enterprise-level platform for managing regular billing, designed to serve subscription-based companies in various fields such as SaaS, content, media, retail, Web 2.0, Mobile, publishing, consumer and business services, etc. This recurring revenue management tool enables businesses to process payments through various payment channels, manage billing, subscription plans, and invoicing.
Recurly’s own payment gateway connects business with payment processors. Platform does not provide its own merchant accounts, point-of-sale equipment or mobile card processing. Recurly integrates with enterprise solutions like Salesforce, NetSuite, Avalara, as well as with various gateways and merchant account providers such as PayPal, Braintree, Amazon Payments, Worldpay, and so on. So, platform can be considered as a third-party billing management service used with existing business’s merchant accounts.
Recurly Core Features
- Hosted payment pages
Recurly provides the business with a hosted customized checkout page compatible with PCI. Besides, payment pages are mobile optimized.
- Subscription plan management
Recurly allows you to create a variety of subscription plans with different billing cycles and pricing tiers. The platform manages the subscriber lifecycle by automating billing, proration, upgrades&downgrades, and more. Recurly also offers multiple subscriptions per account.
- Invoicing, metered billing & one-time charges
Through Recurly, a business can create invoices and record their full or partial payment by the client. In addition to recurring payments, if your service or product is metered, you can bill customers for one-time transactions.
- Trial period and setup fee configuration
Recurly provides a business with the opportunity to set a free trial period for potential subscribers for a period defined by you. In addition, you have the option to define and include a one-time setup fee in one or each subscription plan.
- Add-on offers and coupons
Add-ons can be either individual or included as additional for all clients. Also, for promotional purposes or to engage current customers through Recurly, you can offer coupons and discounts.
- Templates
Recurly offers a business a number of templates that you can modify. These include account templates, invoice templates, subscription templates, gift card templates and email templates. Email templates can be edited through HTML or plain text.
- Credit card decline logic technology
This technology helps to cope with the rejection of the customer’s card and reduce the likelihood that you will not receive payment for your services or goods. It automatically corrects 60 common error types to retry the card.
- Dunning management
In case of a failed transaction, you can send a notification via Recurly and ask the client to retry the payment. Notifications are customizable.
- Virtual terminal
Recurly provides businesses with virtual terminals. This is a secured browser that allows you to enter your subscriber’s credit card details and transfer them over the phone to fulfill various order methods, including through customer support staff.
- Sales tax collection
Recurly offers the feature of calculating and collecting sales tax, including European VAT. All transactions are carried out in accordance with all up-to-date tax rules and rates.
- Automatic billing information updates
In case of updating any customer data, in order to avoid delay or rejection of payments, Recurly compares your customer’s credit card details with Visa and MasterCard.
- Reporting
Recurly’s analytics dashboard provides business reports on a number of essential metrics – from trial and plan performances to retention rate and recovered revenue. Reports can be generated and filtered depending on your needs. There is also a function for creating graphs and charts for visual demonstration of key information.
- Data portability
Recurly guarantees that you will not lose card and transaction data if you decide to change the platform. All data will be transferred to your new provider.
- Security
Recurly is PCI-DSS Level 1 compliant. It encrypts data, follows industry guidelines on secure coding to the letter, and hosts data in facilities with first-rate physical and network security.
- Support
Recurly has a help hub, which can sort out many of those common everyday queries and also has official documentation. There’s also 24/7 online chat-based support. If you need direct telephone support, you can create a support request.
Recurly Pricing
Recurly offers business three different plans.
Core plan is the only one with an off-the-shelf price. This plan will free during 2023. No monthly fee or total payment volume fee BUT only for one year and only if business’s TVP does not exceed $40k per month. After the promotional period, merchant will be charged a monthly platform fee of $249 per month and a fee of 0.9% of TPV per month.
Professional and Elite plans are with customizable pricing. Adding of features and, therefore, pricing depends on the needs and requirements of your business. First one is for businesses with subscription revenue between $1M-$25M annually. The second suits businesses with subscription revenue over $25M annually.
Is Recurly right for your business?
Compared to its competitors, Recurly is a mid-range performing brand within its category. Platform offers easy configuration, fast integrations, and secure subscription management. Recurly offers business the tools necessary for a well-organized work.
Recurly users really speak very positively about the experience of interacting with the platform. Almost no one notes any critical flaws.
However, many novice business owners believe that the platform rather focuses on large enterprises. For most startups, the platform can be rater expensive.
Additional fees are charged for a lot of services, including Merchant bank account fees, payment gateway fees, customer/card import fees and more.
Also, customer support service periodically causes user complaints.
We can help
Choosing a billing platform is a responsible decision that can help your business grow and scale. Before integrating with any system, you need to analyze how this or that platform really suits your business. Starting from whether the platform is suitable for your field of activity and geography of sales and ending with each individual feature.
It is worth considering all options. Including startups with a more personal approach to each client and each client’s needs than in large corporations.
Rainex is a billing and subscription management platform that will allow you to manage payments and subscriptions in one tool. We offer you flexible configuration of tariff plans with any frequency and in any currencies, integration with several payment gateways at the same time, full control of your customers and their subscriptions, multilingual notifications and invoices, and much more.
To learn more, sign up for a product demonstration. We will be happy to tell you about us and answer any questions.
