You can vibe code a checkout page. You can't vibe code compliance.

AI can build your checkout page in an afternoon. It can't sign a BAA, pass your PCI assessment, or keep up with auto-renewal laws in 30 states, and it won't recover the payments that fail on renewal day. Recurly has been handling all of that for 15 years.

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Billing at production scale

Your billing system holds every subscriber, card on file, renewal date, and dollar you're owed. If you're weighing build vs. buy for subscription billing, this is the platform built to scale with you as you grow.

2,300+

Subscription businesses

Running on the same billing platform today

100M+

Active subscribers

Renewing on schedule across every plan type

3.8B+

Webhook events a year

Sent to the systems that depend on billing

$1.7B

Recovered revenue a year

From payments that failed on the first try

THE BUILD PATH

Six jobs hiding behind the checkout page

Each one is its own project, and none of them is ever finished.

Plans that match how care works

Rx refills, dose escalation, add-ons, annual prepay, and pause. When a patient moves from 2.5 mg to 5 mg halfway through a cycle, somebody's code has to prorate it correctly. Until you build tools for your ops team, every new offer is an engineering ticket.

Getting paid when cards fail

Retries timed by decline code, account updater, expired card handling, and dunning emails. Card networks limit how often you can retry a card and charge fees when you go over, so a simple retry loop can rack up fees and still miss the payment.

Card data and PCI scope

If card data touches your servers, you're completing PCI's full self-assessment every year, covering all 12 requirements.

Keeping patient data where it belongs

In telehealth, a plan called "Semaglutide 2.5 mg" can count as protected health information (PHI). If that name shows up in your email tool, analytics, or data warehouse, each of those vendors needs to be covered by a Business Associate Agreement (BAA).

Cancellation and renewal rules

Federal law (ROSCA), auto-renewal laws in roughly 30 states, and an FTC rulemaking that restarted in 2026. California by itself requires separate consent to renew, an annual reminder, and online cancellation for anyone who signed up online.

Gateways and reporting

Gateway integrations that change when the gateway decides. Failover when a processor has an outage. Recovery and revenue reports your finance team can hand to an auditor.

THE COMMON PATH

Most teams build on top of their payment processor

Almost nobody builds billing from zero. What we hear from various vendors is this: the processor handles charges, and engineering has written everything else on top of it. Plans, renewals, retries, the cancel page, the reminder emails. It works until a patient changes doses mid-cycle or a webhook fails on a Saturday.

Failures don't throw errors

A webhook drops, a retry job skips a night, or a dose change leaves a patient billed at the old price. None of it crashes anything. Someone finds it weeks later in a support ticket or at month-end reconciliation.

Revenue leaks out

One GLP-1 telehealth brand we worked with was handling failed payments by hand, with bulk reminder emails sent before each retry. It recovered 17.7% of insufficient-funds declines. Recurly's analysis of the same transactions projected 77.9%.

The knowledge lives in one person's head

The engineer who wired the processor, the retry job, and the email tool together knows how it all fits. When they change teams or leave, that knowledge goes with them.

SIX MONTHS IN

What your billing stack looks like after launch

Every dashed line below is code your team wrote and has to keep working. Most of them fail without telling anyone.

Diagram of an in-house telehealth billing stack with nine systems joined by custom code. Three connections are marked as failing: a dropped webhook, a retried hard decline, and a plan name containing patient data sent to an email tool. A second panel shows Recurly as one billing layer between checkout and 20+ payment gateways.

THE AI QUESTION

What AI coding tools change, and what they don't

They make the first version of a billing system much faster to write. They don't change who's responsible for it once patients are paying through it.

Edge cases come from volume

The tricky billing bugs show up at scale: a retry schedule that lowers approval rates, a proration rule that breaks on a mid-cycle dose change. Recurly has hit and fixed those across 2,300+ businesses over 15 years.

Good retry logic needs more data than you have

Recurly's retry models learn from decline patterns across its entire network. A system you build yourself only learns from your own transactions, one failed payment at a time.

Some obligations aren't code

An AI tool can write your cancel page. It can't sign a BAA, pass your PCI assessment, or tell you when a state changes its renewal law.

Someone still has to run it

Renewals and retries run every day, whether or not anyone's watching. Code an AI assistant still needs someone on your team to monitor it and fix it when it breaks.

When building makes sense

If you have one plan, a few hundred subscribers, and no patient data in your billing records, your processor's built-in billing may be all you need for now. The math changes when you add a second product or a dose tier, start losing real money to failed payments, or bring PHI into the billing flow. For most telehealth brands, all three happen in the first year.

THE MATH

What building costs, in dollars

Salary is the cost everyone counts. Failed payments are the one that gets missed.

$135,980

Median annual pay for a US software developer (BLS, May 2025), before benefits, equity, and on-call time. Three engineers on billing is more than $400,000 a year in base salary.

$60,200 a month

Say $100,000 in renewals fails on the first try each month. At 17.7% recovery you get back $17,700. At 77.9% you get back $77,900. That's $60,200 a month, or about $722,000 a year, from the same failed payments.

Comparison criteria	Build it yourself	Recurly
Time to launch	Several quarters before billing handles your real plan mix	Live in two to three weeks through a single API
People	A standing billing team, about $136,000 base salary per engineer	Your engineers handle the integration, then get back to the product
Failed payment recovery	Manual outreach and fixed retry schedules. One telehealth brand: 17.7% on insufficient-funds declines	77.9% projected for that same brand. 72% of at-risk subscribers saved across the network
PCI scope	Full self-assessment (SAQ D) if card data touches your servers	PCI-DSS Level 1 platform. Hosted fields can keep you at SAQ A
HIPAA	You design the PHI boundaries and sign a BAA with every vendor in the path	Recurly signs a BAA and supports HIPAA-compliant data handling
Cancellation and renewal rules	Your legal and engineering teams track roughly 30 states	Self-serve cancellation and cancel-save flows are part of the platform
When something breaks	Your team finds it, fixes it, and eats the lost revenue	Recurly is accountable for the fix
Return	Ongoing cost with no revenue attached	18x average ROI

BUILD WHAT PATIENTS SEE

What your engineers keep building, and what they can stop maintaining

Buying billing doesn't mean handing over your product. Your team keeps everything patients see and everything clinical. Recurly takes the billing engine underneath it.

API, webhooks, Recurly.js

Your team builds

Checkout design and the signup flow (with Recurly.js handling card fields)
Intake, eligibility, and prescribing
EHR and pharmacy fulfillment integrations, triggered by Recurly webhooks
The patient experience in your app
Anything clinical

Recurly runs

Plans, pricing, add-ons, proration, and pause
Card vault, PCI Level 1 infrastructure, and a signed BAA
Retries, account updater, expired card handling, and dunning
Gateway connections and failover across 20+ gateways
Self-serve cancellation, cancel-save flows, and billing reports

What engineers get to work with

A REST API, webhooks (3.8 billion events a year and counting), Recurly.js for card collection, hosted pages if you want them, mobile SDKs, and a sandbox site for testing before anything touches a real card. Platform status is public at status.recurly.com, and implementation runs through Recurly's own professional services team.

They (Recurly) have the cleanest, most well-thought-out API in existence. Who knew a company could simultaneously give access to dozens of gateways while exposing a unified interface that's more simple than any of them."

Sr. Engineer

Twitch (customer since 2010)

FROM OUR CALLS

What telehealth teams tell us

Each of Recurly's decline management features alone would have taken us significant time and resources to develop and optimize. By using Recurly for subscription management, these capabilities are included with near-zero work on our side.

Maayan Kotler

Vice President of Marketing , Tailor Brands

We have been utilizing [our processor] for everything and then manually building on top of that for our plans and subscription management.

Engineering lead

health and wellness practice platform

That's where the value is: without engineering being a downstream dependency to get the job done.

Head of Product

telehealth company

ALREADY STARTED BUILDING?

Keep what works and replace what doesn't

Recurly plugs into what you've already built through its API, webhooks, and Recurly.js, and your checkout, EHR, and fulfillment systems stay where they are. When you move billing over, accounts, subscriptions, and billing information migrate in phases, and in most migrations patients never have to re-enter a card.

Not ready to move billing yet? Recurly Recover can sit on top of your current system and work only the failed payments, so you can see the recovery numbers before you change anything else.

Calculate my recovered revenue

FAQ

Questions engineering teams ask us

Can we build subscription billing with AI coding tools?

You can build a working first version, and quickly. What AI tools don't handle is running it: retrying cards within network rules, keeping PHI out of the wrong systems, passing a PCI assessment every year, and keeping up with state renewal laws. Those are ongoing jobs, and they land on your team either way.

We already built billing on our payment processor. Can we still switch?

Yes. Recurly works with the processor you already use and 20+ other gateways, so moving billing doesn't mean changing processors. Accounts, subscriptions, and billing information migrate in phases. You can also start with Recurly Recover on failed payments alone.

Will our engineers get real support, or just documentation?

Both. Recurly's own professional services team works with your engineers through implementation and migration, and support continues after launch. The developer docs, API reference, and sandbox site cover everything in between.

How do we keep QA control if non-technical teams can change offers?

Plan, pricing, and offer changes are configured in Recurly, so they don't need a deployment, and you can test them first. Use a sandbox site for plan and pricing changes, and Recurly Engage preview URLs before a prompt goes live.

Does Recurly sign a Business Associate Agreement (BAA)?

Yes. Recurly signs BAAs and supports HIPAA-compliant data handling across the billing lifecycle. The platform also holds SOC 2 Type 2 certification and meets GDPR, CPRA, and CCPA standards.

What PCI scope do we keep if we use Recurly?

Usually much less. Recurly is PCI-DSS Level 1 and listed on the Visa Global Registry of Service Providers. When you collect cards with Recurly.js hosted fields or Recurly hosted pages, card data goes straight to Recurly, which can keep you at the lighter SAQ A self-assessment instead of SAQ D. Your assessor makes the final call.

How does Recurly's recovery compare with retries we'd build ourselves?

For one telehealth brand handling failed payments manually, recovery on insufficient-funds declines was 17.7%. Recurly's analysis of the same transactions projected 77.9%. Across the network, Recurly's retries, account updater, expired card management, and dunning save 72% of at-risk subscribers. The recovered revenue calculator will estimate your number.

Is the FTC click-to-cancel rule in effect?

No. A federal appeals court vacated it in July 2025, before it took effect. The FTC restarted rulemaking in March 2026 and still enforces subscription practices under ROSCA and Section 5 of the FTC Act, and roughly 30 states have their own auto-renewal laws. For a billing team, that means the rules are still changing, and someone has to track them.

Build what patients see. Buy what they shouldn't have to think about.

Your engineers should be building the intake flow and the care experience. Let Recurly run the billing underneath it.

Get started Get the build vs. buy TCO guide