THE PIANO ALTERNATIVE
Piano shows you what readers do. Recurly makes sure you get paid.
Piano just made a decision about your billing. Here's what leading publishers are doing about it.
"Good enough” billing could cost you millions. Recurly has helped customers recover over a billion. Let us show you how we do it.
Request a demo$82M
subscription revenue recovered
20.6%
average recovery rate
130+
media & digital publishers
What publishers are doing after Piano's billing change
Plan A: Keep paywall, replace billing
Use Recurly to power subscriptions, billing, and revenue operations — without touching Piano's paywall or analytics stack.
Benefits:
- Flexible payment orchestration — choose your processor
- Best-in-class dunning and involuntary churn recovery
- Automated RevRec for finance teams (ASC 606 / IFRS 15)
- No disruption to your editorial or analytics stack
Fortune Media — $200K+ annual lift, paywall untouched
Plan B: Leave Piano completely
Replace both paywall billing and your revenue stack with Recurly as the full system of record for subscription lifecycle management.
Benefits:
- Lower payment failure rates
- Full subscription lifecycle management
- Global payment flexibility — no processor lock-in
- Single source of truth for billing, RevRec, and analytics
A fastest-growing sports media brand — left Piano entirely, moved to Recurly Engage
Book my demo
Recurly is the one we recommend. We prefer their API, and their documentation is better too. This is the platform that's going to work better for you.
Ally Flinn
Director of Audience Engagement
The Cook Political Report
Recurly has done a really good job of creating a tremendously powerful subscription ecosystem while maintaining genuine simplicity in terms of the implementation.
Marc Ruskin
President
HockeyTV
The benefits are many from the top of the funnel all the way to the bottom… getting someone into our system… all the way to retaining them, winning them back if they leave — we just have the whole toolkit.
Allan Wills
Head of Operations
True Royalty TV
How Recurly and Piano compare
Why choose Recurly over Piano for subscription billing
Understanding your audience is table stakes. Optimizing their billing is a competitive advantage.
Payment flexibility that scales
Support ACH, SEPA, PayPal, Apple Pay, and 15+ global payment methods.
Proven dunning & revenue recovery
Recurly's AI-powered revenue optimization engine recovered $1.2B last year. Static retries leave money on the table.
Subscription-first architecture
Every feature is built for recurring revenue, not bolted onto an analytics platform. No iframes, no drag, no "thousands of lines of code" to make a simple change.
Deeper subscription analytics
Go beyond pageviews. Track MRR, churn cohorts, and customer lifetime value. Know what's making you money, not just what's getting clicks.
Passive churn prevention
Recurly Engage intercepts failed payments and cancellations with intelligent prompts that reduce involuntary churn before it happens.
Fits your stack, without lock-in
Full API control, no-code ease, and freedom to choose your payment processors.
Switch billing without disrupting your paywall
Publishers can move billing to Recurly while keeping their existing paywall and reader experience unchanged — in three steps.
Connect your payments stack
Recurly integrates with your existing payment processors and subscriber data. No rip-and-replace required.
Import subscribers
Migrate active subscriptions without impacting reader access. Your subscribers won't notice a thing.
Turn on recovery and revenue tools
Activate smart dunning, payment retries, and revenue recognition from day one.
Frequently asked questions
Recurly is purpose-built for subscription billing, revenue recovery, and churn prevention. Piano is an analytics and paywall platform with basic billing bolted on. If your priority is maximizing subscriber revenue (not just audience behavior), Recurly is the better fit.
Piano offers static retry schedules with minimal insight into recovery performance. Recurly’s dunning management software uses machine learning to optimize retry timing, recover failed payments automatically, and prevent passive churn.
Recurly’s intelligent retry engine and Account Updater automatically recover revenue that Piano’s basic dunning misses. For every $100 in payment volume, Recurly’s failed payment recovery tools save publishers an additional $20.60 that would otherwise be lost.
Yes! Many publishers keep Piano for audience analytics or advanced paywalls while using Recurly for subscription billing, revenue recovery, and RevRec. A global business news publisher uses this exact architecture. Recurly integrates with Piano and lets you decouple billing from content access.
Dunning management software automates the process of recovering failed subscription payments. It determines when and how to retry declined transactions, updates expired card details, and communicates with subscribers to prevent involuntary churn. Recurly’s ML-powered dunning recovered $1.2B in 2023.
Leading publishers including The Washington Post, Fortune, Axios, Yahoo, and Business of Fashion use Recurly. Recurly manages 12.3M+ active publisher subscribers and has recovered $82M in publisher revenue in the last 12 months.
Recognized as a leader in subscription management from the G2 community
Stop losing subscription revenue to failed payments
See how publishers recover more revenue with Recurly
