THE PIANO ALTERNATIVE

Piano shows you what readers do. Recurly makes sure you get paid.

Q: Can I use Recurly if I already use Piano for analytics or paywalls?

Yes. Many publishers keep Piano for audience analytics or advanced paywalls while using Recurly for subscription billing, revenue recovery, and RevRec. Recurly integrates with Piano and lets you decouple billing from content access.

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.

$82M

subscription revenue recovered

20.6%

average recovery rate

130+

media & digital publishers

What publishers are doing after Piano's billing change

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

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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

How we compare	Recurly	Piano
Architecture Fit Recurly offers a flexible, vendor-neutral architecture for long-term scale		X
Billing Depth Recurly supports full subscription management — digital, print, hybrid, bundles & usage		X
Revenue Recovery Recurly recovers transactions through intelligent retries & account updaters		X
Churn Prevention Recurly offers built-in cancel-save flows, win-backs, offers, & A/B testing		X
Pricing & Scale Recurly allows you to launch bundles, add-ons, prepaid, usage, or tiers without re-implementation		X

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.

Switch billing without disrupting your paywall

Publishers can move billing to Recurly while keeping their existing paywall and reader experience unchanged — in three steps.

Talk to an expert

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

Why is Recurly better than Piano for subscription billing?

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.

What does Piano lack in subscription management and dunning?

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.

How does Recurly’s failed payment recovery compare to Piano?

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.

Can I use Recurly if I already use Piano for analytics or paywalls?

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.

What is a dunning management solution?

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.

What subscription billing platform do media and publishing companies use?

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.

Top-rated by real users on G2

Stop losing subscription revenue to failed payments

See how publishers recover more revenue with Recurly

Request a demo

THE PIANO ALTERNATIVE

Piano shows you what readers do. Recurly makes sure you get paid.

$82M

20.6%

130+

What publishers are doing after Piano's billing change

Plan B: Leave Piano completely

How Recurly and Piano compare

Why choose Recurly over Piano for subscription billing

Switch billing without disrupting your paywall

Frequently asked questions

Top-rated by real users on G2

Stop losing subscription revenue to failed payments

THE PIANO ALTERNATIVE

Piano shows you what readers do. Recurly makes sure you get paid.

$82M

20.6%

130+

Switch billing without disrupting your paywall

Frequently asked questions

Top-rated by real users on G2

Plan B: Leave Piano completely

Why choose Recurly over Piano for subscription billing

Plan A: Keep paywall, replace billing