How to Choose the Best Subscription Billing Software

The best subscription billing software should be specific to your technology, fulfillment, and customer engagement needs. While there are hundreds of options, the right platform can enable you to grow into new regions with relative ease, even as you navigate payment gateways, revenue recognition, and compliance regulations. 

Key Takeaways

• Choosing to buy software is a strategic decision about focus. While building a custom tool in-house offers control, it also turns your company into a billing software business, creating a permanent cost center and diverting talent from your core product. Buying a solution from a strategic partner allows you to launch faster, outsource security and compliance risks, and free up your team to focus on customers.

• Your platform should be a growth engine, not just a billing tool. The right software helps you grow faster by letting you adapt quickly without draining engineering resources. It enables you to grow smarter by providing a single source of truth for data-driven insights.

• Prioritize features that protect and grow your revenue. Look for a platform with proven tools to fight involuntary churn, such as automatic payment updates and intelligent retries. Your business strategy should drive your billing, not the other way around, so ensure the software supports flexible billing models and promotional tools.

Why do I need subscription billing software?

Subscription billing software is an application that companies use to automate and implement subscription changes across their business. Whether you’re just launching a new subscription service or have been an established player for years, subscription billing software can provide numerous benefits that directly impact acquisition, retention, and churn. Subscription billing software can help tackle things like: 

• Automating invoicing and card payment processing

• Helping you scale into new regions with local payment and currency support

• Giving you the flexibility to offer different pricing plans across your product lines

• Fighting involuntary churn to keep more revenue

• Giving you actionable playbooks to fight churn and maintain retention through pricing, promotions, and win-back campaigns 

• Automating finance and accounting compliance and recognized revenue

• Following compliance and regulations across regions without manual interference 

Should you build our own subscription platform or buy a dedicated solution?

When it comes to launching a subscription platform or managing a high performing subscription company, building vs buying a software solution is on every exec’s mind. In short, both have their advantages and disadvantages:

Build In-house: You own a custom tool

• Upside: Ultimate control. It’s a proprietary asset built exactly for your current processes.

• Downside: You’re now in the billing software business. This means a permanent cost center, diverted engineering talent from your core product, slow adaptation to market changes, and owning 100% of the security and compliance risk.

Buy software: You gain a strategic partner

• Upside: Unmatched speed and focus. You launch faster, outsource risk, and free your team to focus on customers. You benefit from continuous innovation from experts and access to innovative tools. 

• Downside: It’s an ongoing operational expense (OpEx) and you are dependent on your vendor’s roadmap for major new capabilities.

The right choice isn't about features; it's a strategic decision that will define your company's agility, global reach, and ability to outmaneuver competitors for the next decade. It can determine your strategies for retention, churn, and so much more. You’ll be able to react to subscription industry trends and ensure you’re ready for market shifts. If you’re looking for a solution that will enable you to scale quickly and help guide your subscription platform to make the most informed decisions, using a subscription billing platform is the way to go. 

If you’d like to read more on this topic, check out our checklist on building vs buying. 

What are your core requirements for subscription billing software?

So you have decided that you want to invest in subscription software, now what? The best subscription billing software should meet at least three core requirements for your business:

• Grow faster: You’ll need an intuitive platform that lets you react in real-time so you can iterate, experiment, and adapt quickly without draining your engineering resources

• Grow smarter: You’ll need access to a single source of truth for subscription information that gives you data-driven insights to capture more business

• Grow stronger: You’ll need an experienced partner that can manage subscriptions at scale, anticipate challenges, and tackle problems before they even pop up

If your subscription solution doesn’t enable you to do those three things, it shouldn’t be on your list. Subscription billing software isn’t just about plan management, it’s about optimizing subscriber lifecycle management, payments, and technical needs to help you grow your business.

What criteria should you use to choose the best subscription billing software for you?

While every business is different, there are some key considerations you should use to inform your decision:

• Industry expertise: The best platform for you is one that’s familiar with the challenges brands face in your industry. Look for a vendor with a track record of helping similar businesses succeed. As subscription fatigue sets in, you’ll need a partner that can help you navigate the waters and give you the tools to maximize retention.

• Growth accelerators: How will your subscription platform help you fuel growth? Look for a platform that can surface insights on subscription management, plan enhancements, and playbooks to grow your subscription brand. Tools like Recurly Compass do exactly that.  

• Fast time to value: Your subscription billing software should be up and running in a few months, not a year. Look for a partner that provides the implementation, training, and support you need to get the most value from the platform.

• Revenue recovery tools: Involuntary churn is a major threat to growth. Your platform should have proven tools to fight it, like automatic payment updates, intelligent payment retries, and personalized dunning campaigns.

• World-class security and compliance: Your partner must be an expert in navigating global regulations like GDPR, maintaining the highest level of PCI compliance, and providing effective, integrated fraud management tools if you are looking to scale into new regions.

• Composable commerce: Your software shouldn’t limit you on the tech integrations you need. A modular tech stack allows you to choose which technologies you need for your specific needs. You won't be locked into a tool or software that doesn’t evolve as you do.

• Actionable, real-time insights: Your platform should deliver data on the metrics that matter most — subscriber acquisition cost, lifetime value, churn, and plan performance — so you have the information you need to make smarter decisions.

• Flexible billing models: Your business strategy should dictate your billing model, not your platform. Look for a solution that supports various models, including fixed recurring, quantity-based, usage-based, and hybrid approaches.

Additional reading: How to navigate dynamic pricing for subscription businesses

• Promotional tools: Acquiring subscribers is easier with the right incentives. Your platform should offer flexible options like free trials, gift cards, and advanced couponing, along with robust tracking to measure their impact. These promotional tools allow you to showcase real value, and get customer buy-in without slowing down your team. The best part? The right software will allow you to test and launch new promotions in minutes.

• Subscription pause functionality: Reduce voluntary churn by giving subscribers the option to pause their subscription instead of canceling. It’s a simple feature that increases the chance they will come back later.

• Payment gateway management: A great platform offers flexible payment routing to increase acceptance rates and lower processing costs. It should also include automatic failover to a backup gateway during an outage so you never miss a payment.

• Time savings for your team: The best billing platform minimizes manual work, freeing up your team to focus on growing the business. Ask for case studies that show how much time other customers have saved.

• Support for global expansion: Choose a platform built to scale with you. It should support multiple currencies, languages, international payment methods, and integrations with tax software to handle complex scenarios.

What subscription billing software is actually right for you?

So we’ve talked a lot about the features, usability, and whether buying software or building it is right for you, but which one is right for you? We believe that Recurly can be the right fit for you. Recurly is a subscription growth engine for enterprise and large scale businesses looking to scale without comprising features and technical capabilities. 

Book a demo and see how you can grow.

FAQ about subscription billing software

Is subscription billing software easy to get up and running?

Your time to value is critical. You shouldn’t have to settle for an implementation that takes six months to a year. The right subscription management platform can get you operational in a matter of weeks — even for complex, large-scale integrations. This speed means you can focus on growing your business instead of getting stuck in a lengthy setup process. However, successful implementation depends on the team helping you, Recurly can get you up and running within weeks. 

How can the subscription billing software fit my needs?

The right platform is designed to be flexible because no two subscription businesses are the same. It should easily support your specific pricing models, promotion strategies, and tech stack out of the box. Don't settle for a rigid system that forces you to build workarounds. Instead, choose a platform that gives you the power to grow without limitations.

Can subscription billing software allow you to run promotions?

Getting new subscribers is tough, so your platform needs to make it easy to run compelling promotions. Basic coupons are table stakes. A strategic platform gives you the flexibility to create offers that actually drive growth. Look for the ability to:

• Offer both percentage and flat-dollar discounts

• Generate unique coupon codes in bulk

• Set redemption limits to control your budget

• Offer customizable pausing options for you to deploy for win-back campaigns

• Track the performance of every campaign to see what’s working

Do I need gateway failover protection? 

Yes — it’s a critical tool for protecting your revenue. What happens when your payment gateway goes down unexpectedly? Without a backup, every attempted transaction fails. Gateway failover automatically switches your transactions to a secondary gateway during an outage. This means your customers can still check out, your recurring renewals still process, and you don't miss out on sales.

How much time can subscription billing software save you? 

The right platform automates the manual, time-consuming parts of subscription management, freeing up your team to focus on growth instead of billing busywork. While the exact hours saved will vary, a vendor should be able to prove their impact with real-world examples. Ask for case studies from companies like yours. If they can show you how they've helped others reclaim countless hours, you'll have a good sense of the value they can bring to your business.

What are the benefits of recurring billing?

A subscription model does more than just automate payments — it creates a stronger foundation for growth. The benefits extend to you, your team, and your customers.

• Predictable revenue and smarter forecasting. A consistent, recurring revenue stream makes everything simpler, from budgeting and financial planning to making strategic decisions about where to invest in your business. Subscription makes all of this easier.

• Stronger customer relationships. Subscriptions are built on delivering continuous value, not one-time sales. The right billing software allows you to build loyalty and increase customer lifetime value, creating a "stickiness" that keeps subscribers around for the long haul.

• More flexibility to meet customer needs. With subscriptions billing, you can offer a variety of plans and payment options. This lets you meet customers where they are, allowing them to pick the price and value that’s right for them and making it easy to upgrade as their needs grow.

• Better security and efficiency. Customers enter their payment details once, and everything is automated from there. This reduces the chance of errors, minimizes security risks, and frees up your team from chasing manual payments.

What can subscription billing software do? Do I need a subscription billing and management solution?

The best subscription billing software can help you manage every aspect of your subscription program. It can help you:

• Grow subscription revenue by helping you manage and test new pricing plans and payment options

• Make billing frictionless and help you account for Recurring Billing Models, such as quantity-based pricing

• Recover revenue that would otherwise be lost by minimizing involuntary churn

• Improve decision-making by giving you deep insight into how your subscription programs are performing

• Automate tax collection

• Detect and address fraud

If you charge customers on a recurring basis, subscription billing software can help you simplify all of these workflows (and more) so you’re not managing disparate tools and trying to run your business out of hundreds of spreadsheets.

What kinds of industries use subscription billing software? Subscriptions are everywhere, and the subscription economy is showing no signs of stopping. All kinds of businesses that take recurring payments use subscription billing software, including:

• Software and SaaS

• Consumer goods & retail (including DTC brands)

• Digital media and entertainment

• Education

• Business & professional services

• Healthcare

• Travel, hospitality, & entertainment

• Government & non-profit

• Telecom, energy, & utilities

What's the difference between subscription billing software and a subscription billing platform?

Subscription billing software and subscription billing platforms usually refer to the same thing: a solution to help you manage all aspects of your subscription programs. That said, when evaluating different vendors, you should look for a true platform that can integrate with every part of your payments tech stack, from gateways and accounting software to tax calculators and fraud mitigation software.

Only when you combine the power of a subscription billing platform with the entire payments ecosystem can you optimize your subscription business and get a sense for how it’s performing.

How do subscription billing platforms usually charge?

Subscription billing platforms can use a number of different pricing models including:

• Flat fee per month

• Percentage of subscriptions

• Packaged features based on subscription volume

• Total payment volume per month

• Feature pricing

• And more!

Check out Recurly's plans to get a sense for how we charge our customers.