Introducing Recurly

What is Recurly? How does Recurly enable subscription management and recurring billing?

Recurly is a subscription management and recurring billing platform designed for growing, global DTC and B2B businesses like yours. We make it simple to get started, speeding your time to value and kickstarting MRR. Automated billing and revenue recognition tools, out-of-the box integrations, comprehensive subscription management tools, built-in revenue recovery capabilities, and extensive analytics help you grow your subscription business faster, smarter, and stronger. Each month, our subscription and recurring billing platform supports over 65M subscribers and $1B in transaction volume.

Why should I consider Recurly to replace my current subscription and recurring billing system?

Quite simply, Recurly is the leading subscription management and billing platform. While others focus on a slim industry segment (e.g. SaaS), or on a particular size merchant (e.g. startups), Recurly offers a flexible, scalable, and easy-to-use platform that is the ideal fit for companies of any size, in virtually any industry.

There’s also the fact that we’ve been perfecting our platform since 2009, helping more than 2,200 brands—just like yours—grow their recurring revenue business. You’ll be in good company. Smart, strong subscription brands—Paramount+, Bark, and Twitch—run their businesses on Recurly.

Why do I need Recurly if I am already paying for a payment gateway/processor?

While payment gateways are essential for any subscription business, they are just one part of the equation. To run a successful business, you’ll need efficient ways to launch your plans, manage your subscribers, generate invoices, and streamline revenue recognition. The Recurly platform includes it all—a turnkey solution that provides all the tools you need to attract and retain subscribers, automate invoicing, process payments, and accurately account for your recurring revenue.


Getting Started

How do I get started with Recurly?

You can start using Recurly today! Begin by requesting a demo or signing up for a free account to experience Recurly. When you first sign up, you’ll be provided with a sandbox environment so you can play around a bit—see what we have to offer. (Note that most, but not all of the platform’s functionality, is available in the sandbox environment.) When you’re ready to begin charging and collecting money from customers, you’ll simply connect Recurly to a payment gateway and merchant account.

How quickly can I launch subscriptions with Recurly?

Within minutes! It’s quick and intuitive to configure and launch new offers, dial in best pricing, upsell one-time products, celebrate with gift subscriptions, and entice customers through discounted promotions. And if you need to make adjustments to those plans later (based on all the helpful subscription analytics), that’s just as simple.


Plans & Pricing

How do Recurly’s pricing plans work?

Merchants can choose from one of three Recurly pricing plans: Starter, Professional, and Elite. Each plan offers slightly different services and capabilities. For all plans, we bill on a per-transaction basis, a percentage of revenue, plus a base monthly fee. A per-transaction fee is assessed against successful payments, refunds, voids, authorizations, and declines. Recurly does not charge for transactions that fail due to a gateway connection issue. Additional fees may apply for using specific optional features. For more information about what each Recurly plan offers, visit Recurly Plans & Pricing or contact Recurly Sales.

Is there a setup fee to use Recurly?

No, Recurly does not charge a setup fee for customers. You may sign up and start implementing Recurly for free at any time.

Does Recurly require a long-term contract?

Recurly offers flexible plans to meet your needs. Our Starter plan is a month-to-month service and you may cancel at any time. However, our Professional and Elite plans do require a minimum of a 12-month commitment although we have options to structure the contract to drastically reduce your committed spend (i.e. pay-as-you-go).

What is the charge for set up and implementation, if any?

Thanks to the intuitive interface and helpful online resources, many Recurly merchants are able to implement Recurly on their own, without assisted implementation services. However, Recurly has a Professional Services team ready to help with any aspect of the implementation and these services are billed separately.

Does Recurly charge for each site separately?

You will be billed for each site, however Recurly can consolidate the billing for convenience as requested.


Platform Features & Payments

How do I set up and configure subscriptions in Recurly?

It’s fast and simple to set up and configure subscriptions within Recurly. Usually, the work is done for you when a customer signs up through our Hosted Payment Pages or using the Recurly API. You can also create a subscription manually through the Admin Console. You’ll follow a similar procedure to change (such as upgrade or downgrade) a subscription. You can choose to make the changes take effect immediately or on the next billing date.

What options does Recurly offer for customizing subscription plans and pricing?

Recurly makes it easy to build, launch, test, and refine subscription plans with features like these:

  • Offer free trial subscriptions, with or without a credit card.
  • Upsell and cross-sell by including add-ons to any plan.
  • Choose from multiple billing methods, including fixed, volume, tiered, stairstep, usage-based, ramp, and one-time—and customize them to make them your own.
  • Combine multiple billing models within a single plan—such as a fixed monthly fee plus a one-time setup charge.
  • Price products and plans in any of the supported (140+) currencies.
  • Allow a customer account to have multiple subscriptions.

Does Recurly support multiple currencies and international transactions?

Absolutely! Recurly supports more than 140 currencies and dozens of global payment gateways. You can find a full list here.

What are the available payment gateways and payment models supported by Recurly?

Recurly supports over 20 payment gateways including Braintree, Adyen, Cybersource, and more. See the full list here. Why so many? Because different gateways support different payment methods, some gateways support specific currencies, and others operate in specific geographic markets. By supporting a broad range of gateways, you have more options when you want to scale operations. You can add or change payment gateway partners at any time. Recurly also offers custom gateway routing so you can route payments to specific gateways based on your business needs.

How does Recurly handle taxes and VAT for subscription billing?

Recurly supports basic tax rate calculations. For more advanced options, including support for global regions and advanced tax reporting, you can connect Recurly to Avalara AvaTax Pro or Vertex. Recurly partners with Avalara and Vertex to enable our customers to bill for and collect sales taxes globally. Recurly supports VAT collection and VAT number validation for all 28 member states of the EU. Here’s a list of those countries and a bit more about VAT. In addition, Recurly’s tax inclusive pricing feature allows you to set your prices inclusive of any taxes that your customers may have.

How does Recurly handle failed payments and customer churn?

Recurly includes numerous advanced features to combat involuntary churn resulting from failed payments, including:

  • A backup payment method for each subscriber is used in the event the primary payment method fails
  • Expired card management automatically updates account billing data prior to recurring billing to keep card data fresh and accurate.
  • Customizable email communications make it easy to contact a customer due to a billing issue.
  • Automated, customizable dunning campaigns are configurable for various cohorts and can be assigned to specific plans or accounts.

What types of standard reports are made available with Recurly?

You have access to dozens of standard reports and dashboards within the Recurly platform covering every aspect of subscribers, subscriptions, billing, revenue, churn, performance, and dunning/revenue recovery. Among the most popular are Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR), Plan Performance, Churn Analysis, Recovered Revenue, Subscriber Churn, and Dunning Activity.

Can I customize my own reports with Recurly?

Yes you can! The Recurly builder is a custom report writing tool that allows you to easily create custom insights into your business. Use builder to generate a report or dashboard that combines the metrics you care about most.


Partner Integrations

What integration methods are available (e.g., APIs, webhooks, .js, hosted pages)?

You can satisfy your unique business requirements and processes across web and mobile with customizable APIs and mobile SDKs. Recurly supports two-way syncs to accelerate how you do business and increase efficiencies.

  • APIs: Use the Recurly API to support two-way communication between Recurly and homegrown or external business applications including ERP, CRM, and data warehouse. There are no additional costs to use API keys to authenticate calls to the Recurly API. Read more about Recurly APIs
  • Webhooks: These one-way notifications are sent by Recurly when something important happens, such as when a subscription is paused or canceled, to deploy a triggered communication. Then, you can take the action based on the notification, such as showing a “past due notice” on the customer’s account. Read more about webhooks
  • JavaScript: Securely handle your customer payment data within a customizable user experience using the Recurly.js JavaScript library to secure checkout forms. Create subscriptions, process one-time transactions, and update customer billing information. Read more about JavaScript
  • Hosted pages: Get up and running quickly with limited development work using hosted pages. Simply direct customers to the pages from your website or app, and Recurly takes it from there. Get more information about Hosted pages
  • Mobile SDKs: Recurly mobile SDKs make it possible for developers to integrate native in-app payments into iOS and Android mobile apps—easily and securely with PCI compliance in mind—for a transparent view of subscriber payment behaviors. Get more information about Mobile SDK
  • App connector: Automate data synchronization across app stores into Recurly with a simple no-code/low-code configuration. Learn more about App Management

What third-party applications are currently integrated and supported with Recurly?

Recurly offers native integrations with a host of applications, including Avalara, Vertex, Salesforce, Oracle NetSuite, QuickBooks Online, and Zendesk. View the full list of integration partners here. In addition, the Recurly API allows partners and customers to develop custom integration to meet business needs.


Security & Compliance

How is security and PCI compliance enforced at Recurly?

Recurly is PCI-DSS Level 1 compliant as a merchant service provider. Learn more about this topic here. We meet—and exceed—all industry-standard payment security practices to protect you and your customers.

  • When you use Recurly's hosted payment pages, your sensitive cardholder data is sent directly to Recurly. Cardholder data never passes through your environment, and this qualifies you for the simplest PCI compliance level.
  • We support GDPR compliance for our merchants operating in Europe. More about that here.
  • Recurly provides flexible data hosting options across the world to help you stay up to date with compliance and security in various geographic locations.
  • All of our data centers provide the same level of service and performance, as well as the same level of GDPR compliance.
  • Recurly partners with Kount to offer our customers world-class, fraud-prevention capabilities by validating transaction details for each new card prior to contacting the payment gateway.

Does my business need to be PCI compliant?

If your business accepts debit, credit, or cash cards as a form of payment, then you must be PCI compliant—even if the card is entered on another site via Recurly. Using our hosted payment pages is the easiest way to start accepting subscriptions and reduce your PCI compliance scope. When you use Recurly's hosted payment pages, your customers' sensitive cardholder data is sent directly to Recurly. Their cardholder data never passes through your environment. As a merchant, this qualifies you for the simplest PCI compliance level. Read more about this important topic

How does Recurly ensure security of its platform?

Recurly is hosted on the Google Cloud (also known as Google Cloud Platform), one of the largest and most secure public cloud vendors, and maintains data centers in US (Virginia and Oregon) and EU (Germany and Belgium). Recurly chose Google Cloud because it’s built for high-velocity companies and end-to-end monetization solution by providing flexibility, agility, reliability, scalability, security, high availability, and low latency. Other security features at work within the platform include:

  • Single sign-on
  • Multi-factor authentication
  • PCI compliance
  • User roles and permissions
  • Secure hosted pages

Support & Services

What type of support and services does Recurly provide?

We offer a full range of services and support to ensure you’re able to launch, run, and scale your Recurly platform successfully. Recurly development, customer support, and services teams are mainly US-based with some located in the APAC region. Read more about our service and support offerings

  • Our professional services offering includes: onboarding and migration services, report customizations, custom integrations, and custom enhancements.
  • Our support team is available 24/7 at support.recurly.com and live chat is available to all Recurly customers. Depending on your size and transaction volume, you may have access to phone support or a dedicated Customer Success Manager (CSM) who will serve as your go-to contact for all things Recurly. We also have a Strategic Support offering for select larger-volume merchants to provide training, best-practice approaches, and more.

Is Recurly support and services available to all Recurly customers in all regions?

Yes, all of our support services are available to customers in every region.