At Recurly, we always advise our clients to keep their pricing simple. Simple pricing reduces friction between you and the customer; it’s difficult to see value when the pricing is difficult to explain. After months of innovating in the subscription billing space, we are also innovating with our pricing. Today, we are announcing three ways to purchase Recurly.
Most billing providers prices increase as your business becomes more successful. Instead, we are aligning our subscription packages around our features. With our three packages, you have access to a wide variety of options appropriate for small projects to large companies.
Please visit http://recurly.com/pricing (http://recurly NULL.com/pricing) for our new pricing details.
Pricing advice to other businesses
When we priced our service around a mixture of usage (subscribers and revenue), we received dozens of very technical questions about the nuances of our billing calculations. At the end of the day, customers need to understand what they’re going to pay to correlate price to value. My advise to other businesses is not to avoid usage based billing, but rather to keep the pricing clear. Cell phone companies can charge per minute because there’s no ambiguity over the service usage. For us, it’s more difficult to charge per subscriber because we also have free subscribers, trial subscribers, and one-time transactions. If your usage parameters can be difficult to explain, then look at other ways of aligning the pricing to your value.
Pricing clarity goes a long way to simplifying sales and implementation.
Feedback
As always, we welcome your feedback. Please drop us an email if you have any questions or concerns. We look forward to helping you get more money in the bank.
Please see our Pricing and Signup (http://recurly NULL.com/pricing).
26 Comments
Well I was considering using you, however these new prices are crazy.
It would be alot better to base it on usage rather than features, limiting the features makes it harder for me to make money and less likley that I would continue.
I echo Jon. After much deliberation, billing came down to Recurly and a competitor. Was ready to pull the trigger on dev/branding billing next week for new product next week with recurly. Unfortunately, this pricing is no longer startup friendly.
Please note…I understand you need to earn a buck, and I’m far from looking for handouts…but let’s be clear with the whole 2.0/3.0 paradigm…that companies like you preach…
Value and pricing based upon “feature” and bullet point is the old school enterprise software bloatware formula. Usage based is the new economically sound, SaaS, pay as you go methodology.
This takes a major step backwards.
Jon, please shoot me an email at isaac [at] recurly. We want to work with our existing beta customer who signed up under the previous pricing model and we want your feedback. Thanks!
I really like this pricing plan, both as a potential customer and as a startup guy. From the customer perspective, the cost certainty is huge – now I don’t have to worry about how my economics change as my acquisition changes. I’d much rather know up front how many transactions I need to do to cover my nut.
As a startup guy, the steps here are brilliant – they’re very clear additional values, and they’re not surreptitiously tied to usage. White label is worth a step up; one-time payments are worth a step up. Here’s post I did on startup pricing strategy before I started my Meat in the Sky blog: http://www.sachinagarwal.com/setting-pricing-for-a-startup-the-rule-of-80 (http://www NULL.sachinagarwal NULL.com/setting-pricing-for-a-startup-the-rule-of-80) Recurly avoids the whole Rule of 80 because they’re entirely not usage pricing; bravo!
Agreed that white label is worth a step. Metered usage as well.
Disagree that one-time payments should be. That’s like paying for ala carte for tires with a car.
And the whole “unlimited customers”…thats like a 1TB bandwidth offer from your web host. Guess what? You’re not YouTube..you’re not going to get that type of traffic. It’s a meaningless handout.
I agree with Jon and David – this new pricing setup is kind of a shock.
Recurly’s previous philosophy of “We don’t make any money until you do,” and thereby allowing free usage up to a certain point, made a lot of sense. Not needing to make $X per month immediately upon launch takes a great deal of pressure off the shoulders of your customers, and isn’t that the whole point of your business?
The feature set is lopsided and just bizarre. I have no idea who the “Weekend package” would even appeal to. I mean, if there’s no API access and no push notifications, how the hell would my app even keep track of who’s subscribed?
I agree that the previous user-counting method was probably too complex and unwieldy, but by switching to this system you took one step forward and eight steps back.
Agree with John, David & Chris! Was dead set on Recurly for our new SaaS application currently in development. Have looked at all the others including Chargify, CheddarGettar, Zuora, Aria etc and decided upon Recurly because of your start-up friendly pricing. We had provisioned for approx €20 a month for our first year until we gained traction as we have low transaction count. However, now to get the exact same service will cost us €150 a month!
We need the API, Push Notifications & One Time Transactions as I would expect any serious SaaS business. Isaac, with respect this is the most bizarre and frankly silly pricing turnaround I’ve ever seen.
You have my email, please contact me if/when you have a change of mind otherwise it will be back to the drawing board for us..
Oh no!
I totally agree with the previous comments. The free plan up till 50 subs was the winner for me.
My app isn’t charging £100 a month for each user, it’s charging £3.
At those levels no way can I afford that sort of sunk cost – I’d be losing money from day 1. Not startup friendly at all.
Turned off by the new pricing as well…
Honestly I’d rather just have all the features and you guys take a cut of what I bring in. Otherwise my bootstrapped startup will be in the hole on day one.
As a customer currently billing real people I’m bummed by the bait and switch. I chose Recurly because of the innovative pricing. Is there a way to export my current paying accounts?
Thanks for all the feedback, guys. We understand that several of you integrated with Recurly; some will be excited about the new pricing and some will have concerns. We have not charged any of our beta customers and we want to work with you to ensure that we can continue to work together. Please drop me a line if you have any concerns about how the pricing might affect you; I will reach out to those who have left comments.
The new pricing’s a much better approach. Clearer and simpler, and allows me to offer free trials of my product without having to pay. Which helps me grow my business. Nice move.
Considering that I would never charge for one of my products if I didn’t have intentions of making more than $199/mo, I don’t see what everyone is complaining about. Recurly saves you time, and setting up a solid billing system isn’t trivial. Saved time saves money.
I’m also in the process of recommending a recurring payment solution to a client of mine. Recurly’s features were compelling, but the client was stuck on pricing confusion when compared to alternatives. This new pricing news happily surprised me today as I started to put together the comparison spreadsheet.
While I’d still love to see a free plan that limits the number of subscribers (good for use during development and private beta periods), I like this new approach to pricing.
Ryan: I think we all plan on billing more than $200 a month eventually, but not all of us can start at that level, and with Recurly’s new system we pretty much have to.
My new plan is to start things off with Spreedly (maybe Chargify, but I’m leaning toward Spreedly right now). Once I have enough customers I can consider switching to Recurly, assuming that it’s possible to migrate my customer data.
I have to concur with the other comments. I think you are missing out on a lot of transactions with a minimum package of 49. Add a free package with up to a certain amount of transactions (The amount required to earn 49$ per month) and you will have a lot more users.
I really feel defrauded here. You have my customers’ billing information already, which limits my ability to react to your sudden complete about-face in terms of pricing strategy. You went from the most startup-friendly of the new subscription management startups to the least startup-friendly.
You’re offering to make some kind of deal with existing users, but this is the core of our business we’re talking about. And you’ve already shown you can’t be trusted with it. We’re supposed to expect that as you make wild swings in business strategy in the future, you’ll keep your word on offering some radically different pricing to a couple of grandfathered in accounts?
I don’t sleep soundly at night by entrusting my business to hopes like that. More likely at some point you’ll decide we’re not worth the upkeep of separate pricing code in your app and force us to switch or leave.
A little disappointing. I work with low-budget clients who embrace a 0-debt* model for their projects, which is more relevant given the state of the economy, so these changes are pretty unfriendly to very lean 1-2 man businesses.
The major benefit to Recurly months ago was that it supported a broader range of payment gateways and was available *right then*; otherwise, it was just about the same as Chargify. Now that you’ve altered the pricing model so radically and Chargify is openly available, why should I keep recommending Recurly?
* 0-debt: an uncommon phrase I just made up to describe the type of client who keeps operating costs so razor-thin that they’re making a profit by the 2nd or 3rd sale. Seen a lot more of’em since the economy went to the crapper.
The pricing was certainly nice for start-ups before, but I would have been fine with a bit of a pricing shift. I can certainly appreciate the desire to simplify pricing. Unfortunately, this is far from “a bit” of a shift due to the way features are spread out. We’d have to be at *least* mid-tier for the API to even get off the ground, but the amount of additional code we’d need to write and maintain to keep both systems in step without push notifications make this system much less appealing than many of your competitors. While it’s painful to think of scrapping plans that we’ve already invested time in, it’s hard to ignore the discrepancy between your offering and other services. I expect we’ll be moving on as well.
Chargify is not an option if the broad gateway support was what you were after, but Spreedly supports just as many as Recurly and just became the much cheaper option for a whole range of people.
I think Recurly forgets that we can’t just move all our existing customers to them. You can’t take data out of Authorizenet CIM, PayPal recurring billing or subscriptions, or wherever it’s currently stored. So a company migrating to Recurly is only going to be able to move people over slowly, as if starting over, while billing existing clients on the old platform.
$99/month may be more than total *revenue* for a while as people move over, even longer it’ll be more than total *profit*, and it’s only after a very significant number of customers are on the platform that you even break even.
I pay less than $99/month for my Authorizenet account with automated recurring billing, customer information manager, and all the AVS/settlement fees on thousands of transactions per month.
I am actually in the beta for Chargify and Recurly comparing the 2 to one another.
Unfortunately I think this pricing change seals the deal for Chargify.
Gateways and some other things Recurly is ahead currently but when inquiring the Chargify team seems to be getting a few more gateways ready to launch.
Not sure why you guys at Recurly took this backwards leap… as a startup I need better Freemium support. This doesn’t work.
I think you forgot who your target market was – startups without experience writing billing software. These aren’t people with a lot of money. “Push notifications” are a must for any kind of third party billing which makes all but the $200/month plan essentially worthless. Your target market doesn’t have $200 a month to spend up front.
I agree that the new pricing is certainly more *clear*, but it is not affordable for most of your target market. I’ll take “confusing but affordable” any day of the week over this.
And going by the approximate 3% fees that most merchant pay for credit card txns, a startup would have to be making around $6,000 a month through recurly before the $200/month equated 3% of revenue. To even get into the range of reasonable, the fees would have to be at most 10% of revenue, which means $2000 per month minimum. I don’t think most of your customers expect to be making that much, at least not within the first 3-6 months of their service launching. Which puts recurly out of their league.
I’m not downplaying the value of your service, I’ve written recurring billing software and it’s a pain in the ass. I just don’t think this is going to work for a lot of people.
I have to agree with the negative comments, your initial pricing was great, both for you in the long term and your customers. Give us some breathing room while we startup and then benefit as we grow.
These new prices are a deal-breaker for me, and I expect to be billing a few million by end of FY1. Really bad move.
Unless you guys are bowing to some kind of ill-conceived investor pressure why not simply add these new pricing options to the old and keep everyone happy?
You are a billing company after all.
Let me be clear.
I see the majority of people here jaded by the loss of the free up to 50 plan…that was NOT the impetus for my earlier comments. I expect my customers to pay me fairly and I expect to pay a fair price for services I consume.
Freebies are good as a marketing vehicle to introduce folks to your service…As an example, I used the free online version of QuickBooks…good until you hit 10 customers. I bought the full product after only 3 customers…because of the tonnage of added value I was missing in the thick version.
So let’s get that point clear. I’m not a whiner looking for free…and if that’s the only thing the others are bitching about…I say turn their microphones off.
Here’s why i was going to move to recurly:
- One-time setup payment acceptance
- Documentation & API depth
- Styling on the hosted pages (should I choose to hold off on the API)
- The above gave me a sense of a solid solution that further provided a level of comfort. For me, relationship is everything. I will pay a little more for added value, and I will look past some deficiencies if I feel the partner (in any endeavor) is right.
Here’s where you just missed the mark:
- One-time payments should absolutely be part of any *basic* plan. If you can’t offer at a basic level what other providers have in the box, then you lose
- Goes against the grain of SaaS/Pay as you go pricing. Sorry, pay-as-you go feature doesn’t cut it. That’s old school enterprise software methodology. Even the big boys at QB got my dough with the right policy.
- Here’s the biggest problem. You did an about face with absolutely no timeline. It was immediate. Rate changes that happen the instant a blog hits the intertubes are wrong. If this is how you treat your *existing* customer base, how will you treat a potential new customer like me??
I never meant that “startup friendly” = free. I meant you understood the pain, challenge, and wanted to build lasting partnerships. And frankly, your customer lifetime value I have to believe is pretty darn high considering what a challenge it is to integrate CC/customer information and deal with PCI/Security. Give someone just 3 free customers and you’d probably have them for life because nobody wants to deal with that shit ever again.
To follow that train of thought, your target market is developers..Forget the economic scenario…They’re devs. People who historically say “That’s too expensive, I can just build that” (even when they really , really shouldn’t). Give them an easy shim into your plan (a la 3-for-free) and hook em for life. Tell them that they have to spend from the get-go…my guess is the small guys will build something internally that’s just “good enough” until they blossom and require a more robust solution.
And this new unlimited free trial?? Sorry, no charges while in *test* are an expectation…not a handout.
Oh and for what it’s worth…the labeling of your plans is really patronizing. Not cute. Guess what? By going against the grain of Pro/Premium/Advanced/Whatever, you didn’t just label your plans, you’ve “labeled” your customers. That shop with 5 guys burning the midnight oil 90 hours a week..you’re only “weekenders”…Seriously tacky and I’m sure off-putting to some.
But enough marketing advice. You’ve already provided enough of an education on what *not* to do for your competition. There is an entire book here.
Branded hosted pages and an API we’ll have to write a few more lines of code against…ok. EVERYONE is in beta and I’m gambling that the partner I select will add the features I need in good time. I assess that gamble based upon quality of solution and their engagement with customers.
Its nice to see you make postings on this topic, I have to book mark this website. Keep up the good work.
Was also considering Recurly but now I simply cannot. We need at least basic push notifications and $100 per month is a lot to begin with that we just can’t afford. Have no problem paying that once we’re in profit though.
So looks like Chargify or Spreedly.