Our team is ready to unveil our biggest update yet: API v2 and support for multiple subscriptions on a single account. API v2 incorporates feedback we heard from our merchants and allows you to integrate with even more flexibility than ever before. For many customers, multiple subscriptions enables scenarios that were difficult workarounds with our first API.
API v2 Improvements
Over the past two years, we’ve heard from hundreds of customers that our first API works incredibly well. From day one, our REST API was designed to be easy to use. We’ve lived with it for two years and found several ways to improve it: better validation errors, more transaction details, reliable pagination, links to nested resources, easier authentication, and official support for creating plans, add-ons, and coupons via the API.
Updated Client Libraries
With the release of API v2, we’re also releasing three completely rewritten client libraries: PHP (http://docs NULL.recurly NULL.com/client-libraries/php), Ruby (http://docs NULL.recurly NULL.com/client-libraries/ruby), and Python (http://docs NULL.recurly NULL.com/client-libraries/python). PHP now has better exception and error handling. The Ruby client no longer depends on ActiveResource, and it will take advantage of Nokogiri if installed for faster XML parsing. And our Python library is a dramatic update from the first version. An update to our .NET (http://docs NULL.recurly NULL.com/client-libraries/net) library is coming soon.
Because our API now supports better pagination (http://docs NULL.recurly NULL.com/api/basics/pagination), the client libraries can paginate through very long lists transparently using iterators. The libraries will automatically lazy load the next page of results when needed. The pagination also switched from page numbers to a cursor, which means the result list no longer returns duplicates if a new record is inserted while you are paginating the results.
Multi Subscription
Recurly was designed to take the pain out of subscription billing. Most merchants manage a single subscription per account and we solved that use case rather well. We took our time to really understand how successful companies manage multiple subscriptions per customer. Next, we built a new API from the ground up since we knew API v1 could never support multiple subscriptions. Finally, we added clarity to our UI to simplify multi subscription management. We hope you like the end result as much as we do.
Updated Documentation
Our documentation has been rewritten to complement our new API and client libraries. It’s fully up to date for API v2 (http://docs NULL.recurly NULL.com/api) and our client libraries (http://docs NULL.recurly NULL.com/client-libraries). We pride ourselves on providing documentation that is clear, simple, and complete. This revision has required a complete refresh of our documentation, and we’re proud of the end result.
12 Comments
Didn’t see this post until now. It’d be great if future big announcements also went out via email! Keep up the awesome work!
Interesting. I just ran into this online, and frankly am interested in a number of things you have. Are you looking at a SugarCRM integration? Sugar has been pretty ignored on this side of things. I know salesforce has more people, but I think you’d hit it off with the Sugar users out there. Let me know if it gets in the mix, please.
is there a roadmap for using multiple subscriptions with recurly.js?
Hi Jordan! Recurly.js does support multiple subscriptions, so feel free to shoot us a support ticket (support@recurly.com) if you’re having trouble.
Recurly.js does not support multiple subscriptions in a single transaction, but you can have different forms that you show/hide (using whatever method you like) depending on the subscription that a user chooses
Did you replace the first version of the API or is it still running alongside the new one?
Hi Ronan – our v1 API is still in place and continues to run alongside our new v2 API.
Now the only thing you’re missing is storage of multiple credit cards by account. It’s quite a pain to force the client to enter the same credit card data multiple times if they have multiple subscriptions/plans. The ability to store CCs and return a reference ID is perhaps the only thing you’re missing at this point.
Corey – if you’re using the API, you should be able to reference the account code and have the customer’s sign up reference the billing account information on file. Feel free to email support and we can chat about this more in-depth
Multiple subscription could be gerat feature if I needed, but how can i use api v2 and have recurly.js validate that the user/email already have an active subscription? and prevent the user for subscribing to another plan?, do i have to manage this internally with the client API?
Recurly will automatically prevent a user from signing up for the same plan twice. If you have questions about the specifics, please shoot us an email through support@recurly.com (support null@null recurly NULL.com)!
Any word on the release date of the v2 .NET client library?