The short answer is: Flexibility and Total Cost Of Ownership We’re glad you asked – because this could save you many hours of development, and many curse words before learning the hard way – on your own precious company’s dime. Every payment gateway is designed to handle one-time transactions. Some gateways like PayPal and Authorize.Net [...]
Every so often I hear about a company that wants to bill all their subscribers on the first of the month. Sure, a lot of companies bill on the first of the month. This has its roots in the old school manual invoicing days of yore. In the digital age, there’s almost no excuse to invoice on the first of every month.
This question recently came up at the Freemium Summit on a pricing panel where I spoke; if you are offering a trial or a freemium service, when should you ask your users for a credit card number? Asking for a credit card number is a significant hurdle for most people.
This past week, I’ve heard from multiple customers who offer yearly subscriptions. They took the easy route and implemented it with one time transactions — in other words, the subscription is valid for a year and then never renews. When they find out about Recurly, sometimes they want to simulate that behavior and not have the subscription renew because that’s what their customers are used to. While Recurly can do that, there’s a better way to maximize your retention rate and still keep your customers happy.
Pivotal Labs recently invited Recurly to present a TechTalk to a room of developers. Developers are smart people and can quickly figure out how to run credit card transactions using the numerous payment gateway APIs out there. So, we decided to a range of topics that you won’t learn from reading documentation — advice you’ll only learn from experience.
As a .NET developer, I am excited to announce that Recurly now has a C#.NET client library well under way! We polled our customer base and found a large number of our customers are powering their websites with ASP.Net, but they don’t have many options today when it comes to simplifying their subscription billing.
More than once, I’ve underestimated the efforts required to create a billing system. I have yet to find a start-up that budgeted correctly for the time and effort to integrate subscription billing. If your startup is new to subscription billing, there are a few key problems you’ll soon encounter. Knowing about these issues will help you budget your development resources appropriately and help you evaluate your recurring billing options.