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, Ruby, and 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 library is coming soon.

Because our API now supports better 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 and our 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.

Back in March 2011, we launched Transparent Post to simplify PCI compliance for our merchants. Today, we are taking it to the next level with the release of Recurly.js. Recurly.js is our open-source Javascript library that gives you great looking credit card forms to securely create subscriptions, one-time transactions, and update billing information for your customers.

Dynamic Total Calculations and Fully Customizable CSS

The library performs client-side validation of cardholder data, immediate pricing calculations for add-ons and Value Added Tax (VAT), and coupon validation. Out of the box, the forms have a great looking design that can be easily embedded into your website. Or, you may customize the CSS to make the forms match your website.

In addition to looking great, the library handles transaction failures gracefully. Should a transaction be declined, the library automatically highlights the appropriate fields and displays proper error messages for your customers.

PCI Compliance

Recurly.js continues our tradition of simplifying PCI compliance for our merchants. After performing client-side validation on the cardholder data, the library securely submits the order details directly to Recurly. Because the sensitive cardholder data is never transmitted to your web servers, your PCI compliance scope is dramatically reduced. This allows you to host the credit card order forms on your website without the headaches of PCI compliance.

Learn More

Learn more about Recurly.js from our intro video and examples, documentation, or GitHub project.

Once you have installed the Recurly Add-On in your Heroku application, you will will have single sign-on access to your Recurly account, and will receive your Recurly fees bundled as an added line item to your Heroku invoice. This makes it easy to provision subscription billing without cluttering your desk with multiple invoices and account credentials. You will still log-in to Recurly to set up your subscription plans, manage your accounts and make any necessary changes.

The Recurly Add-On is currently in the Heroku beta process, which means it is first made available to private beta users, then open for public beta, and after having been reviewed by a number of beta testers, it will become a permanent Heroku Add-On available for everyone.

FOR ACCESS: You can join the Heroku beta program at http://beta.heroku.com/signup.

We’ve already received very positive feedback from early testers, and look forward to receiving more feedback from the rest of you.

Get those subscription-based applications rocking!

Cheers!

The Recurly Team

http://docs.recurly.com/

Cheers,
Isaac

Recently, there’s been a high amount of email support requests. We spool mail locally from our web application to Postfix, then deliver it out to the internet. Well, it turns out that a large amount of that email was getting dropped. Watching the postfix mail logs was a bit disheartening after seeing numerous mail servers refuse to chat with our email server. We have SPF records setup, reverse DNS, and deliver mail from a dedicated IP address — it turns out that that’s still not enough.

To our customers: I’m sorry we didn’t figure this out earlier. We haven’t done a good job delivering our billing emails to your customers. Right now, we are evaluating multiple ways to improve the email delivery rates for the emails we send to your subscribers on your behalf. There should be an immediate uptick in the delivery rate for your emails today. And over the next couple weeks, we’ll determine the best way to reliably deliver your emails with the correct domain keys, SPF records, etc so that they work even better than if you were to send the emails yourself.

To other start-ups: I hope you read this and then realize that running your own SMTP server on dedicated, non cloud-based servers can still be problematic. I thought that because we’re not in the cloud, we don’t need someone else to handle our emails — looks like I was wrong. To remedy the situation, we’re now evaluating SendGrid (shout out to another CEO named Isaac). I’ve heard great things about their service and I’ve been comparing email headers all evening. It looks like their product is doing a fantastic job handling bounced emails, invalid email addresses, ISP feedback loops, domain keys (something we didn’t have setup), SPF, and everything else. Their web UI is a little rough around the edges, but so far it looks promising. Assuming their product lives up to its marketing material, it will help us dramatically improve our email reliability.

We’re not email experts and we don’t have time to build it out ourselves — (this sounds so familiar, right?).

Once again, a big thanks to everyone for being patient as we improve our email issues.

Our REST API is pretty easy to consume, yet without an open-source .NET client library to start with, we found that our clients’ integration times took an extra day of effort.  So we started our own.

This lightweight library uses fast-forward only XmlTextWriters and XmlTextReaders along with Stream readers and writers so you can be assured it’s fast.  It also works great in .NET 2.0 and above.  And finally, it is strongly typed and boasts a wide range of explicit exceptions to help you handle errors.  The library is about 85% completed today and will be finished very soon.

So if you’re looking for a simple to use, subscription billing service to power your ASP.Net websites, check out Recurly and our open-sourced C# library.

With the Ruby client, just a few lines of code are required to start creating new subscriptions in Recurly from your Rails web app.  We designed the API to simplify the most common API requests about subscriptions.  To that end, this client library makes it incredibly easy to:

• Create a subscription and account at the same time,
• Create a subscription for a new or existing account,
• Cancel a subscription,
• Refund a subscription (full or partial),
• Update an account’s billing information (and validate the new card number or collect a balance, if there is one),
• Query subscription status (active, past due, free + plan information),
• Upgrade or downgrade the subscription
• And more…

In the near future, we’ll include a fully functional subscribe page example.  (The PHP client library has a great example already.)  In the meantime, every function of the client library is demonstrated by unit tests.

Check out our client documentation and the code.

PHP Client Updates

On a related note, the PHP client has also been updated today.  It now has support to lookup the current subscription status for a user.  And, it can perform upgrades and downgrades with a single function call.  Please see our documentation for more information, or grab it from gibhub.

As always, if you have any questions, drop us a line in our support forums and we’ll get back to you soon.

Cheers,
Isaac