Category Archive: Recurly

Merchant Account Headaches- and how to avoid them

Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010

Recently there’s been a lot of controversy and talk about the way merchant banks provide merchant accounts. You might have seen the article TechCrunch posted about Fabulis and the fallout from Citigroup suspending their account for “nonexistent objectionable content”.

This highlights one of the major surprises that a lot of online businesses find out- merchant accounts are _not_ like personal bank accounts. As my co-founder Isaac has mentioned “I think of merchant accounts as special checking accounts because they really are special.  Special as in time consuming to open and full of headaches.” These headaches usually involve the major differences between online purchases and offline purchases.

Online transactions typically are services that do not include a physical exchange of good. As they are somewhat intangible, many merchant banks put these type of transactions as high risk and often request several years of payment history to prove you are a valid business (obviously if you’re a new startup, this is an issue).

What can you do?

The most important part is to choose a merchant account provider that understands online billing. Many of our Recurly users and colleagues have had great success with Braintree as they’re focused specifically on online business. We also have had good luck with Silicon Valley Bank. We’ve gotten a lot of poisitive feedback from our EU users about Wirecard. Regardless of the merchant account, be sure to ask these questions:

  • How much are you paying above interchange rates? (Interchange rates are the standard fees to run a credit card)
  • What are the monthly minimums? Are there invoicing or statement fees?
  • When do we have access to our funds? This can be a real issue when collection yearly subscriptions. Other times it matters if they require a minimum amount in your account (revenue equal to the past 30 days of transactions).

Please also see our post on how to choose a merchant account. If you have any questions we can help with, feel free to leave a comment or send us an email at hello@recurly.com

Testing Site support, additional currency support and a change log (oh my!)

Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010
Over the past few weeks we’ve been collecting feedback about new features, functionality and fixing a few issues. We appreciate all the feedback and have got some great updates to share today.

Over the weekend we launched a new testing site feature. This feature allows you to always have a separate version of your Recurly deployment available to run tests against. The test site behaves like a live site, except all the transactions are fake. This allows you to test and integrate with Recurly without using real credit card transactions. The service behaves identically for both test and live sites. Please let us know what you think of this update, and a couple of the UI enhancements we made along with it.

In addition to this new feature, we added expanded currency support for Japanese Yen and South African Rands.

We’re constantly making updates to Recurly- some big (like the testing site support), others smaller (like adding additional currency support) and others related to fixing issues that may come up with the service. In order to make our updates as transparent as possible, we’ve created a change log where you can track what updates we’re making to the site as soon as they happen. You can find the change log here.

What’s next this week in terms of new updates? We’re working on additional payment gateway support (SagePay in the UK), expanded one time transaction support and some additional UI and UX work. Let us know if you have any additions to the list as well as question- we’re excite to share whats coming soon!

Metered Billing Support (a.k.a. Usage-based Biling)

Wednesday, February 24th, 2010
http://www.flickr.com/photos/daveknapik/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0The billing space is evolving and growing rapidly, and subscription billing is no exception. One of the most frequently requested features we get at Recurly is for “metered billing”. Metered billing is the act of charging customers monthly based on their usage of a service, similar to a cell phone plan or electricity bill. These models can take many forms ranging from one purely based on usage to a model that combines a monthly fee with a component of usage based/metered billing.

While listening to customer feedback, we discovered that most cases of metered billing or usage-based billing can be supported today with Recurly through a combination of a subscription and one-time charges via our API.  For technical details and code examples, please see our how to guide.

At the moment, a variety of billing scenarios can easily be supported using our API.  This is only the first iteration; we’re working on making metered billing a first class citizen in our API.  If you have any feedback or questions, please drop us a line at support@recurly.com.

Ruby on Rails Client Application now available

Monday, February 1st, 2010

At Recurly, we’re all about making developers lives easier. We’ve gotten some great feedback on the Ruby client library, but we thought a simple rails application would make things even easier.

I’m happy to announce an open source Ruby on Rails client application available now up on github. The client application demonstrates the REST API calls you’ll use in order to get your rails application processing subscriptions and one time payments with Recurly.

The client application depends on Recurly’s Ruby client library, which is available as a Ruby gem (via gemcutter.org) or plugin.  Please see the Ruby client documentation for installation instructions.

If you run into any problems using the app, drop us a line over in our support forums.

Cheers,
-james

Beta now available to everyone

Tuesday, January 19th, 2010

Today is another exciting day for Recurly.  After two months of running a private beta, we’re opening up the sign-up to everyone.  With the help of our initial beta companies, we improved the user experience, expanded our payment gateway support, re-evaluated our pricing, and processed thousands of transactions.

Thanks to everyone who submitted feedback during our private beta.  And if you didn’t make it into our private beta, thanks for waiting–we’re ready for you now.

Pricing

During our private beta, we heard from all of you about our pricing.  Our percentage pricing works great for companies with lots of small transactions.  However, several companies with larger subscriptions fees and fewer accounts expressed concerns about the predictability of Recurly’s pricing.  So today we’re adding a new pricing option based on the number of your active subscribers.  At the end of the month, Recurly will calculate the percentage fee and the flat fee based on the number of active subscribers — you will only be charged the best price.  There’s no need for you to decide which tier or pricing scheme to use.  Please see our updated pricing page for more information.

Remember, our pricing is based on the number of active subscribers — not the number of accounts.  We want to know about all of your users so we can provide statistics about your free vs paid accounts.  And by tracking your free users in Recurly, you can easily service their accounts from our interface.

International Payment Gateway Support

Recurly supports 11 payment gateways today, and that list continues to grow.  With our broad gateway supports, Recurly works with companies across the globe.  If you’re curious if we support your preferred gateway, please see our full list of supported payment gateways.

Check out the Open Beta

We invite you to learn more about Recurly and join the beta today!  We’re excited to see how you’ll use Recurly.

UI Refresh, Invoices, and More Gateways

Friday, January 15th, 2010

Wow! January has been an incredibly busy month for Recurly, and we’re just halfway through! We’ve been hard at work integrating the feedback from our beta users into Recurly, and we’ve got a lot of great progress to show. Last night, we phased in a number of updates to Recurly that ranged from cosmetic (a shiny new look and feel) to enhanced features (greater international gateway support).

These updates make deploying subscription billing and interacting with your subscribers even easier. Our expanded international payment gateway support means even more choice and flexibility in the ways you transact your business.

Here are some of the top new items we’ve added:

  • Enhanced UI look and feel
  • Even greater International Payment Gateway Support
    - New gateways supported for US, UK, EU, Australia and Asia
  • Improved Subscription Management Features
  • Enhanced Subscriber Invoicing
  • Streamlined Recurly signup process
  • Additional subscriber retention features
    - Enhanced declined/cancelled card handling
    - Additional customizable and automated email options

All of these features are fully functional and live today in the beta. If you’re an international or US based company, there’s never been a better time to get started with Recurly. For access to our private-beta, email us at hello@recurly.com. Thanks and we look forward to helping you take the pain out of recurring billing!

Supernova Conference Takeaways

Wednesday, December 16th, 2009

It was an incredible week at Supernova- Wharton School of Business’ annual conference that brings together leaders in Tech, Government and Education. The goal of the yearly conference is to create discussion surrounding change and the trends impacting us as a tech community, economy, and society.

Recurly was invited to Supernova as one of the spotlight innovating startups, which enabled us to present our service to attendees. More importantly, it let us attend the various sessions. These ranged from panels focusing on the evolving “real-time web” to the changing landscape of venture funding to the future of global internet policy. The common thread through all of these areas was rapid, real-time change. Rapidly changing times, rapidly changing customer needs and rapidly evolving business models.

How Subscription Billing Fit in

We were really curious to see how the movement towards subscription billing and Freemium models would be discussed. Over the past few months, we’ve spoken to companies ranging from SaaS companies to small newspapers and nonprofits- all of whom are looking at new ways to gain revenue and donations. It was encouraging to hear that the trends we’ve seen over the past year- a movement from traditional ad based revenue models to subscription models- highlighted several times by the panel speakers. One particular presentation stood out in this area- the panel on building startups today in the aftermath of the recent recession. Rashimi Sinha (Slideshare) , Christine Heron (First Round Capital) and Dave McClure (Founders Fund) discussed their thoughts on building a company now, how to fund it and guide it to success.

What was mentioned time and again was that now is the time is right for creating a new company. More can be accomplished with less capital- thus the reasoning for the drop in the size of funding rounds and the increase in the quantity of smaller fuding rounds. For many startups, pure bootstrapping is a very viable and real option. With the drop in dollars put in by VCs to startups,  Dave felt VC’s now offer an even greater level of support for startups in non-tangible resources (assistance with marketing, partnerships, advice on social media). Most interestingly, Dave and Christine suggested if you’re building a startup today, you should be looking at a subscription-based revenue model for success.

What does this mean?
As time goes on, there is going to be a larger shift towards service paid for in smaller- but recurring- increments. Multiple attendees I spoke to from several larger enterprise software executive to the manager of a nonprofit agreed that this shift towards subscription billing/donations is a direct factor of the economy. By lowering the bar to trying a new service (or donating to a charity)- it makes it much easier for an end user to sign up for. Even if the cost of the service over the user’s lifetime is higher, the value of being able to amortize the cost over time is a great incentivizer to using a product. With the explosion in the area of subscription billing and the growing amount of businesses interested in subscription billing, we see this number only growing, And we look forward to assisting make it easy.

Recurly is featured at the Supernova Conference

Tuesday, December 1st, 2009

Wow, it’s been quite an exciting past few weeks, and this one is no different! Today we’re bringing Recurly to the Supernova Conference- a collaboration of many of the innovators in the Industry ranging from Anil Dash to Chris Anderson. The sessions  look really awesome- particularly many focusing on the changing economic times, and how entrepreneurs can “rise from the economic ashes” and succeed. One of the key themes for the conference is change- specifically how the changing economic times are creating new opportunities- and new ways to earn revenue. We’re honored that the Supernova team chose us as an innovating startup and we’re looking forward to showing new businesses how they can generate revenue through subscriptions.

We’ll be attending the sessions and will be taking notes- we’ll try to share some of the ideas we think are the most helpful. If you can think of any questions you’d like us to ask the presenters or address in our notes, please let us know.

If you’re attending, drop on by the “Innovation Alley” to find us. Thanks, and we look forward to giving you updates on the conference!

Ruby Client Library now available

Sunday, November 22nd, 2009

Today, we’re excited to announce the release of our Ruby client library for Recurly.  The library is available as a Ruby gem (via gemcutter.org) or plugin.  Please see the Ruby client documentation for install instructions.

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

Why Recurly?

Tuesday, November 17th, 2009

Recurly was born from the changing needs of web services. With the industry’s movement away from ad-based revenue models to Freemium and SaaS subscription models, the need for subscription billing has exploded.  We’ve had experience with some of the larger swiss-army-knife billing systems as well as building systems from scratch. Neither option was close to ideal. Both take an incredibly long time to set up correctly and more time to maintain. Both weigh heaving on engineering resources that could be better spent on building features. The exiting billing solutions also and an extra sting to the time needed to integrate billing- they were prohibitively expensive.

With so many startups wrestling with the challenge of subscription billing, we felt it was time to offer some help. This is why we created Recurly.

As fellow developers ourselves, we’re looking forward to helping get you up and running quickly, and taking the pain out of subscriptions. Let us show you how. Thanks and we’re looking forward to what the future holds!


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