Some of our merchants really stumped us when they weren’t getting a copy of these emails. After months of testing, we finally found the reason why these BCCs did not reach you: Google Mail does not send emails to groups when the group is on the BCC line. In other words, you can BCC an individual with Google Mail (or GMail) but you cannot BCC a group.

To ensure that you receive a copy of the email, we now default to CC’ing a copy of every customer email to your company email address. You can switch this to BCC on the email settings page if the BCC works for you. We chose the option that will work the most reliably for new clients getting started. Existing customers will not automatically switch to the CC.

Payment Page Improvements

You’ll notice the new version is much more visually appealing. Some of the other improvements include:

• Uploadable logo
• Client-side form validation for required fields and credit card validity
• Improved settings for Google Analytics to ensure your cookies are read/set properly
• Optionally display more fields: company/organization name, phone number, and VAT number
• Optionally hide email address if email is set on URL parameters or otherwise known for the account code
• Additional credit card type logos for international merchant accounts.

All of these revisions are designed to make the page more flexible for your needs and make it easier for your customers to subscribe to your service.

As we deployed this new page template, we wanted to respect the effort some of our merchants already put into customizing their CSS for the hosted pages. We versioned the page so you may choose between the original payment page (using your existing CSS) or the new version. If you have customized any of your CSS, the page will default to the previous version. To upgrade or customize the fields, log into your Recurly account, click the Configuration tab at the top, then select Hosted Payment Pages. The settings can be different for your test site and your production site, so feel free to experiment on your test site before updating your settings on the production site.

What would you like to customize?

At the moment, the new version does not allow you to customize the CSS. If there are pieces of the new page that you would like to customize, but can’t today, please let us know. We would love to hear your feedback on the new page. We are especially interested in hearing from you if the new page helps improve your conversion rates.

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  offer recurring billing or subscription billing functionality, and while they generally work for simple recurring billing integrations, we’d like to explain what you should expect to receive by signing up with Recurly rather than integrating directly with your payment gateway.

Recurly is designed as a complete billing system for recurring billing. This means that we have put careful thought and consideration into the most common pain-points experienced by business owners handling the day-to-day billing and related customer support issues that can come along with subscription billing.

Consider this – Unlike payment gateway solutions, Recurly lets you handle all of the following scenarios elegantly:

1. Customers upgrade and downgrade between plans easily – Recurly handles proration and customer communications
2. Billing cycle changes (e.g. customer signs up for monthly plan and elects to change to yearly plan)
3. Easily issue customer credits towards future service
4. Create email invoices
5. Easily process refunds
6. Process one-time transactions
7. Customizable hosted payment pages for customers to subscribe & update their billing info
8. Provide billing support with an account management console for your customer support
9. Easily change payment gateways without any business interruption. Recurly stores your data safely and securely.
10. Keep your own systems easily in sync with secure XML notifications and/or emails.

Things To Consider Before Building Homegrown Billing Solution

Here are some common pitfalls when estimating the work required to build your own solution:

Customer Upgrades and Downgrades

Most businesses prefer to offer multiple subscription plans. It’s good practice to create a ‘migration path’ from an easy, no risk trial to the plan with the plan with the maximum expected lifetime value. This is great business practice, but the billing intricacies are non-trivial.

Let’s start with proration, it means prorating the current month’s charge against the current payment — this can get complicated quickly once you also factor in trial periods. If your customers decide it’s too much and want to downgrade, you might want to wait until the end of the current billing cycle — now you’re tracking state. These simple tasks can take months to build on your own; Recurly gracefully handles these situations with a single API call.

Failed Payments

Recurring billing APIs typically leave you in the dark when a payment fails. On average, 5-10% of your payments will fail every month due to changed credit card numbers, expiration dates, and accounts overdrawn.  (The longer the billing cycle, the higher the failure rate.) As part of offering a subscription service, you need to follow up with these subscribers to keep their billing information accurate. Recurly makes it easy to follow up with your past due accounts and gracefully collect their new billing info which eliminates costly customer service overhead.

Account Management

Subscriptions come with customer support requirements. This is a commonly underestimated cost, and Recurly makes it much easier for your company to manage without building out expensive custom solutions. Your customer service dept. can view subscription information, issue credits & refunds, and more. Any change made in Recurly will be pushed back to your web application with our Push Notifications and REST API.

Employee Retention

We like the business we’re in, but we’ve never claimed that billing is sexy.  It turns out that many of our customers have come to us AFTER having built homegrown subscription billing solutions. Beyond the expected engineering and customer service challenges outlined above, the net effect on an organization is low employee retention. Engineers typically want to work on the company’s core product. After spending 3-6 months in the “billing department”, many engineers naturally seek new employment.
When you outsource your subscription billing to Recurly, you’ll dramatically reduce your total cost of ownership related to each of these areas.

• Engineering Development Time
• Ongoing Engineering Management and Maintenance
• Customer Service and Support
• Recruiting and Training to get new (replacement) employees up to speed.

Sign up for Recurly.

It’s free to sign-up, and priced to pay-as-you-go. Your business will thank you.

We recently closed a round of fundraising, led by Polaris Venture partners along with an all-star cast of investors, including: Michael Dearing from Harrison Metal, Josh Felser and Dave Samuel from Freestyle Capital, Larry Mohr, Dave McClure (500 Startups), Babak Nivi and Naval Ravikant, and others.

What does this mean for Recurly customers?
We’re super excited because it means that we’re now going to be in a much better position to double-down on feature development to better serve our existing customers’ needs. We believe that there is no better way to ensure future growth than by making our existing customers extremely happy, and we aim to do just that.

This also means we’re hiring super talented engineers to come join our growing team here in beautiful San Francisco. If you’re a Ruby on Rails engineer with the right mix of smarts, experience, and an interest in building a great company, we’d like to hear from you. Please reach out to us via jobs@recurly.com.

We’re looking forward to the future ahead, and while we’re likely to take a moment to savor this milestone, we’re even more psyched to get back to building the next chapter.

-Cheers
The Recurly Team

Today, we’re proud to announce that we’ve designed our pricing structure to be ‘stage appropriate’. We’ve lowered the monthly fee on our lowest tier by 40%, an added variable pricing – based on your transaction volume – so that our smaller customers will enjoy lower monthly fees as their business scales. Our largest customers with high transaction volumes will pay higher monthly fees (for managing large amounts of users) but lower transaction fees.

Please review the details of our new pricing plans

We also responded to your strong feedback about feature-based pricing, and have made all Recurly features accessible to all levels of plans. Independent of your stage of growth, all of our customers can now take advantage of advanced features without paying a premium.

As promised, our customers who were live before July 1 may choose to be ‘grandfathered’ into the previous pricing if they choose. There is no action required to do so.

Thanks again for all of the fantastic input through this entire process. We’ve gotten to know many of our customers and have been pleased to hear more about your successful subscription businesses.

We look forward to hearing your comments. If you would like to speak with us directly, please send a note to pricing@recurly.com.

-Sincerely
The Recurly Team

If you customized an existing email template and would like to reset back to the new default, click the “Edit Template” button while viewing the email template, then look for a big red “Reset Template” button at the bottom of the page. It is only displayed if you have saved changes to your existing email template.

Invoice Data

The set of template variables available for our email templates has expanded to allow you to embed invoice line items. Every New Subscription, Payment Receipt, and Declined Payment email has invoice data that can now be included in the body of your email. Please see our email customization documentation for more details about the variables. Our new default templates include this data.

Headers and Footers

Previously, all headers and footers were amended to every template. We heard that you may have a different header for one or two emails; the rest will use the same header. So, now you can explicitly include your own custom header if you like, or you can use Recurly’s default header.

Disabling HTML Versions

By default, Recurly will send both the text and HTML versions for every email — the subscriber’s email client will render the HTML version if it can, otherwise it will use the text version. You can now disable the HTML version of an email template easily by unchecking a box. Just uncheck “Include HTML Version” in the email template Settings and you’re done.

To find out more about our email templates, please visit our email customization documentation. Thanks again for all your feedback.

Sincerely,
Isaac

Recurly, CEO

Instead of 4- 6 weeks, how about a 24 -48 hour approval time? Better yet, check this out -

• No application, sign-up or cancellation fees
• Extremely competitive rates (Intuit provides both merchant account and payment gateway, so no duplicate fees)
• One-Click integration with your Recurly Subscription Billing Account
• Automatic integration with QuickBooks accounting software

Intuit Subscription Billing Solution details here.

The good folks at Intuit really like what Recurly is doing for small business owners – particularly that we’ve made it much easier for merchants to launch subscription businesses.  So, they’ve stepped up with a really compelling offer and a 1-800 phone number to make your merchant account provisioning as quick and painless as you can imagine.

There is really no reason to live with less than spectacular payment processing. Intuit is a great solution for merchants in the United States, looking to serve customers from anywhere in the world.

-Get going with subscriptions!

The Recurly team

Press Release

http://docs.recurly.com/

Cheers,
Isaac

As we seek more customer feedback, we have some important messages we believe you’ll like:

Effective immediately – Recurly will be FREE during our promotional period. (see details)

After the promotional period, we will ‘grandfather’ our early customers.

That’s right. If you have already implemented Recurly, or do so during the promotional period, you will have the option to either lock-in to our earlier pricing packages, OR elect to move to our upcoming pricing. (There’s no trick here, you will be able to review the new pricing before making your decision!) Our intent is to take great care of our earliest customers, and to make sure that any subsequent changes are not the least bit disruptive to your ongoing success with us.

Most importantly, we’d like to hear from you during this process. Please participate by filling out this simple survey on pricing. We’ll take your feedback into consideration as we form our upcoming pricing plans.

We continue to be dedicated to helping you launch and scale successful subscription businesses.

Sincerely,
Isaac

Recurly, CEO