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 [...]
Supernova Conference Takeaways
Recurly is featured at the Supernova Conference
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 [...]
Ruby Client Library now available
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 [...]
Why Recurly?
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 [...]
Preventing Chargebacks
One of the things most vexing and costly concepts for new businesses are “chargebacks”. Chargebacks are when a customer’s banks forcibly requests a return of funds. In a nutshell, its when bank is the one asking for a refund vs. a customer to business transaction. What’s the big deal about this? Well, it’s a bad [...]
Creating Success from Failure
Lately there’s been a large buzz around the coolness of “Failure”. As cliché as as it may be, there is truth to finding success from failure. Recently, hundreds of people attended a full conference dedicated to the subject. FAILcon.
The conference’s focus was on the ability to quick learn from failure, recover, and iterate. With a [...]
Chris Anderson on why “Freemium” models work
Today at Y Combinator’s Startup School, Chris Anderson from Wired gave a fascinating presentation on leveraging Business Models (a great Techcrunch summary is available here). With economic times being as challenging as they are, the allure of leveraging “a free service” to build users makes sense. “Freemium” gets people using a service while at [...]
Planning a “Freemium” Revenue Model
When entrepreneurs come up with an idea- revenue plans are rarely the first thing that come to mind. After all, asking “how do we solve this incredibly painful business issue” can be a lot more exciting then “how are we going to monetize this”.
Since the first dot-com-boom, several models for revenue have come, some gone, [...]
The Challenges of 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.
How many companies does it take to process a credit card?
If you’re launching a new site and want to accept credit cards, you’ll soon learn how many companies are involved in every transaction. And, once you run into the first few declined credit cards, you’ll learn about a few companies that didn’t seem to be there before. This article describes the companies that are involved in every credit card transaction.