Announcing The Recurly Payment Gateway and New Pricing

Dan Burkhart — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 18:36:51 +0000

Over the past two years, we have become increasingly aware that payment gateways have been designed to serve traditional e-commerce (one-time transactions) as their primary use case. In many instances, the features and capabilities needed to process payments on a recurring basis are sorely lacking. We have viewed this as both a challenge and an opportunity.

The Recurly Payment Gateway

We are proud to announce that we have built the first payment gateway designed to support recurring billing as the primary use-case. This means that we access rich error messages from the payment processor to optimize many different common credit card decline types. As we have communicated recently, credit card declines lead to painful customer churn, which is one of the most important and sensitive metrics for any subscription business.

During beta testing, our trials demonstrated a range of 10-27% incremental lift in recovered invoices for a variety of different kinds of businesses (Both B2B and B2C).

The new Recurly Payment Gateway is now bundled with the Recurly service. In addition, we are adding critical customer retention reports so that our customers can track the long term trends of their customers by cohort month, and by subscription plan.

New Recurly Pricing

As of today’s announcement, Recurly’s pricing structure has also changed.

We now charge a simple 1.25% and $0.10 per transaction per month, with a $69 monthly minimum (as there has been for some time).

Grandfathered Pricing

Existing Recurly ‘live production’ customers will remain on their original pricing unless they choose to take advantage of the Recurly Payment Gateway, or any of our premium features – such as Retention Reports, Salesforce Integration, PayPal Payments or Multi-Currency support. We will continue to support other payment gateways to offer the broadest choice to our customers, but the cost of other payment gateways are not inclusive with our new pricing.

No Merchant Account, No Problem

All you need to take advantage of the Recurly service is your own merchant bank account. If you don’t have one already, we can help you apply and get set up with an account offering extremely competitive rates.

We’re excited about our role in helping companies to optimize their subscriber renewal rates. Our ambition is to make the Recurly service a distinct competitive advantage for our customers.

If you have any questions about the Recurly service, or the Recurly Payment Gateway, please contact sales@recurly.com.

We can help.

Cheers,
The Recurly Team.

How to maximize your yearly subscription renewals

Isaac Hall — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 17:30:36 +0000

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 renewal rate (or retention rate) and still keep your customers happy.

If your users forget about your service during the year and then they see the yearly renewal on their statement, they’re going to remember your service… and not in a good way. Worse yet, they might want their money back. That usually means they’ll ask you for a refund (and you should be willing to issue it if they really haven’t used the service) or they’ll attempt a charge-back (and that sucks for you and your bank account).

So right before the yearly subscription renews, remind your users two weeks ahead of time about the upcoming charge. This gives them plenty of time to opt-out of the subscription. It also gives you a chance to remind them of the value you provide so they will continue paying for the service. It’s just that easy to keep everyone happy and make more money.