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.

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

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