Recurly Blog

I'm using both, since not everyone loves PayPal. Also I was very curious about how to accept "direct" credit card payments, so wanted to set it up for that reason alone. Recurly isn't super cheap, but it's a very slick interface for browsing payments and looking at stats. With PayPal I feel strong hesitation to go to their site as they are always very slow. Recurly also helps collect payments even when credit cards expire by sending reminder emails to customers with a customer-facing interface where they can change their details. I think recently they are even doing some magic to automatically update expired cards: "For Mastercard® and Visa® credit cards, we’ll automatically apply the latest account credit card information when there’s an updated credit card number or expiration date." https://blog.recurly.com/2014/05/new-feature-automatically-update-cred…

Thanks for this. We are a UK-based company and want to have a US "presence" as we have found that charging US customers from a UK payment processor results in greater than expected numbers of declined payments due to the "international" element of the transaction [1] Our plan was to get an EIN number for the business so that we can open a dollar bank account and register with a US payment processor to resolve this issue. We have no plans to hire in the US. My two questions are: (a) Is this a reasonable approach, or is there a better way ? (b) What unforeseen implications (tax, bureaucratic or otherwise) might we be opening ourselves up to by doing this ? [1] https://blog.recurly.com/2013/12/international-decline-rates/

FYI: There are error in the display of the blogpost announcing it at: http://blog.recurly.com/

Braintree is great for bringing this issue to light. I've personally been hurt by the lack of portability and have seen it affect several other companies. Here is Recurly's response: http://blog.recurly.com/2010/05/credit-card-portability/

@dangrossman I'd like to address your comment: Allow me to introduce myself. I'm Dan Burkhart, the President of Recurly. There was a very early pricing change, which was admittedly not handled well. We subsequently reached out to all of our customers twice via email surveys, and personally via telephone to all that indicated that they were willing to speak with us. Our latest pricing went over extremely well, AND we did grandfather any customer to prior pricing if they wanted. (A relatively small percentage chose to be grandfathered, since our new pricing has been favorable for the broad majority). You can see that our new pricing posted on July 1 went over extremely well. (There was only one comment on the blog post). http://blog.recurly.com/2010/07/new-recurly-pricing/ Our customer base continues to grow rapidly, and since we raised money, we have hired full time customer support. We treat our customers extremely well. I suggest you speak to Retargeter, SlideShare, KissMetrics, Unbounce, WordTracker, SproutSocial, GroupSpaces, GOOD.is, and many others to hear from them how they have been treated, and whether they would recommend Recurly. One last point. Understand that Recurly stores credit cards (in a PCI compliant) vault. The benefit to our customers is 1) that as their business scales, we uniquely offer the ability for our customers to easily transition from one payment gateway to another without ANY business interruption. As your business grows, you will surely be…

For application requirements, we (Braintree) work with Visa, MasterCard and the sponsoring banks to make sure that all our merchants are in compliance. There are other payment providers that will turn a blind eye to these requirements in addition to postponing proper due diligence and underwriting until it's a problem for a merchant. We regularly have merchants approach us that are in some sort of bind (e.g. violation of card association rules, account was frozen / shut down) because their previous payments provider didn't do things correctly. The payments industry is very complex with a lot of layers and nuances. We try our best to do things right even if it means more upfront effort. An example: "With increased revenue, the merchant bank became concerned with the increase in liability. So, the bank closed the merchant account." And because they couldn't get their credit card data back, they had to ask all their customers to enter their payment information again. http://blog.recurly.com/2010/05/credit-card-portability/ Additional Info: http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/running_small_business/archives/2… http://whiteelephantmedia.com/ http://www.braintreepaymentsolutions.com/blog/paypal-reserves-surprise

Thanks for the mentions of Recurly, we built our subscription billing engine from the ground up to make it as simple and easy to deploy subscription as possible. The untitled startup did a great unbiased review of the various subscription billing options out there (which you can find here: http://www.untitledstartup.com/2010/02/accepting-payments-on-the-real-… They ended up choosing Recurly for their subscription billing. There are several items to consider when choosing a subscription billing option. Many have already been mentioned (cost, implementation time, the country you're doing business in) but you should also consider the size of each transaction you're doing. Will you be doing lots of small transactions? Fewer large transactions? The answer to that question will have a big impact on the fees you'll pay for the off the shelf solutions (as well as your merchant account/payment gateway). In addition to transaction fees, there are a number of other hidden challenges and "gotchas" to be aware of when billing online. You can see some of our suggestions on our blog here: http://blog.recurly.com/2010/01/lessons-learned-in-online-subscription… Recurly also supports the largest amount of international payment gateway (you can find the full list here: http://support.recurly.com/faqs/payment-gateways/payment-gateway-suppo… Let us know if you have any other questions we can assist with, we're happy to help. Thanks! Tim

The credit card rules converting the free trials to paid got a bit more strict recently, e.g. notifying the users before it starts https://blog.recurly.com/visas-new-free-trial-mandate-what-you-need-to…

This is one of the stuff that I have in my bookmark library that seems most relevant: http://blog.recurly.com/2010/01/lessons-learned-in-online-subscription…

I was curious about the Recurly blog post you mentioned, so I looked it up. Here's the URL for anyone else: http://blog.recurly.com/2010/03/new-pricing/