Instant Sifu

While building a subscription based web site for one of our latest project, The need to have a robust billing system for customer management and recurring billing became obvious. Though the  initial plan was to use back paydotcom – paypal based affiliate platform that I’d been using for quite some time, the limitation of paydotcom in handling multi-tier recurring payment has become a bigger burden itself.

Coding the solution itself from ground up is not a simple jobs and might require weeks if not months. That’s when I stumbled upon a post on techcrunch which talks about a new startup dealing with this problem - recurly

Recurly is a Software as a Service platform which intend to help small companies to handles all the complexities of subscription billing so that we can focus on building our business. It strikes me that this is the service we should be using instead of coding something from ground up.

That’s when i decided to dive a little bit deeper and started to do some research on other similar services. I got to know most of the companies from the comment of the post in techcrunch.

Some of the other companies that is also playing in the same space as recurly — provides light weight subscription billing management are like chargify, Spreedly and CheddarGetter. All of them allow you to create multi-tier membership offering and helps to handle the member management and billing.

One of the hard requirement for our case is that Paypal must be one of the supported payment gateway. With that requirement in mind, I am down with only Spreedly and Recurly. Others only support Authorize.net, which is a big hassle for a non-us merchant like ours.

Both spreedly and recurly offers hosted payment page which we’d like to use at this moment instead of getting our own SSL certificate. However, what I really like about recurly is that it does offer push notifcation using webhook. It also offers the flexibility to do subscription plan change without asking user to re-enter their billing information. Spreedly does have push notification capability as well but when your customer wants to change their subsciption plan, they’ll have to revisit the hosted payment page for the plan they intend to subscribe and reenter the billing information. I do think this could means quite a hassle for customer and might hurt conversion.

One thing that is still lacking for recurly though is the ability to pre-populate the hosted paymetn page with information like name and email addresses. I do think this is an important feature because if you look at the work flow of most web apps:

1. Customer sign up at the web apps, entering their name, email etc

2. Customer redirected to hostep payment page to enter the credit card information

If the information is not pre-populated at step 2, it might cause confusion to user and causing customer to drop off.

Anyway to cut the story short, Isaac (who happen to be the founder and CEO of recurly) has been very helpful and responsive in all the questions I had on the platform. The latest reply I had from him is that the capability to pre-populate the hosted payment page should be up within the next couple of days.

Guess what, I am so ready to get our new project integrated with recurly. I’ll talk more in the next couple of posts about the recurring payment services that seems to be picking up lately with the popularity of freemium business model.