Recurly is a subscription billing platform and manages customer communications via email, business performance monitoring, and account changes. A merchant bank account is required to work with Recurly. A payment gateway is part of the product but it integrates with other gateways, such as PayPal, to give shoppers a more comprehensive suite of payment options.
$0
per month
Visa Acceptance Solutions (CyberSource)
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
CyberSource, acquired by Visa in 2010 and now part of Visa Acceptance Solutions, is payment technology, and includes offerings with flexible payment solutions that work across the globe.
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Pricing
Recurly
Visa Acceptance Solutions (CyberSource)
Editions & Modules
Core
$0/month plus first $40k/mo. in revenue included for first 12 months
I think it works best for scenarios where it involves recurring billing. A subscription-based business model can benefit on the platform and maximize its features. It has great customization when it comes to billing cadence, pricing, prepayment, discount options, among others. It also works perfectly with one-off charges so either way, it's a win. It has great integration with Stripe too.
Easy, stable, and effective financial data management and also excellent for multiple contacts management and easy to provide accurate reports on multiple payment processing and various project activities. The CyberSource features are simple and easy to custom their functionalities and even scheduling using the solution is an amazing and useful data visualization platform.
It is very easy to track MRR, which gives you insights into your overall revenues and health of the subscriptions. Though MRR is pretty easy to calculate Recurly puts it beautifully on the dashboard which is very easy to read.
LTV, Recurly calculates lifetime value which is a good insight for adjusting Marketing spends. Even this is available on the dashboard.
The other features like Subscriber churn Rate, Average revenue per customer etc are really great and would help the marketing team a lot.
The coupons feature is a bit cumbersome. It can become tricky to set up, apply, and un-apply coupons for a particular client. If you have special billing cases where you discount for a few months or give a client service in any irregular fashion, using coupons can become tricky.
We have a referral program with our clients where they receive a perpetual monthly discount for each client they refer to use. The client receives this discount as long as their referral remains active with us. We would like to be able to apply a discount to a client account, and have the ability to remove that discount in the event a referral ends service with us. In some cases a client has referred several clients, and we would like to apply a discount for each referral, and still have the ability to remove one or more discounts as referrals begin and end service with us. Currently there is no way to do this in Recurly. There isn't even a very good work-around, which is disappointing.
price transparency- it's hard to know exactly what you're being charged for. We are charged a small % of each incoming payment batch, so AR reconciliation is more difficult
implementation- significant time and expertise required to get everything up and running smoothly
I believe we would continue to use Recurly because they have shown that they are continually improving their software, and they listen to their customers
Fewer codings are needed, however, the simplicity with Recurly is found once all the information needed is there. I have seen where Recurly is integrated with any other product we use; however, Salesforce does have the ability to be integrated with other products. This is done through coding.
Cybersource is a decent product but 2 things are driving us to look at others options. First is the lack of customer service. Every issue that requires help is dreaded as you know if will not be an easy process. This tags into the communication access with them. Multiple emails are generally required to get any response. There have been times when we requested information about PCI compliance that they never responded. Second is the cost savings with others processors. Currently we are leaning towards Elavon as their replacement.
Providing an interface for our subscribers to manage their own accounts has simplified our business tremendously. This alone has freed up hours of our staff's time each day.
Many customers receive new credit cards due to expiration or fraud. The time we spent in updating this information prior to using Recurly's Revenue Recovery feature versus now is significant.
