Recurly + SaaS = Magic
July 21, 2015

Recurly + SaaS = Magic

Mark Sorenson | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Recurly

Overall Satisfaction with Recurly

We use Recurly to handle all of our recurring subscription credit card transactions with all our clients. It is how we automatically bill our clients for our service each month. Currently our account management, sales, and engineering departments use Recurly. Recurly solves the problem of having to remember to charge our clients for service each month. It integrates into our payment processing service, and automatically runs transactions based on a pre-configured subscription. They support coupons, credits, refunds, prorated refunds, etc.
  • Recurly is very easy to use. Their UI is very clean and intuitive, so my staff has no problem understanding how to handle payments in Recurly. They just released a new UI, which is currently in Beta, but does an even better job making the user experience great.
  • Recurly really helps reduce the time involved in collecting payment from a client. They have a dunning process which detects when a transaction has failed, and automatically re-tries running the payment several times before giving up. Recurly gives you full flexibility on how the dunning process works, including the ability to send your client payment declined notifications every few days to inspire them to update their payment info.
  • Recurly just added a new feature which can automatically update credit card information from clients whose card has expired. They ping the credit card company (visa, MC, AMEX, Discover) to retrieve new card information for cards who have just gone past their expiration dates. This is extremely handy, and has reduced the number of times we've had to contact our client to get updated billing information.
  • Recurly has excellent customer service. You can chat with an agent and receive an instant reply to your questions. I love this.
  • 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.
  • We have increased billing efficiency. Recurly saves us about 40 hours per month or more in administrative costs, plus the added mental effort to keep track of each client to make sure they are billed properly.
  • We're able to deliver better customer service to our clients by allowing them to login and access past invoices, and easily update their billing information.
  • Recurly has much better processing fees than a lot of their competitors. For example, we would currently be paying $2,000/mo more in processing fees if we were to use Stripe or Square for our billing.
Recurly does a much better job at handling subscription payments than QuickBooks Online. We only use QuickBooks Online when we have a client who cannot pay via credit/debit card. In those cases, we send out automatic invoices via QuickBooks Online instead. 95% of our clients are processed through Recurly.
Recurly is particularly well suited for SaaS business models where the pricing is standard, and there are little to no discounts involved. If your business has a variable pricing model, you may want to really dig around using their "Sandbox" trial to make sure it will be a good fit for your business.