Variable amount recurring billing [closed]

Question

Hi i'm looking for a payment gateway that can do recurring billing that changes month to month. Fogbugz do this, they charge based on how many active users there were that month. All of the APIs that i've found only let you set a fixed amount and it's difficult/impossible to vary the subscription amount month to month.

Has anyone come across any services that do this?

Answer 1

All the merchant services providers I have worked with (quite a few of them BTW) offer a recurring billing. Regarding changing the amount every month, it is up to you to notify the merchant service. You can do this by making a call to the service whenever a new user is added/removed.

Answer 2

Our gateway can do exactly what you ask:

• Store payment information (check or credit card) encrypted and tokenized.
• Bill a variable amount
  • Add fixed recurring amount on any schedule
  • add multiple cards to the account so if one fails, it cascades to the next
  • Set any start date, stop date etc.
  • Plus you can accept payments from all inputs- retail, mobile, Electronic invoicing, ecommerce, web pay page. It replaces authorize.net, Payflow Pro and similar. An API is available. There are multiple methods to rebill a customer. The most simplistic is in this recurring billing video. As per others above, the system does need to be told what to bill, whether via API or manual entry.

Answer 3

BrainTree might be a good solution if you are manually triggering the re-bill each month. They will give you a 'token' that represents the credit card number originally supplied.

You can store this number, which is worthless to a potential thief.

Answer 4

Recurly does this. You simply need to track usage on your side and post it to the Recurly API. We support 'metered billing'.

[Full disclosure - I am a co-founder of Recurly and therefore biased...but objective]

Here is a demo video for how you would accomplish variable amount billing using Recurly's API. Video: Variable or Tiered Pricing tutorial for recurring billing with Recurly

Docs for this scenario.

http://docs.recurly.com/subscription-plans/metered-billing

Cheers Dan

Answer 5

im not sure of any payment gateway that does this natively, however, you can set up the recurring billing profile then modify it in your code as needed. say if you charge .05 for each login then each time they login change the profile to add .05 and at the end of the month set it back to its default.

bottom line, is that without communication, there is no way for a payment gateway to know how much or little to charge your clients.

Answer 6

I have a slight preference for managing recurrence on my end and letting the merchant gateway be as dumb as possible. It means a little more bookkeeping on my part, but once the additional tracking is built in, you know each transaction and can present it to your customer in your system, with the billing gateway just taking the sum of the open transactions, running a single charge, and closing the transactions out. Doing it on your side also means that you don't have a recurring charge marching relentlessly toward its recurring date that you have to frantically fix if something goes wrong between your application and the gateway and the new charge doesn't get set.

In the end, it should be about as much work as figuring out how to remove or change the existing recurring charge, but you get the benefit of knowing for sure that the correct charge goes through every time.