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

There is a relatively new entry to the market called recurly.com that sits on top of payment gateways like Authorize. They specialize in recurring billing. I haven't taken a solid look at the service, but I listened to one of the founders talk about recurring billing on a podcast and he brought up a number of edge cases that come up when dealing with recurring billing (e.g., refunds, overdue payements, etc.) that are hard to handle. My opinion is to leave stuff like this up to the experts whenever possible. Unfortunately, I don't have sufficient information at this time to say whether or not recurly is worthy of the expert label. Does anyone have experience with the service?

Answer 2

The Authorize.Net Customer Information Manager (CIM) allows you to store customer credit card information so future payments can be semi-automated. You'll then create your own recurring billing service (could be a cron job) that determines the amount to be charged (since it fluctuates monthly) and then calls the appropriate customer profile and charges them that amount. No human interaction required.

Otherwise no payment gateway offers any service that allows for automated flexible payments since it has no way to know what the payments will be ahead of time.