Is Recurly worth it? One of their team just sent me an email suggesting I check 'em out.
They pulled a massive bait-and-switch on their first users. Overnight, without notice, they changed their long time published pricing from pay-as-you-go (fee per transaction) to high monthly fees. For many, the cost was orders of magnitude higher. They arbitrarily decided the API would only remain accessible if you bought the highest priced plan.
It'd be fine if they gave notice of the change or grandfathered people in, but at least initially, they didn't. They just wrote condescending, insulting blog posts telling us all how we should appreciate their rate hikes. If you weren't happy with (or able to pay) the higher prices and had already integrated Recurly with your site, you were essentially held hostage. They have all your customer billing information, not you. If you want to keep billing customers, your revenue!, while you strip out Recurly and implement some other payment system and get all your users to sign up again, you've gotta pay to keep your account open in the meantime.
Eventually they figured out that screwing with their users like this wasn't a good idea after all, backtracked and came up with a new pricing scheme more like the original, but it's really too late at that point. Revenue is what makes a business. You don't play games with who you trust that to. And nobody should ever trust it to Recurly, since they're more than willing to play games with you.
If you want to outsource subscription management, check out Spreedly and Chargify. They've proven themselves more trustworthy than Recurly by far. Really, I recommend doing it yourself though, it's not that bad. PayPal subscriptions and IPN can take you a long way with minimal coding.
Allow me to introduce myself. I'm Dan Burkhart, the President of Recurly.
There was a very early pricing change, which was admittedly not handled well. We subsequently reached out to all of our customers twice via email surveys, and personally via telephone to all that indicated that they were willing to speak with us. Our latest pricing went over extremely well, AND we did grandfather any customer to prior pricing if they wanted. (A relatively small percentage chose to be grandfathered, since our new pricing has been favorable for the broad majority).
You can see that our new pricing posted on July 1 went over extremely well. (There was only one comment on the blog post). http://blog.recurly.com/2010/07/new-recurly-pricing/
Our customer base continues to grow rapidly, and since we raised money, we have hired full time customer support. We treat our customers extremely well. I suggest you speak to Retargeter, SlideShare, KissMetrics, Unbounce, WordTracker, SproutSocial, GroupSpaces, GOOD.is, and many others to hear from them how they have been treated, and whether they would recommend Recurly.
One last point. Understand that Recurly stores credit cards (in a PCI compliant) vault. The benefit to our customers is 1) that as their business scales, we uniquely offer the ability for our customers to easily transition from one payment gateway to another without ANY business interruption. As your business grows, you will surely be able to negotiate more favorable rates with your gateway, and we give you the leverage to do so. 2) We are also able to better address credit card declines and remediate the process by resubmitting additional information to satisfy the reason for the decline. This results in lower customer churn and for businesses doing any kind of transaction volume, this is a very big benefit. (Compare Recurly costs to services like Litle & Co who offer the same service for big $$).
Cheers.
Dan
I'd also suggest Chargify and Braintree.