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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Hi Dave,
I'm in the same situation - requiring a recurring billing service being able to manage recurring payment changes from month to month.
Could you pls share what service you found which supports this requirement?
Thank you, Sabina
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.
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?