Recurring Payments Cost Calculator

This is a simple comparison of several offerings that promise to take the pain out of recurring billing (I wrote a post outlining the pros and cons of these offerings here and updated the comparison here when Stripe was launched).

Updates

Assumptions

For Chargify, Recurly and CheddarGetter, when you require a payment gateway and merchant account, I assume the following fees (based on quotes from FeeFighters and Authorize.net — YMMV):

  • Payment Gateway: $15 per month and 10c per transaction
  • Merchant Account: average 1.94% plus 25c per transaction

You should get your own quotes for payment gateway and merchant account fees before relying on any comparisons based on the calculator.

Note that Recurly and CheddarGetter also have the option of using their own payment gateway at no charge. If you use one of these options you should add a flat transaction cost for the merchant account since you will likely have to pay this.

For Chargify I assume that you will use the $20/month customer information manager (CIM).

For CheddarGetter, I assume that you are using the “Blowing Up” plan.

For Braintree, I make the following assumptions:

  • No AMEX or international transactions are taken into account
  • On average 70% of the credit cards are qualified
  • You will use the $20/month vault option

I take no responsibility for errors in my calculations. You can look at the PHP script and feel free to contact me at gregorysean@me.com. I’ll be happy to incorporate fixes for any bugs that you may discover.

The pricing data used in the calculation was taken from the relevant websites on 1/28/2012 (CheddarGetter) 1/20/2012 (all others).