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

• 10/2/2011 – Added Stripe
• 1/20/2012 – Added new Recurly pricing
• 1/28/2012 – Added CheddarGetter
• 3/24/2012 – Added flat per transaction cost for merchant account
• 9/10/2013 – Updated pricing for all vendors

Assumptions

For Chargify, Recurly and CheddarGetter, when you require a payment gateway and merchant account, I assume the following fees:

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

For Chargify, I assume for each point on the cost curve that you are on the optimal (lowest cost) plan. In reality you might have overages if you exceed the volume covered by your current plan. Chargify does alert you if you will do better on a different plan though.

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 in early September 2013.