Recurly alternative
A Recurly Alternative for Companies Paying a Percentage of Their Own Revenue
Recurly Starter is two hundred and forty nine dollars a month plus zero point nine percent of everything you bill above the first forty thousand. The percentage is the part that matters, because a good quarter raises what you owe your billing vendor. We run Zoho Billing at five hundred dollars a month, flat, and that number does not move when your revenue does.
With Cascadia you get
- Someone watching your charges
- Dunning tuned, not defaulted
- Pricing that bills the way you sell
- Tax handled before it bites
- Your account, your customers
- Fewer billing tickets to answer
The short version
Why teams pick Cascadia over Recurly
We exist for the company that bought a billing platform, configured three plans in the first month, and has not opened the dunning settings since.
What you get here
- Somebody decides how your plans and proration actually work before the first invoice goes out
- The dunning sequences written for your customers, not a retry schedule left at its defaults
- A scheduled review of which failed payments are recoverable and which are quietly churn
- One figure for the organization, so a record quarter does not raise what you pay us
- The person who configured your first plan is still reachable a year later
- A pricing change modeled before it ships, not discovered in the invoices afterward
- Involuntary churn watched on purpose, rather than noticed in a quarterly export
- The subscription sits in the same estate as the CRM record and the ledger entry it creates
What ships in the standard plan here
A platform bought in week one, three plans configured in week two, and a failed payment report nobody has opened since March.
- Somebody decides how your plans and proration actually work before the first invoice goes out
- The dunning sequences written for your customers, not a retry schedule left at its defaults
- A scheduled review of which failed payments are recoverable and which are quietly churn
- One figure for the organization, so a record quarter does not raise what you pay us
- The person who configured your first plan is still reachable a year later
- A pricing change modeled before it ships, not discovered in the invoices afterward
- Involuntary churn watched on purpose, rather than noticed in a quarterly export
- The subscription sits in the same estate as the CRM record and the ledger entry it creates
- A straight no on the first call if your billing already runs itself without help
- Tax rules, payment gateways and retry logic configured for you, not left as options
Where the platform ends and the operating starts
Plans, proration and dunning configured by somebody who knows what you sell, and revised when the packaging changes.
One figure for the whole organization, with no percentage underneath it
Plan and pricing setup, the subscription lifecycle, invoicing and tax configuration, payment gateway and dunning management, recurring revenue reporting, and the wiring into CRM, Books and Analytics.
Past about sixty eight thousand a month billed, the percentage overtakes us
Two hundred and forty nine plus zero point nine percent above forty thousand reaches five hundred dollars at roughly sixty eight thousand of monthly billings.
You are not re-explaining the business to a stranger every year
The same named person who worked out how your plans, proration and tax rules should behave is the one you reach in month fourteen. No handover to a new account team, and no ticket queue in between.
The invoice lands where the customer record already lives
Zoho Billing writes into CRM, Books and Analytics directly. The subscription, the customer record and the ledger entry stop being three systems joined by somebody exporting a spreadsheet every month.
Who this comparison is for
The entry plan takes a percentage of your billings
Zero point nine percent reads as small until a real number goes through it. Bill one hundred thousand a month and the percentage alone is five hundred and forty dollars, on top of the two hundred and forty nine.
Revenue recognition is a separate product with its own floor
RevRec starts at eight hundred and fifty dollars a month, billed annually, and scales on billing volume as well.
The churn and retention tooling is a third subscription
Engage holds the churn prediction, the cancel save flows and the AB testing, and it starts at one thousand six hundred dollars a month billed annually.
How switching works
- 1
Nothing gets configured until we know what you are actually selling
A plan nobody can explain the shape of is a plan worth rebuilding rather than migrating. We sit with whoever prices your product and ask what each tier is meant to do.
- 2
We count the live subscriptions, the ones on prices you retired, and the ones nobody can explain
The current price book everybody knows about, the grandfathered rate given to eleven customers in a good week two years ago, and the handful still paying on a plan that no longer exists in the catalog.
- 3
The proration, the dunning and the tax treatment get written down
What happens when somebody upgrades mid cycle, how many times a failed card is retried and over how many days, when a subscription is finally canceled, and which jurisdictions you collect tax in.
- 4
You run a full cycle on it, straight through one real renewal month and the failures it produces
The first billing cycle runs with us alongside it. Anything that invoices wrongly gets corrected while we are still there, rather than hardening into a rule nobody questions for the next two years.
What clients say about working with Cascadia
“I’ve always dreaded website management, but Cascadia has done an incredible job with my WordPress site, making it one less thing for me to worry about.”
“I’ve worked with Cascadia for several years now. They are always ready to help in any way I ask and can implement my ideas with ease. A company that values their clients!”
“Cascadia has been great to work with! We recently needed some updates, and Cascadia was quick to get them completed! We highly recommend Cascadia Web Services.”
“Cascadia is very responsive and we’re happy with them as our primary IT vendor.”
“They do great work, been using for years. Prompt responses to requests.”
Ready to move from Recurly?
Talk to us about your setupAsk us
Recurly alternative questions
Straight answers about switching, pricing, and what moves with you.
See Managed Zoho BillingHow does Recurly compare to Chargebee, Zuora and Paddle?
Chargebee meters much the way Recurly does, at zero point eight percent of monthly billing value with no platform fee, or ninety nine dollars a month plus zero point six five percent if you commit monthly. Zuora publishes no price at all and routes you to a sales team. Paddle is a different animal entirely, a merchant of record charging five percent plus fifty cents on every checkout and carrying the tax liability itself. All four will raise an invoice on the day you asked for. None of them decides what your plans should be.
Does the Recurly platform fee give you the whole platform?
No, and this is the part worth reading twice. Subscriptions, Commerce, Engage and RevRec are four separately priced products. Starter carries what Recurly calls static churn prevention and exactly one dunning campaign. The intelligent churn tooling arrives on All-Access, the offer and campaign layer is Engage from sixteen hundred a month, and revenue recognition is RevRec from eight fifty. We will not go further than that, because the full feature matrix sits in a table we have not read line by line.
Which Recurly capabilities sit outside the plan you first buy?
All-Access adds intelligent churn prevention and customized bundles over Starter, and there is a Shopify specific version of it priced the same way. Engage holds the churn propensity model, personalized offers, cancel save and upsell flows, AB testing and segmentation. RevRec holds automated contract modifications and the revenue reporting standards. Recurly also says plainly that the more products you take the better the deal, which is a fair description of how the pricing works.
We already pay for Recurly. Why would I pay you five hundred a month on top?
Often you should not, and we say so regularly. If somebody in your finance team already owns the plan catalog, reviews the dunning and works the failed payment report, you would be paying us to duplicate work that is already getting done. Call us when that person leaves, or when nobody can name who it is.
At what point does Recurly stop being the cheaper answer?
At around sixty eight thousand dollars of monthly billings. Two hundred and forty nine plus zero point nine percent of everything above forty thousand reaches five hundred at roughly that point. Below it Recurly costs less than we do, and at forty thousand billed they are two hundred and forty nine against our five hundred, which is half, and we are not going to dress that up. Keep in mind the two numbers are not the same kind of thing. Theirs is software. Ours is somebody configuring and watching it, and you buy the Zoho Billing license separately.
Is Recurly metered on the platform or on my revenue?
Both, and that is the part people miss. There is a flat two hundred and forty nine a month, and then a percentage of everything you bill above forty thousand. A small company billing heavily pays mostly percentage. A larger company billing lightly pays mostly platform fee. Neither number has anything to do with how much configuration work your setup actually needs, which is the only thing that predicts how much of somebody’s week this takes.
Is Recurly a better product than Zoho Billing?
As a standalone billing platform it is the deeper of the two. The churn tooling is more sophisticated, the payment routing is stronger, and at real volume the gateway coverage matters. We would rather say that than pretend otherwise. Zoho Billing wins on a narrower point. It already sits in the estate where your customers, your accounts and your reporting live, so a subscription and its ledger entry stop being two systems, and bought from us it arrives with somebody to run it.
Does Zoho Billing connect to the rest of Zoho?
That is the reason to choose it. Billing writes into CRM, Books and Analytics directly, so a subscription raised against a customer lands on the same record your sales team works from, and the revenue reaches the ledger without anybody exporting a spreadsheet at month end.
What exactly do you do for five hundred a month?
We build the plans and the price book, set the proration and upgrade rules, configure the tax treatment for the places you actually sell into, connect and test the payment gateways, write and tune the dunning sequences, work the failed payment report every cycle, build the recurring revenue reporting, and connect it to CRM, Books and Analytics. The figure covers the organization and does not move when your revenue does.
Who holds the Zoho Billing license, you or us?
You do, and that is deliberate. The subscription is bought in your name and stays there. If you stop working with us you keep the account, every plan, every live subscription and every invoice ever raised in it, and carry on without a migration. Zoho Assist is the only service where we carry the license.
Can you move us off Recurly?
Yes, and it involves one step a straight rebuild does not. Alongside rebuilding the catalog and moving the live subscriptions across, any plan nobody can justify gets retired rather than carried over, and the customers sitting on it get a decision rather than an exemption. Migrating four dead price points faithfully is not a migration worth paying for.
Is there a minimum term?
No. Five hundred a month, month to month, thirty days’ notice. Recurly All-Access, Engage and RevRec are each billed annually by their own pricing page, so compare the commitment as well as the number.
What if we only bill thirty thousand a month?
Then take Recurly Starter at two hundred and forty nine, where you would sit under the forty thousand threshold and pay no percentage at all, and keep your five hundred dollars. At that volume the whole subscription base is small enough for one person to hold in their head. Come back when that stops being true.
What happens if we outgrow Zoho?
Some businesses do. Once you need multi entity consolidation, usage based rating at real volume, or revenue recognition audited to a standard your board has specified, the ceiling is real and we will say so before you reach it.
Want somebody to own the billing?
Five hundred a month for the organization covers the subscription audit, the plan and price rebuild, the tax and dunning configuration, the migration off Recurly, and the revisions after it goes live.