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Payments

Subscription Billing

Choose the system that owns recurring commercial lifecycle, plans, trials, renewals, changes, prorations, recovery, and cancellation.

Recommendation

Choose the recurring-lifecycle owner.

Processor-native, independent billing-platform, subscription-specialist, and Merchant-of-Record routes couple lifecycle state to different systems.12

For: Software teams operating recurring subscriptions

Main trade-off

A billing system centralizes recurring commercial state while increasing migration, payment-provider, invoice, entitlement-event, recovery, and commercial coupling.1234

Four subscription-lifecycle routes

Choose by payment-provider independence, lifecycle depth, recovery needs, seller role, and migration boundary.

  1. Lifecycle model

    Verify plans, trials, renewals, changes, prorations, pauses, cancellation, and scheduled state.12

  2. Collection and recovery

    Define payment-provider ownership, invoicing, retries, dunning, credits, refunds, and write-off handoff.12

  3. Application state

    Preserve customer, subscription, entitlement-event, webhook, idempotency, and audit boundaries.12

  4. Migration and cost

    Model billing volume, customers, invoices, plans, support, exports, contracts, and provider migration.12

Subscription billing routes

Usage metering and invoice receivables remain dedicated downstream decisions.

Subscriptions should remain in Stripe

Evaluate Stripe Billing.

It keeps recurring lifecycle close to Stripe Payments and Invoicing.

Verify: Payment-provider independence or a non-Stripe source of truth points elsewhere.1

Billing should sit above payment providers

Evaluate Chargebee.

An independent billing platform can separate commercial lifecycle from one processor.

Verify: Validate provider support, migration, entitlements, accounting, contract, and workload cost.2

A subscription specialist is preferred

Evaluate Recurly.

Recurring lifecycle and recovery form the core operating surface.

Verify: Verify integrations, plan scope, payment-provider boundary, exports, and commercial terms.3

The seller role should also be delegated

Evaluate Paddle.

Paddle couples subscription lifecycle to its Merchant-of-Record operating model.

Verify: Do not treat it as a processor-native billing peer; eligibility, contract, payout, and migration control the route.4

Boundary: Subscription Billing owns recurring commercial state. Usage-Based Billing owns meter events and rating; Invoicing owns receivables; application authorization owns access policy.

What actually differs

The decisive boundary is where recurring state lives and which adjacent payment, invoice, tax, and seller responsibilities are coupled to it.

System of record
Subscription state may live with a processor, independent billing platform, specialist, or MoR.12
Payment independence
Some routes support multiple processors; others deliberately couple billing and payments.12
Recovery
Retries, dunning, credits, invoices, cancellation, and write-off workflows differ.13
Migration
Customer, subscription, invoice, payment, entitlement-event, and history export determine exit cost.12

Official resources

Verify current product scope, eligibility, pricing, policy, data, payout, and contractual boundaries in first-party material before implementation.

Sources

Official product and policy sources supporting the bounded routes on this page.

  1. 1
    Stripe subscriptions overview

    Stripe · Accessed Official

  2. 2
    Chargebee Product Catalog

    Chargebee · Accessed Official

  3. 3
    Recurly subscriptions

    Recurly · Accessed Official

  4. 4
    Paddle subscriptions

    Paddle · Accessed Official