How to choose subscription billing software: a checklist

Choosing billing software is one of the few product decisions that is genuinely hard to undo. Once your customers, saved cards and live subscriptions sit in a system, moving out is a project. So it pays to ask the awkward questions before you sign up, not after your first renewal run. This checklist covers what to test, in roughly the order it tends to matter.

The kinds of tools you will find

Most options fall into a few groups:

• Billing built into a payment processor. Convenient if you already use that processor, but usually tied to it, and often priced as a percentage of what you bill.
• Merchant of record platforms. They sell to your customers on your behalf and handle sales tax for you, in exchange for a larger cut of every sale. See merchant of record for what that arrangement means.
• Enterprise revenue suites. Deep and configurable, with long implementations and contracts to match.
• Invoicing apps and spreadsheets. Fine for a handful of customers, painful once renewals, failed cards and plan changes arrive every week.
• Dedicated subscription billing platforms. They sit on top of your own payment account and handle the recurring side: plans, renewals, invoices, retries.

None of these is wrong for everyone. The checklist below helps you see which one fits how you sell.

1. Can it price what you sell, today and next year?

Write down your current plans, then the ones you might add in a year. A flat monthly plan is easy for anything. Seats, usage, tiers, prepaid credits and one-off setup fees are where tools differ.

• Can one subscription mix a flat plan, a seat count and a usage charge?
• Does it support tiered and volume pricing, not just a single unit price?
• Can you offer monthly and annual versions of the same plan?
• What happens when you change a price: do existing customers keep the old one, and can you move them later on purpose?

2. Does it get proration right, and show it?

Upgrades, downgrades and seat changes in the middle of a period produce prorated amounts. Ask to see an invoice after a mid-cycle upgrade. Can you tell, from the invoice alone, how the number was worked out? Can you choose whether those amounts bill straight away or wait for the next invoice? Proration is a common source of billing questions, so a tool that explains its own math saves you real time.

3. What does it do when a card fails?

Failed payments quietly cost subscription businesses a share of their revenue, which is why dunning deserves its own test. Check:

• Retry schedules you can adjust, and whether hard declines stop retries early instead of hammering a dead card.
• Recovery emails you can edit, with one link to update the card and pay.
• A decided ending: what happens to the subscription when recovery fails.
• Warnings before cards expire, not only after they fail.

4. What can customers do for themselves?

Every billing question a customer can answer alone is a support email you do not have to write. A good customer portal lets customers pay invoices, update cards and download receipts at the very least. Ask whether you can also allow plan changes with a clear preview, pauses, and cancellation with one offer to stay, and whether each of those is a switch you control.

5. How does it handle tax?

If you sell to consumers or across borders, tax is not optional. Ask whether the tool applies rates you set, calculates tax for you, or makes you liable for none of it (the merchant of record model). Check that invoices show tax the way your customers' accountants expect, including reverse charge wording for business customers in the EU if that applies to you.

6. Whose payment account is it?

This is the question people skip and regret. Some tools process payments through their own account, which means your customers' saved cards live with them. Others connect to your own account with a payment gateway such as Stripe, PayPal or GoCardless.

Owning the payment account matters for two reasons. You keep the relationship with your processor, including the rates you negotiate. And if you ever change billing software, the saved cards stay where they are, so customers do not have to re-enter anything. Ask plainly: if I leave, do my customers' cards come with me?

7. Can you trust the numbers?

You will use the billing system to answer questions like "what is our MRR this month" and "who owes us money". Check that the reports match what you would calculate by hand from the invoices, that you can pick your own date range, and that you can download the numbers as a spreadsheet for your accountant.

8. How do you get in?

If you already bill customers somewhere, moving is the first project. Ask what can be imported (customers, plans, live subscriptions, past invoices), whether you see a preview before anything changes, and whether historical records come in quietly, without emailing or charging anyone. Ask how saved payment methods move. Our billing migration checklist goes through the steps.

9. What will it cost as you grow?

Billing tools are priced in two main ways, and the difference grows with your revenue.

• A percentage of what you bill. Cheap at the start, and it rises every time you do.
• A flat plan. A fixed monthly price, sometimes in bands by how much you bill.

Here is how that plays out, using a made-up tool that charges 0.7% of billed revenue:

Billed per month	At 0.7% of revenue	Per year
$10,000	$70	$840
$50,000	$350	$4,200
$200,000	$1,400	$16,800

A flat plan stays the same inside its band however much you bill. Either way, the payment processor's own fee is usually charged on top, so compare like with like. The fee calculator runs the comparison on your own numbers.

Run a real test before you decide

A demo shows you the happy path. A trial lets you try the awkward ones. Before you choose, set up one real plan, subscribe a test customer, upgrade them mid cycle, fail a payment, and open the resulting invoices. Half an hour of that tells you more than any feature grid.

Where yRecurring fits

yRecurring is a dedicated billing platform that connects to your own payment account, with eight gateways to choose from: Stripe, PayPal, GoCardless, Adyen, Paystack, Flutterwave, Authorize.Net and Braintree. Pricing is flat: $39, $99 or $299 a month depending on how much you bill, never a percentage of your revenue, with two months free on annual plans (see pricing). Every plan includes all eight pricing models, prorations that show their calculation, tax, and a retry schedule with hosted recovery pages. Around that sit a customer portal where you switch each action on or off, ready-made reports you can download, and a CSV importer that shows you what will happen before anything changes. The trial is 14 days and needs no card.