Chargebee vs Recurly

Chargebee

Tiered, usage-based, flat-fee and custom models are documented alongside a price book with prepaid credits and hybrid plans, with usage ingestion up to 100M events a month included and 500M as a paid add-on. Proration is configurable in both UI and API, subscription changes can be scheduled and applied automatically, quotes come through the CPQ module with approval workflows, and an open-source customer portal handles plan changes, add-ons and upgrades inside your own app. I stop short of the top because grandfathering on price changes and versioned, attributed subscription changes are not documented, and entitlements appear only indirectly as pricing and limits enforcement.

Recurly

The usage model is wired the way I'd want it: usage is metered through a dedicated API that is not rate-limited, billed across fixed, tiered, volume, stairstep and ramp models (up to twelve ramp intervals on the higher plans), and entitlements are readable from the application through a documented endpoint. Trials, proration on up-front line items, add-ons, a final invoice on expiry and a hosted subscriber account page round out the lifecycle. We found no public information on quotes that convert into subscriptions or grandfathering when prices change.

Chargebee

E-invoices are delivered through named networks — Peppol, Italy's SDI, India's IRP — across 20+ countries including Germany and Denmark, with real-time status tracking, recurring e-invoices that follow subscription changes, mandate-adherence claims and a no-code template builder for regional formats, spanning B2B, B2C and B2G. Credit notes, multi-language support and multi-currency invoices are documented, and invoices are described as locally compliant and customizable. I hold back because sequential numbering, GoBD-compliant unalterable archiving, audit export of invoice data and a Verfahrensdokumentation do not appear on the captured pages, and the structured formats are not named as EN 16931, XRechnung or ZUGFeRD.

Recurly

Credit invoices come in credit, refund and write-off forms, every invoice carries an origin that ties it to the event that produced it, and the limited invoice edits are recorded in an activity log and synced to the accounting integrations. Beyond that, the compliance picture is thin for a European seller: we found no public information on sequential numbering, mandatory invoice content per country, structured e-invoices such as XRechnung, ZUGFeRD or Peppol, or retention and archiving to GoBD.

Chargebee

Real-time tax rates are applied automatically with US sales tax, EU VAT and global taxes across multiple tax profiles and regions, and third-party tax integrations can apply reverse charge regardless of the local configuration. Reverse charge is documented in detail — cross-border only, configurable per country, an editable note on the invoice, a VAT number stored on the customer and a validation setting that blocks invalid numbers at customer creation — though on manual taxation the check is country difference alone, without reading the registration number. I found no public information on OSS reporting data, customer-location evidence being kept, or a named US tax engine.

Recurly

VAT and GST defaults apply automatically per country on all plans, reverse charge for valid EU VAT numbers is documented, and tax ID validation runs against VIES, HMRC and other government registries with revalidation every six months and a defined fallback during VIES downtime — that validation layer is genuinely deep. We found no public information on One-Stop-Shop reporting data or a vendor-maintained rate-change process, and the guidance instead tells merchants to stay up to date with their local tax authorities.

Chargebee

Forty-plus gateways with routing by market, currency or method, SEPA among the named direct-debit schemes, tokenization, hosted and full-API checkout, and an Adyen-powered option for unified billing and payments. Dunning is deep: smart retries reading 200+ signals with a 12-retry ceiling and failure playbooks, custom cadences up to 5 retries, configurable final actions on both subscription and invoice, a payment failure dashboard with pre-built cohorts, and a recovery dashboard that reports revenue recovered and benchmarks against your previous retry logic. What I miss is a documented migration path for moving subscriptions and payment tokens out — the terms make export the customer's job and assistance may cost a fee.

Recurly

Collection is gateway-agnostic with Adyen, Stripe, GoCardless and Worldpay named for SEPA direct debit, mandates taken in IBAN form and the mandatory pre-debit notification handled automatically by email; dunning is equally serious with up to fifty versioned campaigns, intelligent retries, an account updater running continuously on overdue invoices, and analytics on automatic-payment invoices. We found no public information on bank-transfer reconciliation, a handover to a collection agency, or a documented migration path for taking subscriptions and payment details elsewhere — the terms condition any export of payment information on demonstrating PCI compliance.

Chargebee

RevRec runs ASC 606 and IFRS 15 five-step recognition with a controlled revenue sub-ledger drillable to the transaction, deferred-revenue waterfalls and forecasts, an SSP library, period locking, and a complete audit trail from signed contract to journal entry. Summarized journal entries post to the general ledger on your fiscal calendar, A/R aging and roll-forward reports are native, native CRM and accounting integrations reflect modified invoices and credit notes, and there is a REST API with webhooks plus warehouse export to Snowflake, S3 or GCS as an Enterprise add-on. I dock a point because a complete export a successor system could import is not documented, and the terms charge a possible fee for export assistance during the retention window.

Recurly

The revenue recognition module adds multi-GAAP compliance with rules-driven allocations, automated monthly close and an immutable audit trail, and the platform syncs invoice changes to named systems (Salesforce, QuickBooks, NetSuite, Xero) with an MRR report that by convention excludes usage revenue while the transactions report includes it. The webhook layer is production-grade — signed payloads, automatic retries on a stated schedule, fifteen days of delivery history with failure reasons and manual bulk retry. We found no public information on a DATEV export or a data-warehouse sync.

Chargebee

The contracting entity is Chargebee Inc. in Maryland, with an EU representative in Amsterdam and a UK representative, a data processing addendum incorporated into the terms, and Data Privacy Framework participation plus Standard Contractual Clauses for transfers. Processing may occur in the United States, European Union, India and Australia, so EU processing is possible but not committed as hosting; the captured pages list no subprocessors with locations and state no ISO 27001 or SOC 2 certification. Deletion on written request after termination and a 120-day retention period are documented, while Google Analytics and third-party AI processing appear on the website side of the chain.

Recurly

The contracting entity is Recurly, Inc. of San Francisco and the services are stated to be hosted and operated in the United States; a data processing agreement with standard contractual clauses, EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework certification and an EU representative in Hamburg provide transfer safeguards, and subprocessor categories are published with a few named providers. We found no public information on EU hosting for billing data, named hosting infrastructure, or certifications such as ISO 27001 or SOC 2.

Chargebee

The two billing tiers are priced publicly with an explicit scaling rule — "$0 + 0.80%" up to $500K, then "$99 + 0.65%" — plus 100M usage events a month included and the first 50 quotes free, and the contract terms are equally public: 12-month auto-renewing term, 90-day non-renewal notice, fees non-refundable and exclusive of taxes, 1.5% per month late interest. But the Enterprise tier and the RevRec, CPQ and Growth modules carry feature lists with no prices, every paid add-on (500M events, access controls, data export) is unpriced, and I found no public information on overage above the revenue band. A buyer can price the low end of the stack but not the whole thing.

Recurly

Starter is computable from the public page alone at "$249 per month + 0.9% of billing volume (first $40K of billings included at no charge each month)", but the upper tiers read as floors rather than prices ("As low as <1% of billing volume", "$850 Per month... Based on your billing volume"), App Management is priced only via the sales team, and the payment-volume allowance that triggers overage fees is set per Order Form rather than published. The documentation also references Professional and Elite plans whose prices do not appear on the public pricing page, so a real annual cost is not derivable for a typical module set.