Recurly Pricing 2026: How Much Does Recurly Really Cost?

Recurly publishes exactly one price you can act on without talking to a salesperson. Starter costs $249 per month plus 0.9% of billing volume, with the first $40,000 of monthly billings included at no charge. Every other way to buy Recurly is quoted. The main paid tier, All-Access, is advertised as "as low as <1% of billing volume, billed annually" and carries a stated $1 million billing volume minimum.

Two Recurly figures circulate online and they look incompatible: a $249 monthly platform fee with 0.9% on billings, and a percentage-of-billing-volume model gated behind a $1 million minimum. Both are live on Recurly's own pricing page as of September 2026. They are not competing versions of one price. The first is a self-serve entry plan. The second is a qualification threshold for the tier most Recurly customers actually run on.

That split matters more than any tier table, because it tells a buyer something concrete. Recurly's published number is the floor of a sales process rather than a menu, and a platform whose primary plan will not quote you until you are billing $1 million a year is saying who it was built for. What follows establishes what is knowable from Recurly's own documentation, models three scenarios keyed to annual subscription revenue, and marks clearly where published figures stop and estimates begin.

Key Takeaways

• Recurly's only self-serve price is Starter at $249 per month plus 0.9% of billing volume, with the first $40,000 of monthly billings included, per Recurly's pricing page.
• All-Access, which carries multicurrency, single sign-on, ACH, payments orchestration and more than one dunning campaign, is quote-only and states a $1 million billing volume minimum.
• Across $600K, $2.4M and $12M of annual subscription revenue, the Recurly platform line lands in a narrow band of roughly 0.68% to 0.89% of subscription revenue. Card processing runs four to five times larger.
• Revenue recognition is a separate purchase: RevRec starts at $850 per month billed annually, and the Engage retention product starts at $1,600 per month.
• Starter runs month-to-month. All-Access is billed annually, and Recurly's FAQ states its non-Starter plans carry a minimum 12-month commitment.
• Recurly holds the card vault itself, so leaving means a tokenized export that the receiving platform must be PCI compliant to accept.

The One Price Recurly Publishes

What $249 a month actually buys

Starter includes automated global subscription billing, flexible plans and pricing, static churn-prevention tools, one dunning campaign, more than 10 payment methods and access to 20+ payment gateways. Recurly lists a 90-day free trial on the plan. The FAQ states there are no setup fees and that a merchant can sign up and start implementing at no charge, which is genuinely unusual among billing vendors at this level.

The 0.9% applies only to billing volume above the included $40,000 per month. That included volume is worth more than it first appears: $40,000 a month is $480,000 a year of billings covered by the flat fee alone. A business doing $400,000 in annual subscription revenue pays Recurly $2,988 for the year and nothing else, which is 0.75% of revenue and cheaper than most alternatives at that size.

Starter is also month-to-month. That is the one place in Recurly's lineup where a buyer keeps the option to leave without a renewal conversation, and it is worth weighing against the features sitting one tier up.

What Starter deliberately leaves out

Recurly's pricing page is specific about the dividing line. Starter gets one dunning campaign and static churn tools. All-Access adds the capabilities that most growing subscription businesses eventually need.

One caution before reading the list. Recurly also sells a separate All-Access for Shopify tier on the same sub-1% billed-annually basis, and its feature set differs from All-Access. Prepaid and gift subscriptions, hybrid subscriptions, cancel-save flows and a hosted subscriber portal with passwordless login sit on the Shopify tier, not on All-Access.

• Multiple dunning campaigns, rather than a single global retry policy
• Multicurrency support
• Single sign-on
• Additional payment methods including ACH
• Payments orchestration across multiple gateways
• Custom reporting and automated exports
• Intelligent churn-prevention tools, and advanced plans, pricing and promotions
• AI-powered agents, analytics and insights

Read that list as a price list rather than a feature list. Every item on it is a reason the published $249 stops applying, and Recurly has put the things a scaling subscription business predictably asks for on the far side of a sales call.

The $1 Million Minimum Is the Pricing Statement

As low as is a ceiling advertisement

"As low as <1% of billing volume" sets an upper bound on the headline rate and nothing else. The same page pairs it with "more volume, better rate," which is a volume discount curve with no published points on it. A buyer at $1.2 million in billings and a buyer at $40 million both see the same sentence and will not be quoted the same number.

The useful consequence is that Starter's published 0.9% becomes a benchmark. It is the one Recurly rate that exists in public, it applies to any volume in principle, and a quote that does not comfortably beat it is a quote worth pushing back on.

What actually triggers the move to a quote

At Recurly the trigger is not a revenue crossover calculation. It is a set of specific gates.

• Billing volume approaching or exceeding $1 million, which is the stated All-Access minimum
• Needing any single All-Access feature, most commonly multicurrency or a second dunning campaign
• Buying revenue recognition or Engage, both of which are separately quoted
• Selling subscriptions on Shopify, where Recurly Commerce is free to install and quote-only from the start

That last one is worth flagging for ecommerce readers. Recurly acquired the Shopify-first subscription platform Prive in May 2025 and rebranded it Recurly Commerce, and the Shopify App Store listing is explicit that pricing is custom and billed externally by Recurly rather than through Shopify. There is no self-serve tier for physical-goods subscriptions on Shopify.

Three Scenarios by Annual Subscription Revenue

One processing assumption applies to all three: a 3.5% blended card rate, which is roughly what Stripe's standard 2.9% plus 30 cents per successful charge works out to on a $50 average charge. Processing is billed by the gateway, not by Recurly, in every case. Substitute your own effective rate; none of the platform arithmetic below changes.

Platform figures on the Starter path are calculated directly from Recurly's published rate and are quoted, not estimated. All-Access figures are estimates, because Recurly publishes no rate card for that tier. Each line below is labeled.

Scenario one: $600,000 in annual subscription revenue

This is $50,000 a month in billings, comfortably inside published pricing and well below the All-Access minimum.

• Platform fee: $249 x 12 = $2,988 (quoted)
• Volume fee: 0.9% on the $120,000 of annual billings above the $480,000 included = $1,080 (quoted)
• Recurly total: $4,068 a year, or 0.68% of subscription revenue
• Processing at 3.5%: $21,000 (estimated)
• All-in: $25,068, or 4.18% of subscription revenue

Recurly is 16% of the total cost here. The platform is cheap at this size and the merchant is buying billing automation, not negotiating leverage.

Scenario two: $2.4 million in annual subscription revenue

This is $200,000 a month, past the $1 million All-Access minimum, which means sales will be involved. The interesting part is that Starter arithmetic still runs.

• Starter path platform cost: $2,988 plus 0.9% on $1,920,000 = $20,268 a year, or 0.84% (quoted)
• All-Access at a negotiated 0.85%: roughly $20,400 a year (estimated)
• All-Access at a negotiated 0.70%: roughly $16,800 a year (estimated)
• Processing at 3.5%: $84,000 (estimated)
• All-in on the published path: $104,268, or 4.34% of subscription revenue

At this volume the quote has to land meaningfully below 0.9% to be worth the annual commitment that comes with it. A rate of 0.85% saves nothing and costs flexibility. This is the point where knowing the published number changes the negotiation, and it is the practical reason Recurly's Starter rate is worth memorizing even if you will never buy that plan.

Scenario three: $12 million in annual subscription revenue

This is $1 million a month and fully enterprise territory. Published pricing no longer describes reality, but it still sets a reference.

• Starter arithmetic as a reference point: $2,988 plus 0.9% on $11,520,000 = $106,668 a year, or 0.89% (reference only)
• Negotiated All-Access at 0.4% to 0.7%: $48,000 to $84,000 a year (estimated)
• RevRec at the published floor of $850 a month: $10,200 a year, and realistically higher, since RevRec is priced on billing volume (partially quoted)
• Engage at the published floor of $1,600 a month: $19,200 a year if purchased (partially quoted)
• Platform plus add-ons at a midpoint 0.55% negotiated rate: roughly $95,400, or 0.80% of subscription revenue
• Processing at 3.5%: $420,000 (estimated)
• All-in: roughly $515,400, or 4.30% of subscription revenue

What the three scenarios show

The Recurly platform line barely moves as a percentage of subscription revenue. It sits between 0.68% and 0.89% across a 20x range, and the add-ons, rather than the core rate, are what push an enterprise bill upward. Negotiation on the Recurly line is worth real money at scale, roughly $24,000 to $60,000 a year at $12 million in revenue, but it is the smaller lever. The larger one is the processing rate, which no billing platform controls on your behalf.

The second finding is the one buyers miss. Recurly's published entry price is not an on-ramp that gets cheaper as you grow. At $2.4 million a year the published rate and a plausible negotiated rate are within a few hundred dollars of each other, and only the negotiated one comes with a year-long commitment.

The Line Items Above the Platform Fee

Revenue recognition is a separate product

RevRec is sold as a standalone product starting at $850 per month billed annually, priced on billing volume. It covers ASC 606 and IFRS 15, plus ASC 842 and ASC 340-40, with configurable recognition rules, real-time forecasting and an audit trail. This is a real capability and the accounting-standards coverage is broader than most billing platforms offer natively. It is also a line item you pay for on top of everything else, and a configuration project rather than a switch.

Retention tooling is a separate product

Engage starts at $1,600 per month billed annually, priced on prompt volume and capability needs. It descends from the Redfast acquisition and covers churn modelling, personalized offers, A/B testing, segmentation and a low-code builder. Budget accordingly: a business buying All-Access, RevRec and Engage has three quoted contracts, not one.

Dunning depth is tiered, and that is the point

Starter gets one dunning campaign. Multiple campaigns are an All-Access feature. For a subscription business with meaningfully different cohorts, an annual plan and a monthly plan should not share a retry policy, and the ability to run them separately is a purchased capability at Recurly rather than a configuration detail. If failed payments are already costing money, the tactical work belongs in a dedicated failed-payment recovery program; what matters for a pricing decision is that the depth of dunning you want determines which contract you sign.

Annual Commitment as a Cost of Ownership

Recurly's FAQ is direct about contract length. Starter is month-to-month with cancellation flexibility. The FAQ states that Recurly's non-Starter plans, which it still names as Professional and Elite, require a minimum 12-month commitment, adding that Recurly has options to structure the contract to drastically reduce committed spend toward pay-as-you-go. Those plan names predate the current lineup, but the pricing page independently describes All-Access as billed annually.

Treat that year as part of the price rather than a footnote. Three practical consequences follow.

• A quote that beats Starter by 0.05% is not worth a 12-month lock, because the option to leave is worth more than the saving.
• Committed-spend structures reward accurate forecasting and punish optimism. A business that commits at projected volume and then grows slower than planned pays for billings it never generated.
• Renewal is the second negotiation, and it happens when your subscriber vault is already inside Recurly. Leverage is lower at renewal than at signing, which is an argument for negotiating exit and export terms in the first contract.

Reality Check: What Buyers Find After Signing

Implementation is a quoted engagement, not a published number

Recurly does not publish Professional Services rates. The FAQ says many merchants implement independently and that Professional Services are available separately, billed independently from platform fees. Anyone modelling total cost should therefore treat implementation as a quoted line with an unknown value, not an estimate.

What is knowable is the shape of the work, and it is Recurly-specific. A straightforward catalog with a handful of plans, one gateway and a single dunning campaign is a few weeks of engineering against a well-documented API. The timeline stretches when three things are in scope: migrating an existing subscriber vault, configuring revenue recognition rules that your auditors will accept, and wiring payments orchestration across multiple gateways. Revenue recognition configuration in particular is finance work as much as engineering work, and it tends to be sequenced after go-live rather than before.

The gateway relationship is yours to sort out

Recurly supports more than 20 gateways including Braintree, Adyen and Cybersource, with routing configurable per gateway. That flexibility is genuine, and it also means the merchant account, the processing rate and the chargeback relationship are between you and the gateway. Recurly does not compress your processing cost, and in the scenarios above processing was four to five times the platform fee. Negotiating interchange with your acquirer is a bigger financial exercise than negotiating the Recurly line.

Compliance is the part nobody budgets

Card data handling sits under PCI DSS regardless of who holds the vault, and a billing platform reduces scope rather than eliminating it. Multicurrency, tax handling and revenue recognition each carry their own configuration and review burden. None of this appears on a pricing page, and all of it appears on an implementation timeline.

Leaving Recurly: Who Owns the Card Data

Recurly is not an app sitting on top of someone else's checkout. It holds the vault, which changes the exit questions entirely.

Recurly's support documentation states that credit card data can be exported only in tokenized format, that the receiving system must itself be PCI compliant, and that one free export is provided as part of offboarding. Read every part of that sentence. Tokenized means you receive references, not card numbers. PCI compliant means your destination platform needs the certification to accept them. One free export means additional exports are a commercial conversation.

Whether those tokens are usable on the other side depends on the gateway relationship, not on Recurly. Recurly's API supports gateway tokens and externally issued network token IDs, which is the mechanism that makes portability possible at all. Cross-vault migration requires cooperation from both the source and destination gateways, and not every processor supports it. Where it is not supported, the fallback is asking subscribers to re-enter payment details, which is the most expensive outcome in subscription commerce.

Three questions to settle before signing, rather than at renewal.

• Whose merchant account is the money moving through, and does that relationship survive a platform change
• Does your gateway support cross-vault token migration to the destinations you would realistically consider
• What does a second or third export cost, and is that written down anywhere

The same logic applies in reverse on the way in. Recurly runs a PCI-compliant Account and Billing Import service through Professional Services for exactly this reason, and it is the recommended path for moving a subscriber vault from a legacy provider.

What Recurly Genuinely Does Well

Recurly deserves credit on three specific counts, and none of them are marketing claims.

Dunning maturity is real. Recurly has been refining failed-payment recovery for longer than most of the category has existed, and the tiering of multiple dunning campaigns behind All-Access reflects a product that treats retry strategy as something worth segmenting rather than a checkbox.

Revenue recognition is a genuine product, not a report. ASC 606 and IFRS 15 coverage alongside ASC 842 and ASC 340-40 with configurable rules and an audit trail is finance-grade functionality. Most subscription platforms hand this to a spreadsheet or a separate accounting integration.

The published research is a real contribution. Recurly's State of Subscriptions report draws on 76 million subscribers, and Recurly puts the underlying dataset at 2,200 subscription businesses. Its churn rate benchmarks are published free and without a paywall, with all figures updated with July 2026 data. The involuntary churn figures cited across the industry, including in this site's guide to handling failed payments and its churn reduction playbook, trace back to Recurly's dataset. A vendor that publishes benchmarks the competition cites is a vendor that knows its category.

Where Swell Fits for Ecommerce Subscriptions

For subscription businesses selling physical goods rather than software seats, Swell is built on a different premise, for one structural reason and one commercial one.

Structurally, subscriptions are part of Swell's core API rather than a billing system bolted alongside a catalog. Products, orders, customers and recurring billing live in the same data model, which removes the integration layer that a separate billing platform necessarily introduces. The API is self-describing, the CLI is built for automation, and the swellstores/skills package exists so AI coding agents can work against the platform directly.

Commercially, every tier is published. Swell's pricing runs from $29 per month on Starter to $79 on Basic, $299 on Standard and $2,250 on Unlimited, billed yearly, with trailing-twelve-month revenue ceilings of $50K, $250K, $1M and $5M respectively. Above each ceiling a per-order overage applies, from 2% on Starter down to 0.4% on Unlimited, with custom pricing above $10 million in annual sales. That is a real cost structure with real overage fees, and the point is not that it is free; the point is that a merchant can calculate it without a sales call, at any size.

Recurly is the stronger fit where subscriptions are the entire business model, billing volume is above $1 million a year, and revenue recognition has to survive an audit. That buyer should go in expecting a negotiated rate and an annual contract, and should treat the dunning depth and RevRec as worth paying for. Swell is the stronger fit where subscriptions ship physical products alongside one-time ones, where the merchant would rather not run a catalog in one system and a billing engine in another synchronized by webhooks, and where knowing what the platform costs before talking to anyone matters. For reporting across both, subscription analytics sit on the same data.

Buyers surveying the wider field will find it covered elsewhere. The Recurly alternatives guide runs the full list, and the category roundup compares ten platforms side by side. Merchants weighing Shopify-native options should also read the Recharge and Skio pricing breakdowns, since those price on order count rather than revenue. Note that Recharge acquired Skio in April 2026, so those two are now one vendor relationship rather than two competing ones.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much does Recurly cost per month?

Recurly's published Starter plan is $249 per month plus 0.9% of billing volume, with the first $40,000 of monthly billings included at no charge. The All-Access tier is quote-only and advertised as under 1% of billing volume billed annually, with a $1 million billing volume minimum. There is no published price between those two points.

Does Recurly have a free trial?

Recurly lists a 90-day free trial on the Starter plan, and its FAQ states there are no setup fees and that merchants can sign up and begin implementing at no cost. Sandbox environments are available for testing before going live.

Why do different sources quote different Recurly prices?

Because Recurly sells two things. The $249 per month plus 0.9% figure describes the self-serve Starter plan. The sub-1%-of-billing-volume model with a $1 million billing volume minimum describes All-Access. Both appear on Recurly's pricing page as of September 2026, and sources that cite only one of them tend to present it as though it were the whole price list.

Is revenue recognition included in Recurly's subscription plans?

No. RevRec is a separate product starting at $850 per month billed annually, priced on billing volume. The same applies to Engage, the retention and personalization product, which starts at $1,600 per month. Budget for these as distinct contracts rather than features of a plan.

Can I move my subscribers off Recurly?

Partly. Recurly exports card data in tokenized form only, the destination platform must be PCI compliant to receive it, and one free export is included in offboarding. Whether the tokens work on the other side depends on whether your gateway supports cross-vault migration to that destination. Confirm this with your gateway before you sign, rather than at renewal.

Is Recurly a good fit for a Shopify store selling physical subscriptions?

Recurly Commerce, built on the Prive platform Recurly acquired in 2025, is free to install from the Shopify App Store but carries custom pricing billed externally by Recurly. There is no self-serve price for it. Merchants comparing options for physical-goods subscriptions should also look at how purpose-built ecommerce platforms price, since several publish every tier.

How does Recurly compare to Swell on price?

They are priced on different axes. Recurly charges a platform fee plus a percentage of billing volume, with the meaningful tier quoted privately above a $1 million minimum. Swell charges a published monthly fee by plan, from $29 to $2,250 billed yearly, with a trailing-twelve-month revenue ceiling per plan and a per-order overage of 2% down to 0.4% above it. At small volume Swell is dramatically cheaper. At large volume the comparison depends entirely on the rate Recurly quotes you.