For a solo seller or coach, the best recurring billing software is Stripe Billing at 0.7% of what it bills, Easy Digital Downloads on a WordPress site, or ThriveCart or CartMango when you want a checkout page and file delivery with it. All 4 publish a price you can read without booking a call.
The names Google puts first compete on a different axis, at a scale most solo sellers never reach. Read at each vendor’s own live pricing page, Recurly starts at $249 a month plus 0.9% of billing volume, Maxio at $599 a month, and Zuora publishes no price. Against 100 members paying $20 a month, Recurly alone eats 12.5% of the money.
I have been building software for creators since 2011 and checkout software since 2013, and charging somebody every month is still the part that stops people.
They search for the tool, land on a page recommending Zuora and Chargebee, and quietly decide the whole thing is above their pay grade.
That conclusion comes from the search term rather than from the job. This term belongs to enterprise finance teams, and the tools written up for them assume a general ledger, a finance department and a revenue floor most solo sellers will never reach.
So here is the full field, all 4 families of it, narrowed by 4 cuts you can check yourself. Every price below was read at the vendor’s own pricing page while writing this.
Key Takeaways
- The category is built for finance teams. Gartner’s own mandatory-feature list requires integrating revenue with a general ledger system.
- 3 of the 9 results on page 1 publish no price. The Zuora and Solidgate pricing URLs redirect, and Sage’s page carries no dollar figure.
- Recurly costs $249 a month plus 0.9% of billing volume. The next tier up needs $1 million a month in billings before you can buy it.
- The exit question matters more than the monthly price. 7 popular seller checkouts cancel every subscription you created if you leave.
- Below roughly $400 a month in sales, a percentage fee beats a flat monthly fee. The usual advice has that arithmetic backwards.
Start here: what recurring billing software actually covers, and the 21 real options
The field for recurring billing software splits cleanly into 4 families, and a search for the term only ever shows you 1 of them.
Worth catching the pricing mistakes before they start costing you subscribers? The Online Selling Mistakes Challenge walks through the 5 that cost solo sellers the most, 1 a day for 5 days, free.
Enterprise and finance-team billing platforms (8). Stripe Billing, Chargebee, Recurly, Maxio, Zuora, Paddle, Sage and Solidgate. These sit between your payment processor and your accounting system. Between them they cover proration (charging a part-month when somebody upgrades mid-cycle), usage-based billing, dunning (automatically retrying a card that gets declined) and revenue recognition (the accounting rules for when a subscription payment counts as earned). The exact mix differs by vendor and by tier.
Of the 9 results on page 1, 8 are either one of these platforms or a roundup of them. The 9th is a Reddit thread.
Digital-seller checkouts (7). ThriveCart, SamCart, Payhip, Gumroad, SendOwl, Sellfy and CartMango. These take the payment, deliver the file and manage the subscription, and most of them need no code at all. CartMango is on that list because I built it, so treat its row in every table below as the one you check hardest.
WordPress plugins (3). Easy Digital Downloads, SureCart and MemberPress. These run recurring billing inside a site you already own, and the full cost of a WordPress digital-product stack runs well past the licence fee.
All-in-one creator platforms (3). Kajabi, Podia and ClickFunnels. Billing is 1 feature inside a course and funnel bundle.
That is 21, and I can name all 21 because I checked each one against what it does today. E-junkie is left out on purpose: it has no recurring or subscription billing at all, so it never enters the field.
4 cuts take that 21 down to 6, and you can check every one of them yourself.
Cut 1: drop anything that will not tell you a price
If a vendor makes you book a demo to learn what it charges, you are not the customer that page was written for. That is simply how enterprise software gets sold: the price depends on your contract, and your contract depends on your size.
3 of the 9 results on page 1 for this term are vendors whose own pricing page carries no price.
Type zuora.com/pricing into a browser and it redirects to a solutions marketing page without a single dollar figure on it. Sage’s recurring and subscription billing page has no price either, just a contact form. Solidgate’s /pricing/ URL redirects to its homepage.
Solidgate is the interesting one, because it also publishes a 3,696-word guide to this category that ranks on page 1. That guide contains 5 dollar figures in total and not one of them is a product price. They are all volume thresholds, and the article states plainly who the product is for: subscription businesses processing $300k or more a month.
The same rule kills the top tiers everywhere else.
Recurly’s All-Access plan says “request pricing details”. Maxio’s Scale tier says “Get a Quote”. Chargebee’s Enterprise plan is a demo booking. SamCart’s third tier is “Book a Quick Call”. ThriveCart’s Enterprise plan is “Talk to an Expert”.
Killed by cut 1: Zuora, Sage and Solidgate, plus the top tier of Recurly, Maxio, Chargebee, SamCart and ThriveCart. That leaves 18.
Cut 2: drop anything priced for a company you are not
The enterprise billing platforms are priced for a company with a finance department, and the clearest proof comes from the people who catalogue them. Gartner runs a review directory for this category, lists 52 products in it, and publishes a definition of what qualifies.
Gartner’s category page for recurring billing applications. Read the last line: to count as recurring billing software at all, a product has to integrate received revenue with a general ledger system.
A general ledger. That means the accounting system a company with a finance department keeps, several steps past a payout landing in your bank account, and it tells you exactly which buyer the category was drawn around. Which is why the advice on page 1 reads like it was written for somebody else. If you are 1 person with a spreadsheet and 100 members, you are not in the room this category was designed for, and no amount of comparing the 52 products in it will change that.
Not long ago we had a water filtration system put in at home. Where I live I buy drinking water every month anyway, and the subscription costs about the same as the water I was already buying, so it was a no-brainer, and the filter for the taps came free on top. The comparison was never against spending nothing. It was against a bill already sitting in my life.
Billing software works the same way.
The number that matters is the monthly price set against the money the software moves for you.
So take an ordinary case: 100 members paying $20 a month. That is $2,000 a month and $24,000 a year, which is a genuinely good membership for 1 person running it alone.
Here is what each platform costs against that, before Stripe or PayPal take their normal card fee, which sits on top of all 4 of these.
Against $24,000 a year in subscription revenue, Maxio’s entry plan costs $7,188 and Recurly’s costs $2,988, while Stripe Billing costs $168 and Chargebee’s entry plan costs $192. All 4 are named by Google as the answer to this query.
| Platform | Published entry rate | Cost on $24,000 | Share of revenue |
|---|---|---|---|
| Stripe Billing | 0.7% of billing volume, no base fee | $168 | 0.7% |
| Chargebee Growth | 0.80% of invoicing volume, no base fee | $192 | 0.8% |
| Recurly Starter | $249 a month plus 0.9% of billing volume | $2,988 | 12.5% |
| Maxio Grow | $599 a month | $7,188 | 30% |
Recurly’s Starter plan includes the first $40,000 of billings each month at no extra charge, so at this size the 0.9% never fires. That $2,988 is the flat part on its own.
Those 4 numbers are also why reading a roundup is not enough. The page-1 guide from Schematic, updated in July 2026, budgets Chargebee at $7,188 a year. Chargebee’s live pricing page shows 2 self-serve billing plans and neither carries that figure: Growth takes 0.80% of invoicing volume with no base fee at all, and Flow is $99 a month plus 0.65%. On $24,000 a year of billings, Growth costs $192. A reader planning from that roundup would set aside 37 times what the vendor’s own page now asks for.
Recurly’s own pricing page. Starter is the cheapest way in, and you cannot buy the All-Access plan beside it until you are already billing $1 million a month.
Killed by cut 2: Recurly and Maxio. Stripe Billing and Chargebee survive, which is the honest result, because neither charges a base fee at all. That leaves 16.
Cut 3: drop anything selling you a course platform you did not search for
Kajabi, Podia and ClickFunnels all bill subscriptions perfectly well. They are also course, community and funnel platforms where billing is 1 feature among dozens, and the price reflects everything else in the box.
Kajabi’s entry plan is $89 a month and takes 5% of sales on top when you use a third-party payment processor. On $24,000 a year that is $1,068 in subscription fees plus up to $1,200 in commission. Podia starts at $49 a month with a 5% cut on that tier. ClickFunnels starts at $97 a month.
None of those are bad prices for what they include, and if you want the course, the community and the funnel builder on 1 bill then paying for the bundle is the sensible move. They are strange prices to pay when the thing you typed into Google was the name of 1 feature, and that feature is the only part of the bundle you actually needed.
Killed by cut 3: Kajabi, Podia and ClickFunnels. That leaves 13. If you do want the course and community side in the same tool, they are the right shelf to shop on and this post is not the guide for it.
Cut 4: drop anything where the subscriber relationship is not yours
When you set up a subscription, some platforms create it inside your own Stripe or PayPal account, and some create it inside their own system and charge through your gateway. In the second case every subscription you built is cancelled the day you close the account.
Almost no buyer asks which kind they are signing up for, and no pricing page volunteers it.
At 100 members paying $20, that is $2,000 a month that stops arriving. Over a year it is $24,000, and asking nicely does not get it back, because your customers have to re-enter their card details on a new checkout and most of them never will. No pricing page states this anywhere. It is not in the feature comparison, not in the FAQ, and not in either of the 2 longest guides ranking for this term, which run to more than 6,000 words between them.
Of the 12 checkout platforms tracked on this question, 5 let you keep your recurring payments and 7 cancel them, and 5 of the 7 cancel them even when the money was running through your own Stripe or PayPal account.
| Platform | What happens to your subscriptions if you leave |
|---|---|
| Easy Digital Downloads | You keep receiving them |
| ThriveCart | You keep receiving them |
| Kajabi | You keep receiving them |
| ClickFunnels | You keep receiving them |
| SamCart | Cancelled, including Stripe fixed-term subscriptions and all PayPal subscriptions |
| SureCart | Cancelled, because subscriptions are managed on SureCart rather than directly on Stripe or PayPal |
| Payhip, Sellfy, SendOwl, Podia | Cancelled, even when connected to your own Stripe or PayPal |
| Gumroad | Cancelled |
| CartMango | You keep receiving them |
CartMango‘s homepage leads with this question instead of burying it in a help doc, which is also why you should check the 11 other platforms against their own terms rather than take my word for how the table turned out.
Paddle belongs in this cut for a different reason. Paddle is a Merchant of Record, so Paddle is the legal seller and the subscriber’s contract is with Paddle rather than with you. Gumroad has worked the same way since January 2025. That model buys you something real, because the Merchant of Record handles sales tax and VAT worldwide, but the customer is theirs by design.
On the enterprise platforms the answer is not published either way, and the architecture is the thing to ask about. If the subscription lives in the billing platform rather than in your own Stripe account, assume it goes when you go, and get the answer in writing before you move 100 people onto it.
Killed by cut 4: Gumroad, Payhip, Sellfy, SendOwl, SamCart, SureCart and Paddle. That leaves 6.
What is left, and how to pick between them
6 options survive. 5 clear all 4 cuts outright, and Chargebee clears the first 3 with the exit question still open, which I have left in its row rather than quietly resolved. They are not interchangeable, and the gaps between them are wide.
On $24,000 a year of subscription revenue these 6 cost between $10 and $699 a year, and the 2 priced purely as a percentage, Stripe Billing and Chargebee, are the only 2 whose bill grows every time your membership does.
| Tool | Cost on $24,000/yr | Cleared because | Still does not do |
|---|---|---|---|
| Stripe Billing | $168 | 0.7%, no base fee, subs live in your Stripe | No file delivery, no sales page, no order bumps |
| Chargebee Growth | $192 | Cuts 1 to 3 only. 0.80%, no base fee, published rate | Cut 4 is unresolved: Chargebee does not publish what happens to subscriptions if you leave |
| Easy Digital Downloads | $79.60 first year, $199 after | Published price, you keep your subscriptions | Needs a WordPress site you host and maintain |
| MemberPress Growth | $349.50 first year, $699 after | Published price, 0% on this tier | Needs WordPress. The cheaper Launch tier adds a 4.9% cut |
| ThriveCart Standard | $444 | Published price, you keep your subscriptions | Dunning sits on the $87 a month plan, not this one |
| CartMango Silver | $10, and free until October 2026 | Published price, you keep your subscriptions | No courses or community yet, both arrive October 2026 on the $30 a year plan |
CartMango is my own platform, so read that bottom row with the same suspicion you would read any vendor’s own table, and check the other 5 rows against their pricing pages.
A few things that table hides.
Easy Digital Downloads and MemberPress both advertise a first-year discount and renew at full price. EDD says so in a footnote under the plans: “Special introductory pricing, all renewals are at full price.” MemberPress does the same, and its cheapest tier hides a 4.9% cut in a collapsed FAQ. Budget for year 2 rather than year 1.
ThriveCart has quietly changed how it charges. It was known for years as a one-time $495 lifetime purchase.
Its homepage now leads with $47 a month and $87 a month instead. The lifetime option still exists as a link at the bottom of the pricing block, but it is no longer the offer.
And on CartMango, subscription selling sits on every plan including the $10 a year one, which is why that row says $10 rather than a higher tier. Courses, community and affiliate management are all still being built. Affiliate is targeted for September 2026, courses and community for October 2026, and all 3 land on the $30 a year plan when they ship.
If a membership is the thing you are actually billing for, the same 4 cuts applied to that shelf are in what membership platforms really cost, priced at 100 members.
The cut most people get wrong
Below roughly $400 a month in sales, a flat monthly fee costs you more than a percentage does.
The standard advice runs the other way: avoid the tools that take a cut, pay a fixed fee, keep 100% of your revenue.
Run it. ThriveCart Standard is $47 a month with no cut of your sales, and Gumroad takes 10% plus 50 cents per transaction with nothing monthly.
At a $20 a month membership price, Gumroad’s real rate works out at 12.5% of sales once the flat 50 cents is folded in, so the 2 cost exactly the same at $376 a month in sales. Below that, the tool with the scary percentage is the cheaper one.
Move the price point and the crossover moves with it. On a $10 a month membership Gumroad’s effective rate is 15%, and it breaks even against $47 at $313 a month. On a $50 a month membership the rate drops to 11% and the crossover rises to $427 a month.
Gumroad is still not the answer here. It fails cut 4 outright, and at $2,000 a month it costs $3,000 a year against ThriveCart’s $564 on the same monthly billing, or $444 if you prepay the year. What the arithmetic shows is that avoid-the-percentage is a threshold rule with a specific number attached, and the number is low enough that plenty of people starting out sit on the wrong side of it.
The same backwards reasoning shows up on dunning, the automatic retry when a card is declined. Google’s summary of this category lists it as a core feature, which pushes people toward the tier that has it. Recurly’s own network benchmarks put average involuntary churn at 1.25% against 2.34% voluntary, so roughly a third of the subscribers a business loses never decided to leave. Their card simply failed.
Roughly a third is a lot as a share. At 100 subscribers it is also a very small number of people, and you will know each of their names.
ThriveCart puts Subscription Dunning on Pro+ at $87 a month rather than Standard at $47. SamCart puts Subscription Saver on Pro at $199 a month rather than Core at $79. Paying $40 to $120 extra every month to automate an email you could send by hand once a month is not a saving. SureCart includes the same feature on its free tier, so it is not even an expensive thing to build.
Above a few hundred subscribers this flips completely and automating the retries is obviously right. The mistake is buying it on day 1 because a feature list called it mandatory.
It is worth noticing who is actually answering this question in public. The most upvoted reply in the r/SaaS thread ranking on page 1 for this term is a single word: “Stripe.” Several of the longer replies underneath it are written by the founder or an employee of the tool being recommended, and 1 of them says so openly, opening with “v biased as the cofounder”. Nobody in the thread names a tool a non-technical seller could set up this afternoon.
FAQ
Which recurring billing software is the best?
There is no single best one, and the dividing line is not really volume. It is whether anybody in your business reconciles revenue into a general ledger, because that is what the enterprise platforms are built to feed. If nobody does, Stripe Billing at 0.7% or a checkout like ThriveCart, Easy Digital Downloads or CartMango covers the job for a fraction of the cost. Once somebody does, Chargebee and Recurly start earning their price.
What are the best platforms for automated recurring billing?
Google’s summary answers this with Stripe Billing, Chargebee, Recurly and Maxio. That is a fair answer for a funded SaaS company. For a coach, course seller or membership owner, the 6 that survive the cuts in this post are Stripe Billing, Chargebee, Easy Digital Downloads, MemberPress, ThriveCart and CartMango. All 6 publish a price. 5 of them keep paying you after you leave, and Chargebee is the 1 that does not say either way.
How much does Recurly cost per month?
Recurly’s Starter plan is $249 a month plus 0.9% of billing volume, with the first $40,000 of billings each month included at no extra charge. The next plan up, All-Access, is quoted “as low as” under 1% of billing volume but carries a $1 million per month billing volume minimum, so it is not available to most businesses at any price.
Is there free recurring billing software?
Every free plan charges a percentage instead. Payhip’s free plan takes 5% of every sale, SureCart’s free plan charges 2.9%, and Gumroad charges 10% plus 50 cents with no monthly fee at all. On $24,000 a year those work out at $1,200, $696 and $3,000. A paid plan is usually cheaper the moment you are billing more than a few hundred dollars a month.
What is the most popular billing software?
Gartner’s Peer Insights directory for this category sorts by number of ratings, and the 3 at the top are Chargebee, Stripe Billing and Zuora Billing. Popularity there measures enterprise adoption rather than fit for you, because those reviews come from companies large enough to employ somebody whose job is choosing billing software.
What happens to my subscribers if I switch tools later?
Everything turns on where the subscription was created. This is the question that separates real subscription management software from a checkout that merely takes a recurring payment, and it is the one a small business almost never thinks to ask. If it lives in your own Stripe or PayPal account, it keeps charging after you leave. If the platform created it in its own system, every subscription is cancelled when you close the account, and your customers have to re-enter their card details somewhere else. Ask before you migrate, not after.
Pick the cut that matches your size
Every tool in this post is correct for somebody. Maxio is a good product for a company with $100,000 a month in billings and an accountant reconciling it, and a strange thing to recommend to a person with 100 members and a spreadsheet.
If you are in the second group, the shortlist is short: something that publishes a price, something small enough against the money it is moving that you stop noticing it, and something that lets your subscriptions keep paying you the day you decide to leave. CartMango covers all 3, with subscription selling on the entry plan and payouts going straight to your own Stripe or PayPal rather than through us.
About the Author
👋 I’m Welly, founder of CartMango (the site you’re on), a checkout platform for digital product sellers. We’ve previously processed $179M+. I also run BirdSend (email marketing tool, 3.1B+ emails sent). On the side I show other non-techie digital sellers how I use AI workflows to automate 50%+ of my operations. Find me on LinkedIn.
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- 20 recurring revenue businesses: worth reading before you shop for recurring billing software at all