Recurly VS. Chargify: Features, Pricing, Reviews, and More

Frequently Asked Questions

• What is Chargify and how does it work for subscription businesses?

  Chargify is a subscription billing platform built for B2B SaaS and recurring revenue businesses, handling automated invoicing, flexible pricing logic, and dunning management without requiring custom code.
  
  At its core, Chargify lets you set up and adjust subscription plans, run split tests on pricing offers, and manage the full billing lifecycle from trial through renewal. It includes level 1 PCI compliance and two-factor authentication, which matters when you are handling payment data at scale. Pricing starts at $299 per month for up to $50k in monthly revenue, with overage fees on top. For subscription businesses evaluating the platform, the key question is not just what Chargify handles on the billing side, but what you will use to track the revenue metrics that result from it, including MRR, churn rate, and LTV.
• How do Chargify and Recurly compare for SaaS subscription billing?

  Chargify and Recurly are both purpose-built recurring billing platforms, but Chargify offers more robust reporting and split testing features while Recurly comes in at a lower starting price point.
  
  Recurly starts at $149 per month plus 0.9% of revenue, making it more accessible for early-stage subscription businesses. Chargify starts at $299 per month for up to $50k monthly revenue, but justifies that cost with more advanced billing logic and deeper integrations. Neither platform gives you the subscription analytics layer you need to act on your data, including MRR movement, cohort-level churn, or revenue forecasting. That is where a tool like Baremetrics sits alongside your billing platform, turning raw transaction data into the metrics your team actually uses to make decisions.
• What platforms offer automated failed payment recovery for subscription businesses?

  Automated failed payment recovery tools retry declined cards on smart schedules and send targeted dunning emails to recover revenue that would otherwise be lost to involuntary churn.
  
  Involuntary churn, where subscribers leave not by choice but because a card expires or a payment fails, typically accounts for 20 to 40% of total churn for SaaS businesses. Baremetrics includes a feature called Recover that automatically retries failed payments and sends customisable dunning sequences, working directly on top of your existing payment processor data. This means you do not need to rebuild your billing stack to start recovering revenue. For subscription businesses already using Recurly or evaluating chargify alternatives, adding a recovery layer on top of your billing platform is one of the highest-leverage moves you can make to protect MRR.
• How can I benchmark my SaaS churn rate against similar subscription companies?

  You can benchmark your churn rate against comparable SaaS businesses using open industry data sets that break down churn by MRR range, business model, and pricing tier.
  
  Knowing your churn rate in isolation tells you little. Knowing that your 3.2% monthly churn is above the median for B2B SaaS businesses at your MRR level tells you exactly where you stand and how urgently you need to act. Baremetrics publishes open benchmark data drawn from hundreds of real subscription businesses, so you can compare your churn rate, LTV, and ARPU against companies at a similar stage. This is especially useful when you are mid-stack evaluation, deciding between billing platforms like Chargify and Recurly, and trying to understand whether a billing change will actually move the metrics that matter.
• How do I track MRR, churn, and LTV after setting up a subscription billing platform like Chargify or Recurly?

  After connecting a subscription billing platform, you need a dedicated analytics layer to separate new MRR, expansion MRR, contraction MRR, and churned MRR, and to calculate LTV and churn rate by customer segment.
  
  Billing platforms like Chargify and Recurly handle payment processing and invoice automation well, but their reporting stops at the transaction level. To understand revenue health across your subscriber base, you need to track metrics like MRR growth rate, trial-to-paid conversion, and cohort churn over time. Baremetrics connects directly to your payment processor and surfaces all of these in real-time dashboards, with no custom setup required. For SaaS founders and finance leads managing recurring billing, having a single view of subscription KPIs alongside your billing data is what turns operational data into decisions.