Recurly vs. Chargify (Now Maxio): Features, Pricing, and More for 2026

First, the update most "Recurly vs. Chargify" articles miss: Chargify no longer exists. It merged with SaaSOptics in April 2022 and rebranded as Maxio. If you're comparing these two in 2026, you're really comparing Recurly vs. Maxio — and they've evolved in noticeably different directions.

Subscription businesses weighing these platforms usually have one of these problems:

• Failed payments are quietly draining revenue and nobody owns recovery
• Their pricing model (usage-based, hybrid, negotiated contracts) has outgrown simple plan billing
• Finance is asking for audit-grade revenue recognition they can't produce
• They can't tell which platform fits a consumer subscription vs. a B2B SaaS motion

Whichever billing platform you land on, Baremetrics gives you the metrics layer — natively integrated with Recurly.

Recurly vs. Maxio at a glance

What Recurly does best

Recurly's Dashboard

Recurly is a gateway-agnostic subscription billing platform. Recovery is its hero pitch. It has the strongest churn-recovery reputation in the category, built on AI-driven retry logic and dunning campaigns. Its customer base skews consumer subscriptions and media (Sling, Twitch, BarkBox, FabFitFun, Paramount), and its product suite reflects that: Commerce for Shopify-native subscriptions, Engage for lifecycle prompts, gift subscriptions, coupons, and trials, plus 140+ currencies and multi-language dunning.

For consumer or DTC subscriptions at meaningful volume, Recurly is purpose-built. That's its lane.

What Maxio does best

A screenshot from Maxio's Subscription Management product tour

Maxio is a billing and financial operations platform for B2B SaaS: recurring and usage-based billing, CPQ, expense recognition, and the decisive feature: GAAP/IFRS-compliant revenue recognition built for ASC 606 audits. Its 2025–2026 partnership with AI-native ERP Rillet underlines the direction. Maxio is building for the CFO stack.

If your company is sales-led, invoices against negotiated contracts, and is prepping for audits or a raise, Maxio is the right category.

If you're torn between these two, check your category

Genuinely struggling to choose between Recurly and Maxio usually means the shortlist is wrong, because they optimize for different businesses. Recurly's roadmap serves consumer mechanics: recovery performance, promo stacking, gift flows, Shopify-native commerce. Maxio's serves the finance office: contract terms, rev-rec schedules, CPQ approval chains. A B2B SaaS choosing Recurly buys a world-class recovery engine and thinner finance tooling. A consumer brand choosing Maxio buys audit-grade rev-rec it may never use. Match the platform to who owns billing in your org. Growth owns it: Recurly. Finance owns it: Maxio. Nobody owns it yet: stay lighter.

Pricing compared

Neither platform is transparent. That's itself a signal about who they serve.

Recurly: Start out with a free 3-month Starter (up to $40K/month volume, new customers only), then custom pricing based on Total Payment Volume, with a reported $1M TPV minimum. Third-party benchmarks put typical rates around 0.9–1.25% of revenue plus per-transaction fees. Published add-ons: Commerce at $399/mo + 1.5% GMV + $0.10/order; RevRec from $1,200/mo. Enterprise onboarding fees of $1–10K are reported.

Maxio: Quote-based, annual contracts typical, sales-led implementation. No published list pricing.

Either way, expect a sales process, an implementation project, and an annual commitment. These are mid-market platforms. Not card-swipe signups.

Where each is heading

The 2025–26 investments confirm the split. Recurly keeps shipping into recovery and consumer surface area (Engage lifecycle prompts, Shopify Commerce). Maxio keeps building toward the CFO stack, with the Rillet partnership pointing at AI-native ERP integration. Neither is drifting toward the other's lane. Buy the trajectory, not just the feature list.

Which should you choose?

Choose Recurly if: you're a consumer subscription, media, or DTC brand; recovery is a top priority; you want gift subs, promos, and Shopify-native subscription commerce; and you clear their volume floor.

Choose Maxio if: you're B2B SaaS with complex contracts and your finance team needs audit-grade revenue recognition and CPQ inside the billing system of record.

Choose neither (yet) if: you're an early-stage, self-serve company on Stripe with straightforward plans. Both platforms' minimums and sales cycles are built for bigger operations — Stripe Billing plus an analytics layer covers you for a fraction of the cost and effort.

Getting real analytics on either platform

Here's the gap both share. Their analytics see only their own data. Recurly's dashboards are decent but Recurly-only; Maxio's metrics are audit-grade but live inside the billing system. Neither answers cross-source questions, and neither is built for the operator who wants to slice churn by plan, country, and cohort in two clicks.

Baremetrics integrates natively with Recurly (alongside Stripe, Braintree, Chargebee, Apple, Google, and Shopify). Everything normalizes into one MRR view. You get the full MRR waterfall, cohort retention, LTV, unlimited saved segments, plus Forecast Plus for runway, burn rate, and CAC from your actual QuickBooks/Xero P&L. If you're mid-migration between billing systems (a common reality), a normalization layer is the only way to see the whole business in one place.