Variable amount recurring billing [closed]

Answer 1

Our gateway can do exactly what you ask:

• Store payment information (check or credit card) encrypted and tokenized.
• Bill a variable amount
  • Add fixed recurring amount on any schedule
  • add multiple cards to the account so if one fails, it cascades to the next
  • Set any start date, stop date etc.
  • Plus you can accept payments from all inputs- retail, mobile, Electronic invoicing, ecommerce, web pay page. It replaces authorize.net, Payflow Pro and similar. An API is available. There are multiple methods to rebill a customer. The most simplistic is in this recurring billing video. As per others above, the system does need to be told what to bill, whether via API or manual entry.

Answer 2

BrainTree might be a good solution if you are manually triggering the re-bill each month. They will give you a 'token' that represents the credit card number originally supplied.

You can store this number, which is worthless to a potential thief.

Answer 3

There is a relatively new entry to the market called recurly.com that sits on top of payment gateways like Authorize. They specialize in recurring billing. I haven't taken a solid look at the service, but I listened to one of the founders talk about recurring billing on a podcast and he brought up a number of edge cases that come up when dealing with recurring billing (e.g., refunds, overdue payements, etc.) that are hard to handle. My opinion is to leave stuff like this up to the experts whenever possible. Unfortunately, I don't have sufficient information at this time to say whether or not recurly is worthy of the expert label. Does anyone have experience with the service?

Answer 4

im not sure of any payment gateway that does this natively, however, you can set up the recurring billing profile then modify it in your code as needed. say if you charge .05 for each login then each time they login change the profile to add .05 and at the end of the month set it back to its default.

bottom line, is that without communication, there is no way for a payment gateway to know how much or little to charge your clients.

Answer 5

The Authorize.Net Customer Information Manager (CIM) allows you to store customer credit card information so future payments can be semi-automated. You'll then create your own recurring billing service (could be a cron job) that determines the amount to be charged (since it fluctuates monthly) and then calls the appropriate customer profile and charges them that amount. No human interaction required.

Otherwise no payment gateway offers any service that allows for automated flexible payments since it has no way to know what the payments will be ahead of time.

Answer 6

Recurly does this. You simply need to track usage on your side and post it to the Recurly API. We support 'metered billing'.

[Full disclosure - I am a co-founder of Recurly and therefore biased...but objective]

Here is a demo video for how you would accomplish variable amount billing using Recurly's API. Video: Variable or Tiered Pricing tutorial for recurring billing with Recurly

Docs for this scenario.

http://docs.recurly.com/subscription-plans/metered-billing

Cheers Dan