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e-commercesaaspayment-processingrecurly

Products as a service with Recurly

I'm having a hard time figuring out if Recurly supports a "products as a service" kind of business.

"Products as a service" has following characteristics:

  1. No monthly fee
  2. No charge upfront
  3. Just charge the products itself
  4. A subscription can have different products and different amounts per product for each customer
  5. The products or (amount of them) can change montly

For example: A costumer can choose out of products A, B, C and D. He chooses to subscribe to our service and wants a montly delivery of a pack containing product A and 2 of product B. After three months receiving this subscriptiopn he wants to change his pack. He deletes product A out of his pack and adds product C. The next delivery contains those products.

As far as I understand the API I have the following options:

Create a different subscription per user per "pack"

Seems too complicated for managing all subscriptions. There will be many subscriptions created and deleted (set on inactive, as deleting is not possible). And it certainly isn't intended to be used this way.

Subscription plan of €0,00 with add-ons per product

Add-ons seem to be defined rather fixed when creating the subscription plan. I want my products to be flexible, taking them in and out of the subscription as I please. Doesn't seem to support that.

Metered billing

Also defined as usage-based billing. The proposed use cases in the docs all have a fixed subscription fee (which I don't want). They also add a defined and linear 'product' (eg. 0,1 / minute). Doesn't seem to fit my needs either.

How can I handle this kind of business best with Recurly?

Solution

  • A €0,00 with add-ons per product will be your best path forward. Add-ons are flexible and can be added/removed from a subscription plan as needed.