Is Mollie or Recurly cheaper?

Mollie starts at €0.32 per iDEAL transaction, or 1.80 percent plus €0.25 on European Economic Area consumer cards (free plan available). Recurly starts at $249 per month plus 0.9% of billing volume, with the first $40,000 of monthly billings included (free plan available).

Mollie vs Recurly

An independent, review-free comparison compiled by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Both products are profiled in full, and neither can pay for placement here.

The short answer

Editorial assessment

Mollie compared with Recurly

Complementary rather than competing. Recurly owns the subscription lifecycle, plan changes, proration, and a serious revenue-recovery engine, and charges a platform fee for it. Mollie is a gateway that can sit underneath. The pairing makes sense for a European business that needs real billing sophistication but does not want to give up iDEAL and SEPA. Mollie alone is only sufficient if your recurring charges are simple and unchanging.

Choose Mollie if

European businesses, especially Dutch, Belgian, German, and Polish ones, where local payment methods drive conversion and a card-only processor leaves money on the table; ecommerce and SaaS companies that want transparent per-method pricing with no monthly fee; and teams that already have their own billing logic or a billing platform and need a European acquirer underneath it rather than a subscription engine.

Choose Recurly if

Subscription businesses with meaningful card volume, particularly consumer and media subscriptions, where involuntary churn recovery and multi-gateway payments orchestration are worth more than pricing flexibility, and which have the finance capability to own their own tax registrations and filings.

Side by side

13 attributes

Attribute	Mollie	Recurly
Category	Billing	Billing
Starting price	€0.32 per iDEAL transaction, or 1.80 percent plus €0.25 on European Economic Area consumer cards (free plan available)	$249 per month plus 0.9% of billing volume, with the first $40,000 of monthly billings included (free plan available)
Pricing model	Per-transaction pricing published individually for each payment method, with no monthly fee and no minimum volume on online payments. In-person payments have an optional monthly plan.	Monthly platform fee plus a percentage of billing volume above an included threshold, with separately priced products for churn engagement and revenue recognition, and higher tiers gated by volume and a sales conversation.
Free plan	No plan fee at all on online payments. You pay per successful transaction and nothing otherwise, which functions as a permanent zero-cost baseline.	No free plan. The 90-day trial is the evaluation path, and after it the $249 monthly floor applies regardless of revenue, which is the single most important constraint for a small business.
Free trial	No trial; test mode is free and available before verification completes	90 days, which is by a wide margin the longest trial in this category and is available self-serve
Best for	European businesses, especially Dutch, Belgian, German, and Polish ones, where local payment methods drive conversion and a card-only processor leaves money on the table; ecommerce and SaaS companies that want transparent per-method pricing with no monthly fee; and teams that already have their own billing logic or a billing platform and need a European acquirer underneath it rather than a subscription engine.	Subscription businesses with meaningful card volume, particularly consumer and media subscriptions, where involuntary churn recovery and multi-gateway payments orchestration are worth more than pricing flexibility, and which have the finance capability to own their own tax registrations and filings.
Setup time	A day for a plugin-based ecommerce setup. Two to five days for a custom API integration covering payments, mandates, and subscriptions. Business verification runs in parallel and test mode is available immediately, so development is never blocked on approval.	Weeks for a real deployment. Hosted pages and mobile SDKs shorten the front end considerably, but connecting multiple gateways, configuring dunning campaigns, and modelling plans and promotions properly is a project rather than an afternoon, which is part of what the 90-day trial is for.
Learning curve	Low for developers. The API is small, well shaped, and thoroughly documented, and the mandate model is easy to grasp. The real learning is method-specific behaviour: which methods produce mandates, how SEPA notice periods work, and what each failure reason means.	Moderate. The subscription concepts are conventional and the documentation is mature after fifteen years, but the value of the platform is concentrated in the recovery and orchestration configuration, and that is where the learning actually is. A team that connects one gateway and accepts default retry settings has bought an expensive invoice generator.
Platforms	Web dashboard, REST API, Official libraries for PHP, Python, Node, Ruby, .NET, and Java, Plugins for WooCommerce, Magento, Shopware, PrestaShop, and Shopify, Payment terminals for in-person	Web application, Hosted checkout and account management pages, Hosted subscriber portal, REST API, Mobile SDKs, Webhooks, Shopify app via Recurly Commerce
Compliance	Licensed payment institution regulated by De Nederlandsche Bank, PCI DSS Level 1, PSD2 and Strong Customer Authentication, GDPR, SEPA scheme participation	SOC 1, SOC 2, PCI DSS Level 1, GDPR, ASC 606 and IFRS 15 support through the RevRec module
Founded	2004	2009
Headquarters	Amsterdam, Netherlands	San Francisco, California
Ownership	Private, venture and growth-equity backed	Private equity owned, majority stake held by Accel-KKR since August 2020

Strengths and limitations

Mollie

Strengths

The deepest European local payment method coverage of any self-serve provider, with iDEAL, Bancontact, SEPA Direct Debit, Przelewy24, EPS, Klarna, and Wero as first-class methods rather than redirects.
Genuinely transparent per-method pricing published on the website, which is rare in European acquiring and makes cost modelling possible.
Flat-fee methods change the economics of recurring billing: SEPA Direct Debit at 35 cents per collection is a fraction of any percentage-based rate on a typical subscription.
No monthly fee, no minimum volume, and self-serve signup, so the cost of trying it alongside an existing provider is limited to the transactions you route through it.

Limitations

The Subscriptions API is a scheduler, not a billing platform. No plan catalogue, no proration, no coupons, no usage metering, no quotes, no invoicing worth the name, and no revenue recognition.
Dunning is a fixed policy: five daily retries and then the subscription is cancelled. You cannot shape the schedule, there is no intelligent retry model, and there is no card account updater story comparable to Stripe or Paddle.
Not a merchant of record, so European VAT registration and one-stop-shop filing stay entirely with you, and nothing in the product helps with tax at all.
Non-European card rates at 3.25 percent plus 25 cents make it a poor choice for a business selling mainly to the United States.

Recurly

Strengths

The most developed churn recovery machinery in this batch: machine-learning retry logic, an account updater, configurable dunning campaigns, cancel-save flows, and pause-before-cancel, built over fifteen years for businesses where recovery is the whole game.
Payments orchestration across more than 20 gateways with cascading retries recovers transactions a single-processor integration would lose outright.
Support for 140-plus currencies and 10-plus payment methods, with genuinely global subscription billing rather than a US product with international bolted on.
A 90-day free trial with self-serve signup, which is long enough to migrate a real subscriber base and measure lift before committing, and nothing else in the category offers it.

Limitations

The $249 monthly floor is disqualifying below roughly $30,000 of revenue, where it produces an effective rate no better than a merchant of record while providing none of the tax relief.
Not a merchant of record. Tax is localized and calculated, but registration, filing, and remittance remain your company's legal responsibility.
Almost everything differentiating sits on All-Access, which requires $1M in billing volume and a sales conversation, so the self-serve product is deliberately the thin version.
Revenue recognition and the Engage churn product are separate annual purchases from $850 and $1,600 a month, so a complete configuration is an order of magnitude more expensive than the headline.

Pricing compared

Mollie

Per-transaction pricing published individually for each payment method, with no monthly fee and no minimum volume on online payments. In-person payments have an optional monthly plan.

Online payments (pay per transaction)From €0.25
Klarna and buy now pay later2.99% + €0.35 to 4.99% + €0.40
In-person pay as you go€0
In-person Pro€20
Volume pricingNegotiated

Work it at a $50 average ticket, roughly 46 euros. On a European Economic Area consumer card that is 1.80 percent, about 90 cents, plus 25 cents, so roughly $1.17 per transaction, an effective rate of 2.34 percent. At $10,000 a month across 200 transactions that is about $234; at $100,000 across 2,000 transactions about $2,340, the same 2.34 percent. Now change the method. Route those same subscriptions to SEPA Direct Debit at a flat 35 cents and the effective rate collapses to 0.7 percent, which is $70 a month at $10,000 and $700 at $100,000. That spread is the whole argument for Mollie: not the card rate, which is unremarkable, but the ability to move recurring charges onto a flat-fee rail your customers will actually accept. Set against Stripe Billing at 4.2 percent and Paddle at 6 percent on the same ticket, a European business collecting by SEPA is paying a sixth of what a merchant of record charges. It is also getting none of the tax service, none of the billing engine, and a five-retry dunning policy it cannot change.

Recurly

Monthly platform fee plus a percentage of billing volume above an included threshold, with separately priced products for churn engagement and revenue recognition, and higher tiers gated by volume and a sales conversation.

Starter$249 + 0.9%
All-AccessLess than 1% of billing volume
All-Access for ShopifyLess than 1% of billing volume

Recurly is priced for a business it fits, which is not a small one. The $249 floor plus your processor produces an effective 6.0 percent at $10,000 a month, no cheaper than a merchant of record and without the tax relief, so a bootstrapped company should not be here. At $100,000 a month the same structure lands near 4.3 percent and saves roughly $1,700 a month against a merchant of record, and at that scale the churn recovery engine and multi-gateway orchestration start paying for themselves independently of the fee comparison. The frustration is that the features that justify Recurly, multiple dunning campaigns, intelligent churn prevention, payments orchestration, and multicurrency, are on All-Access behind a $1M volume gate. Starter is the on-ramp, not the product. Judged honestly, Recurly is excellent value for a high-volume subscription business with a finance team and poor value for anyone else, and the 90-day trial is the right way to find out which you are.

Editorial verdict on each

Mollie

Mollie is the right European acquirer and the wrong European billing platform, and confusing the two is the only way to be disappointed by it. The local method coverage is genuinely best in class, the per-method pricing is published and honest, and the ability to move recurring charges onto SEPA Direct Debit at a flat 35 cents drops the effective take rate to around 0.7 percent, a sixth of what a merchant of record charges on the same ticket. What you do not get is a plan catalogue, proration, coupons, usage metering, revenue recognition, or any control over dunning beyond five daily retries and cancellation, and you keep every ounce of the European VAT obligation. Buy Mollie as the rail under a billing system you already have or intend to buy. If you are a European business currently paying a merchant of record double-digit percentages for convenience, work out the SEPA arithmetic before your next renewal, and factor in that the GoCardless integration through 2026 will make this a bigger and less predictable vendor than the one you signed with.

Read the full Mollie profile

Recurly

Recurly is a specialist, and the specialty is getting money out of cards that did not work the first time. Fifteen years of machine-learning retry logic, an account updater, configurable dunning campaigns, cancel-save flows, and cascading retries across more than 20 gateways add up to a recovery engine nothing else in this batch matches, and for a consumer subscription business with real card volume that is worth more than any amount of pricing flexibility. The economics follow the same logic. At $10,000 a month the $249 floor produces an effective 6.0 percent, identical to a merchant of record but with none of the tax relief, which makes Recurly simply the wrong product at that size. At $100,000 a month the same structure lands near 4.3 percent, saves roughly $1,700 monthly against a merchant of record, and the recovery lift arrives on top. The frustration is how much sits behind the $1M All-Access gate, including multiple dunning campaigns, orchestration, multicurrency, and SSO, which means Starter is an on-ramp rather than the product. Use the 90-day trial, which is genuinely the best evaluation term available anywhere in this category, and let your own recovery numbers decide.

Read the full Recurly profile

Mollie profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; Recurly last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.