MoonClerk 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.
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The short answer
Editorial assessmentMoonClerk compared with Recurly
Not really comparable in capability and that is the point. Recurly is an enterprise-grade subscription platform with a serious revenue-recovery engine, deep churn analytics, and a proper plan catalogue, priced accordingly. MoonClerk is $18 to $550 a month for a form. A business that has outgrown MoonClerk usually knows it, because it has started needing proration, entitlements, or analytics that MoonClerk simply does not have. Until that point, Recurly is expensive infrastructure for a problem you do not yet have.
Choose MoonClerk if
Non-technical operators who need recurring payments live this week: nonprofits taking monthly donations, gyms and studios billing memberships, coaches and consultants on retainer, small course businesses, and early SaaS companies whose plan structure is simple enough that a form is genuinely sufficient, particularly anyone who already has or wants a Stripe account and does not want to write code.
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 | MoonClerk | Recurly |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Billing | Billing |
| Starting price | $18 per month for up to $2,000 in monthly volume (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 | Flat monthly fee banded by monthly processing volume, with identical features on every tier. Stripe's processing fees are charged separately by Stripe and are not included. | 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 permanent free plan, but the entry tier is $18 a month and every feature is included at that price. | 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 | Free trial with no credit card required | 90 days, which is by a wide margin the longest trial in this category and is available self-serve |
| Best for | Non-technical operators who need recurring payments live this week: nonprofits taking monthly donations, gyms and studios billing memberships, coaches and consultants on retainer, small course businesses, and early SaaS companies whose plan structure is simple enough that a form is genuinely sufficient, particularly anyone who already has or wants a Stripe account and does not want to write code. | 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 | Under an hour for a working recurring payment form, including connecting Stripe, branding, and embedding. A more considered setup with several forms, custom fields, and Zapier automations is an afternoon. | 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 | Very low, and that is the product's entire proposition. The interface is deliberately narrow, there is little to configure wrongly, and no payments vocabulary is required beyond understanding what an interval is. | 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 application, Hosted payment pages, Embeddable forms for WordPress, Webflow, Squarespace, and any HTML site, REST API | Web application, Hosted checkout and account management pages, Hosted subscriber portal, REST API, Mobile SDKs, Webhooks, Shopify app via Recurly Commerce |
| Compliance | PCI DSS Level 1 inherited through Stripe, GDPR, SOC 2 posture through the Stripe relationship | SOC 1, SOC 2, PCI DSS Level 1, GDPR, ASC 606 and IFRS 15 support through the RevRec module |
| Founded | 2012 | 2009 |
| Headquarters | Greenville, South Carolina, United States | San Francisco, California |
| Ownership | Privately held and bootstrapped | Private equity owned, majority stake held by Accel-KKR since August 2020 |
Strengths and limitations
MoonClerk
Strengths
- Genuinely no-code: a non-technical operator can build, brand, embed, and launch a recurring payment form in well under an hour, which is the whole product and it works.
- Every feature is included on every tier, including the $18 entry plan, so there is no upgrade-to-unlock dynamic and no feature you discover you cannot have.
- It runs on your own Stripe account, so cards, customers, and subscriptions live in infrastructure you control, MoonClerk cannot freeze your funds, and removing it later does not cost you your recurring revenue.
- The flat monthly fee is predictable and modest, and at higher volumes it works out below a percentage-based competitor's software fee.
Limitations
- No tax capability of any kind: no VAT, no sales tax, no merchant of record, so international selling leaves you fully exposed and you need a separate solution.
- Not a plan catalogue. MoonClerk thinks in individual forms, and a business with tiers, add-ons, bundles, and coupons will find the model fights it past a handful of products.
- No usage-based metering, no entitlement API, and no proration engine you would trust for a seat-based SaaS product with mid-cycle changes.
- Stripe only. There is no gateway alternative, so a business that needs a different processor for regulatory or cost reasons cannot use MoonClerk at all.
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
MoonClerk
Flat monthly fee banded by monthly processing volume, with identical features on every tier. Stripe's processing fees are charged separately by Stripe and are not included.
- Tier 1$18
- Tier 4$90
- Tier 6$175
- Tier 9$415
- Tier 10 and Enterprise$550 then custom
Work it at a $50 average ticket. At $10,000 a month you are in the $7.5K to $12.5K band at $90, plus roughly $350 in Stripe fees across 200 transactions, totalling $440, an effective rate of 4.40 percent. At $100,000 a month you are in the $65K to $100K band at $415, plus roughly $3,500 in Stripe fees across 2,000 transactions, totalling $3,915, an effective rate of 3.92 percent. Compare with Stripe Billing at a flat 4.2 percent at both volumes, Paddle at 6 percent, and Gumroad at 11 percent. So MoonClerk is slightly more expensive than raw Stripe Billing at $10,000 and slightly cheaper at $100,000, which means you are not buying it to save money on fees. You are buying it because a non-technical person can have recurring payments live this afternoon and never open a code editor. Priced against a developer's time, $90 a month is trivially worth it. Priced against a billing platform's capability, it is expensive for what it does not do.
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
MoonClerk
MoonClerk sells one thing honestly: recurring payments without a developer, on infrastructure you already own. At $18 to $550 a month flat, with every feature available on every tier and Stripe underneath holding your cards and your money, it is the fastest path from having no billing to having billing for anyone who is not going to write code. The effective take rate of roughly 4.4 percent at $10,000 a month and 3.9 percent at $100,000 is a wash against Stripe Billing, so this is not a cost play. It is a time and capability play, and against a developer's rate it pays for itself in the first week. The boundaries are hard and clearly drawn: no tax handling of any kind, no plan catalogue, no usage metering, no entitlements, no analytics, and Stripe or nothing. If those gaps describe your business, buy Zoho Billing or Outseta instead. If they do not, MoonClerk is a thirteen-year-old, bootstrapped, quietly excellent tool that will not surprise you.
Read the full MoonClerk profileRecurly
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 profileMoonClerk 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.
The best in Subscription Billing
17 trackedSubscription billing platforms handle recurring charges, plans, invoicing, dunning, and tax, either as a layer on a payment processor or as a merchant of record that takes on tax and compliance liability.
The merchant of record that sells your software so you never file a VAT return.
The cheapest published merchant of record rate in software, at 3.9 percent plus 40 cents with no monthly fee.
An open-source merchant of record built for developers who bill by the token, growing as fast as the AI products it bills.
Usage-based billing at AI scale: meter the events first, price them later, and change the model without re-engineering the pipeline.
Gumroad gets a paid product live in under an hour with near zero learning curve, built to be run by someone who has never configured payments.
Frequently asked questions
6 questionsWhat is the difference between MoonClerk and Recurly?
Not really comparable in capability and that is the point. Recurly is an enterprise-grade subscription platform with a serious revenue-recovery engine, deep churn analytics, and a proper plan catalogue, priced accordingly. MoonClerk is $18 to $550 a month for a form. A business that has outgrown MoonClerk usually knows it, because it has started needing proration, entitlements, or analytics that MoonClerk simply does not have. Until that point, Recurly is expensive infrastructure for a problem you do not yet have.
Is MoonClerk or Recurly cheaper?
MoonClerk starts at $18 per month for up to $2,000 in monthly volume (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). The billing models differ, so the entry price is rarely the whole cost. MoonClerk pricing model: Flat monthly fee banded by monthly processing volume, with identical features on every tier. Stripe's processing fees are charged separately by Stripe and are not included. Recurly pricing model: 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.
Does MoonClerk or Recurly have a free plan?
MoonClerk has a free plan. No permanent free plan, but the entry tier is $18 a month and every feature is included at that price. Trial terms: Free trial with no credit card required. Recurly has a free plan. 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. Trial terms: 90 days, which is by a wide margin the longest trial in this category and is available self-serve.
Who should choose MoonClerk?
Non-technical operators who need recurring payments live this week: nonprofits taking monthly donations, gyms and studios billing memberships, coaches and consultants on retainer, small course businesses, and early SaaS companies whose plan structure is simple enough that a form is genuinely sufficient, particularly anyone who already has or wants a Stripe account and does not want to write code.
Who should choose Recurly?
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.
What are the best alternatives to MoonClerk and Recurly?
SaaSTracker profiles 17 products in Subscription Billing. The Summer 2026 awards in the category went to Paddle (Category Leader), Creem (Best Value), Polar (Momentum). Every profile is compiled from primary sources, so a shortlist can be built from pricing, limitations, and fit rather than from star ratings.
