Is Paddle or Recurly cheaper?

Paddle starts at 5% plus $0.50 per transaction, with no monthly fee (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).

Paddle 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

Both sides assessed

Paddle compared with Recurly

Recurly is a billing and payments-orchestration platform for companies with real subscriber volume, starting at $249 a month plus 0.9 percent above the first $40,000 of billings, and it leaves you as merchant of record. Paddle charges more per transaction but has no floor and no compliance burden. Under about $40,000 a month Recurly's flat $249 is dead weight for a small seller and Paddle wins on simplicity; above roughly $150,000 a month with a finance team in place, Recurly's orchestration and churn tooling start to justify themselves.

Recurly compared with Paddle

Different architectures with a clear crossover. At $10,000 a month Recurly plus Stripe costs an effective 6.0 percent, identical to Paddle, while leaving you the VAT registrations and filings, so Paddle is strictly better at that size. At $100,000 a month Recurly plus Stripe is about 4.3 percent against Paddle's 6.0 percent, saving roughly $1,700 a month, and the recovery engine adds value on top. Choose Paddle below the crossover and while you have no finance function; choose Recurly above it once you do.

Choose Paddle if

Small and mid-sized software companies selling globally with no finance or tax function, especially B2C and prosumer SaaS with a lot of small international transactions, teams who would rather pay a visible 5 percent than discover an unfiled VAT obligation in Germany two years later, and founders who want checkout, subscriptions, tax, fraud, and billing support from one vendor on day one.

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	Paddle	Recurly
Category	Billing	Billing
Starting price	5% plus $0.50 per transaction, with no monthly fee (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	Single blended merchant of record fee per successful transaction, with no monthly platform fee, no setup fee, and no minimum volume. Tax filing, fraud protection, dunning, analytics, and customer billing support are included in the rate rather than sold as add-ons.	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 free plan and none needed: there is no platform subscription at all, so an account with no sales costs nothing. Every feature including tax filing, Retain dunning, and ProfitWell Metrics is included in the transaction rate.	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 in the conventional sense; the account is free to open and you pay only when you make a sale, subject to seller verification	90 days, which is by a wide margin the longest trial in this category and is available self-serve
Best for	Small and mid-sized software companies selling globally with no finance or tax function, especially B2C and prosumer SaaS with a lot of small international transactions, teams who would rather pay a visible 5 percent than discover an unfiled VAT obligation in Germany two years later, and founders who want checkout, subscriptions, tax, fraud, and billing support from one vendor on day one.	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 the integration, longer for approval. The checkout can be embedded in an afternoon and the API is pleasant, but seller verification is a review of your business and product by a company that is about to take legal responsibility for your sales, and that can take days.	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	Moderate. The subscription concepts are standard, but the merchant of record mental model takes adjustment: your revenue is a payout from Paddle, not a stream of customer payments, and your accounting has to reconcile the two. Teams migrating from Paddle Classic to Paddle Billing face a genuine rebuild rather than an upgrade.	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	Hosted overlay checkout, Inline checkout embedded in your own page, Paddle Billing REST API, JavaScript checkout library, Server SDKs, Hosted customer portal, Sandbox environment	Web application, Hosted checkout and account management pages, Hosted subscriber portal, REST API, Mobile SDKs, Webhooks, Shopify app via Recurly Commerce
Compliance	SOC 2 Type 2, GDPR, PCI DSS Level 1, 3D Secure 2	SOC 1, SOC 2, PCI DSS Level 1, GDPR, ASC 606 and IFRS 15 support through the RevRec module
Founded	2012	2009
Headquarters	London, United Kingdom	San Francisco, California
Ownership	Venture and growth equity backed, with KKR holding a substantial minority stake	Private equity owned, majority stake held by Accel-KKR since August 2020

Strengths and limitations

Paddle

Strengths

The merchant of record model genuinely removes global tax registration, filing, and remittance from your company, which is the only part of billing that carries legal risk rather than operational annoyance.
The 5 percent rate is all-inclusive in a way competitors' are not: no separate international card surcharge, no currency conversion line, no payout fee, and no charge for the dunning engine or the analytics.
Paddle Billing is a real subscription platform with proration, pauses, multi-item subscriptions, trials, and coupons, not a thin recurring charge wrapped around a checkout.
Retain, inherited from ProfitWell, is one of the better failed-payment recovery engines in the category and is included rather than sold as an upsell.

Limitations

Six percent effective is a lot of gross margin, it does not fall with scale on the published rate, and the only way down is a negotiation you have to earn.
The 50-cent fixed fee makes low-ticket products uneconomic, and Paddle will not even quote the standard rate below a $10 price point.
Acceptable use is narrow. Physical goods, services, marketplaces, and anything regulated are declined, and seller verification can reject a business after you have built the integration.
You are not the seller, so your customer's invoice says Paddle, your enterprise buyer's procurement team has to accept that, and you cannot sign on your own paper for a deal that needs it.

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

Paddle

Single blended merchant of record fee per successful transaction, with no monthly platform fee, no setup fee, and no minimum volume. Tax filing, fraud protection, dunning, analytics, and customer billing support are included in the rate rather than sold as add-ons.

Standard5% + $0.50
Volume and customCustom

Paddle is expensive per transaction and cheap per company. At 6.0 percent effective it costs roughly 1.7 points more than assembling Stripe plus a billing layer plus tax software yourself, which at $100,000 a month is about $1,750, or a fraction of one finance hire. Below roughly $150,000 a month in globally distributed revenue that trade is clearly favorable, because the alternative is not 4.3 percent, it is 4.3 percent plus a person who understands VAT thresholds. Above that, and especially if your revenue is concentrated in the US, the premium starts buying you less than it costs, and the exit is painful because card data does not travel. Buy Paddle knowing the take rate does not improve with scale unless you negotiate.

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

Paddle

Category Leader

Paddle is the default answer for a small software company selling globally, and the reason is not the software, it is the legal structure. At an effective 6.0 percent it costs roughly 1.7 points more than assembling your own stack, which is real money and does not improve with scale, but what you buy is the removal of tax registration, filing, remittance, chargeback defense, and a 24/7 billing support desk from your company entirely. Below roughly $150,000 a month in internationally distributed revenue that is an easy trade, because the honest alternative is not 4.3 percent, it is 4.3 percent plus somebody whose job is VAT. Two things should give you pause before signing: the 50-cent fixed fee makes low-priced products genuinely uneconomic, and leaving is expensive because card credentials are not portable, so treat this as a five-year decision rather than a reversible one. If you are US-only, already have finance, or sell on your own contract paper to enterprise buyers, look at a billing layer on your own processor instead.

Read the full Paddle 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

Paddle 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.