Recurly vs Stigg
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 assessmentStigg compared with Recurly
Same relationship as Chargebee. Recurly runs the subscription lifecycle and the revenue-recovery engine; Stigg runs packaging and real-time access control on top. The decision is not between them, it is whether the entitlement logic scattered through your application is costing you enough engineering time to justify a second vendor. If pricing changes routinely take a sprint, it is.
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.
Choose Stigg if
Engineering-led SaaS and AI companies that already have a billing system and are being slowed down by hard-coded plan logic, particularly teams shipping usage or credit-based products where access has to be granted or refused in real time, and companies that need per-customer entitlement exceptions without a code branch for each one.
Side by side
13 attributes| Attribute | Recurly | Stigg |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Billing | Billing |
| Starting price | $249 per month plus 0.9% of billing volume, with the first $40,000 of monthly billings included (free plan available) | $0 (Build), then $399 per month (Pro), or $331 per month billed annually (free plan available) |
| 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. | Freemium platform subscription with limits on managed entities, monthly usage events, and event throughput, plus graduated overage pricing above the included volumes. Payment processing and billing fees are separate and belong to your underlying billing system. |
| 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. | Build is free forever with 10,000 managed entities per month, 5 million usage events per month, 1,000 events per second, the full credits and entitlements engine, and Stripe and HubSpot integrations. |
| Free trial | 90 days, which is by a wide margin the longest trial in this category and is available self-serve | The free Build tier serves as the evaluation path; no separate fixed-length trial is published |
| Best for | 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. | Engineering-led SaaS and AI companies that already have a billing system and are being slowed down by hard-coded plan logic, particularly teams shipping usage or credit-based products where access has to be granted or refused in real time, and companies that need per-customer entitlement exceptions without a code branch for each one. |
| Setup time | 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. | Days for a first entitlement check, weeks for a full migration. Connecting Stripe and modelling your packaging is fast. Replacing every hard-coded limit across an existing codebase is the real project and should be sequenced feature by feature rather than attempted at once. |
| Learning curve | 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. | Moderate for engineers and irrelevant for anyone else, because this is not a product a non-technical person operates. The conceptual work is deciding what your features actually are and where their boundaries lie, which most teams discover they have never articulated precisely. |
| Platforms | Web application, Hosted checkout and account management pages, Hosted subscriber portal, REST API, Mobile SDKs, Webhooks, Shopify app via Recurly Commerce | Web application, REST and GraphQL APIs, Client and server SDKs across major stacks, Sidecar deployment, Embeddable React widgets, Bring your own cloud and bring your own database deployment |
| Compliance | SOC 1, SOC 2, PCI DSS Level 1, GDPR, ASC 606 and IFRS 15 support through the RevRec module | SOC 2, GDPR, FedRAMP path available on the BYOC deployment |
| Founded | 2009 | 2021 |
| Headquarters | San Francisco, California | Tel Aviv, Israel |
| Ownership | Private equity owned, majority stake held by Accel-KKR since August 2020 | Venture-backed |
Strengths and limitations
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.
Stigg
Strengths
- The free Build tier is genuinely usable rather than a demo: the full credits and entitlements engine, Stripe integration, and 5 million monthly events at no cost.
- Sub-10ms p99 entitlement checks are fast enough to sit in a request path, which is the specification that determines whether the product is actually useful or merely tidy.
- Layers on top of an existing billing system with two-way sync, so adoption requires no billing migration and removal leaves your billing intact, which is an unusually low-risk shape for infrastructure.
- Credits and wallets are built with double-entry integrity and immutable ledgers rather than as a counter, which is the right engineering for a balance customers will dispute.
Limitations
- Not a billing system. No payments, no invoicing as system of record, no merchant of record, and no tax capability of any kind, so it is always an addition to your costs rather than a replacement.
- The jump from free to $399 a month with nothing in between is the most awkward part of the pricing, and it lands hardest on exactly the small teams the free tier attracted.
- SSO and role-based access control are reserved for the sales-led Scale tier, which is a high gate for controls many buyers treat as baseline security.
- Adds a runtime dependency in your request path. A well-designed local cache mitigates it, but you are now relying on a third party to answer whether a user may act.
Pricing compared
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.
Stigg
Freemium platform subscription with limits on managed entities, monthly usage events, and event throughput, plus graduated overage pricing above the included volumes. Payment processing and billing fees are separate and belong to your underlying billing system.
- Build$0
- Pro$399
- ScaleCustom
- BYOCCustom
Stigg does not take a percentage, so the arithmetic works differently from the rest of this category. At a $50 average ticket and $10,000 a month you have roughly 200 subscribers, comfortably inside the free Build tier's 10,000 managed entities, so the honest cost is $0 for Stigg plus roughly $350 in Stripe processing, giving an all-in rate of 3.5 percent. That makes Stigg free at the scale most small businesses operate at, which is a genuinely strong offer. If you need Pro's branded widgets and audit log at that volume, $399 plus $350 is $749, an effective 7.49 percent, which is worse than Paddle. At $100,000 a month across 2,000 subscribers, Pro at $399 plus roughly $3,500 in processing is $3,899, an effective 3.90 percent, cheaper than Stripe Billing's 4.2 percent and far cheaper than Paddle's 6 percent. The pattern is clear: Stigg is free when small, expensive in the awkward middle, and cheap at scale. Judge it on whether removing pricing changes from your engineering backlog is worth the platform fee, because the fee itself will never be the deciding number.
Editorial verdict on each
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 profileStigg
Stigg is infrastructure for a problem most SaaS companies do not know they have until the third time they reprice. Moving entitlements out of application code and into a configuration layer that answers access checks in under 10 milliseconds is the correct architecture, and the credits and wallets work, with immutable double-entry ledgers and per-agent spend caps enforced at call time, is genuinely ahead of what conventional billing systems offer AI products. The free Build tier is unusually honest, covering 10,000 managed entities and 5 million monthly events with the full engine, which means a small business can run this at zero cost. The catch is the middle: $399 with nothing between it and free is a jarring step, and SSO sitting behind a sales call is a poor look. Remember what it is not. Stigg does not bill, does not process, is not a merchant of record, and does nothing about tax, so it is always a line item on top of your real billing stack. Buy it when pricing changes are costing you sprints, when credits or AI spend control are unsolved, or when your enterprise exceptions have become code. Otherwise keep the table in your database.
Read the full Stigg profileRecurly profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; Stigg last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.