Paddle vs Recurly Pricing (2026)
How do these two stack up on price? Here's what each one costs, what you get, and where the value sits.
Pay-as-you-go
- Cross-border sales tax compliance
- Protection against fraud and chargebacks
- No migration fees, monthly fees, or hidden extras
Custom pricing
- Custom pricing to fit your business model and products
- Get access to optional premium services and success management
- Custom migration services and implementation support
Starter
- Automated global subscription billing
- Flexible plans and pricing
- Static churn-prevention tools
- 1 Dunning campaign
- 10+ payment methods
- 20+ payment gateways
All-Access
Popular- AI-Powered agents, analytics, insights
- Intelligent churn-prevention tools
- Multiple dunning campaigns
- Advanced plans, pricing, promotions
- Payments orchestration across multiple gateways
- Custom reporting, additional analytics, and automated exports
- Additional payment methods including ACH, gateways, and communications languages
- Multicurrency
- Single sign-on
- And more!
All-Access for Shopify
- Intelligent churn-prevention tools
- Customized bundles
- Subscribe and save
- Prepaid and gift subscriptions
- Hybrid subscription support
- Cancel-save flows and surveys
- Self-serve bulk updater
- Analytics and integrations
- Hosted subscriber portal with passwordless login
- And more!
Engage
- AI powered propensity to churn model
- 1-click billing integration
- Personalized offers
- Cancel save, upsell, cross sell capabilities
- AB testing
- Granular segmentation
- Low code prompt builder
- Advanced analytics
- Robust integrations
RevRec
- Automated contract modifications
- SSP automation
- Rules-driven allocations
- Real-time revenue insights & forecasting
- Automated monthly close
- Unified workbench
- Multi-GAAP compliance
- Immutable audit trail
- Multi-everything support
Paddle vs Recurly FAQ
- Which one is cheaper?
- One or both use custom pricing, so it depends on your specific needs.
- Can I use either one for free?
- Neither has a free plan. But Recurly offers a free trial.
- How do they charge?
- Both use a usage-based model, so the comparison is straightforward — it comes down to features and limits at each price point.
- Which one is a better deal?
- Depends on what you need. Paddle: Paddle sits in the mid-to-premium range for merchant-of-record solutions — they're not the cheapest option (Stripe's standard rate is 2.9% + $0.30), but they're selling tax compliance and MoR liability coverage as part of the deal, which justifies the premium for international SaaS sellers. They're going after founders who want to offload global VAT/sales tax headaches, not price-sensitive teams just looking for a payment gateway. Recurly: At sub-1% of billing volume, Recurly is pitching itself as cheaper than Stripe Billing's percentage-based fees at scale, targeting mid-market SaaS and subscription commerce companies that have outgrown basic payment tools but aren't ready for a full Zuora implementation. They're the pragmatic middle ground — not the cheapest, not the most enterprise.
Still deciding? See the best Paddle alternatives or the best Recurly alternatives, ranked with verified pricing.
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