Comparison: Recurly vs Maxio

What is Recurly?

Recurly is a subscription management and recurring billing platform that helps businesses of all sizes create, manage, and grow their subscription businesses. It is a cloud-based solution that offers a wide range of features, including subscription management, recurring billing, payments, reporting and analytics.

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What is Maxio?

Maxio, formerly Chargify and SaaSOptics, is a Billing and Financial Operations platform. Chargify specialized in billing and subscription management for SaaS companies, while SaaSOptics focused on revenue management. In April 2022, they merged to create Maxio, offering comprehensive solutions for SaaS businesses.

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Recurly vs. Maxio: Feature comparison

Subscription billing

Recurly and Maxio provide flexible subscription billing options, including fixed fees, tiered pricing, volume-based billing, stairstep pricing, along with dunning management and refund support. Businesses can set up recurring billing cycles, manage billing exceptions, and handle proration and discounts all within their platform.

Usage-based billing

Recurly and Maxio offer support for straightforward usage-based pricing (e.g., $20 per user). This allows businesses to implement different pricing strategies, including a pay-as-you-go approach, or a flat fee with overage charges. However, when it comes to complex usage-based billing scenarios, Recurly and Maxio faces limitations. For example, neither of these software packages supports a tiered pricing model that includes both a per unit fee and a flat fee for the entire tier.

Percentage based billing

Recurly supports the percentage-based charge model when charges are collected at the end of the billing period (e.g., 5% per transaction). However, fintech companies like PayPal or Wise typically prefer an instant charge model, where fees are collected immediately when the end-user performs an action. Recurly does not provide support for this fintech-oriented feature.

Maxio does not natively support percentage-based billing. Instead, you need to allocate it manually within your own application before sending data to Maxio.

Invoice and Email language‍

Recurly offers multiple languages for invoices and emails, including English, German, Dutch and Chinese. This supports businesses operating in various countries or aiming for global expansion.

Maxio currently does not offer a translation feature, limiting its invoice and email language to English only.

Taxation

Recurly enables tax calculation through Avalara’s system. This can help you with tax compliance but also lead to additional costs.

Maxio provides a built-in taxation feature, and enables users to set a tax by geographic region or at the charge or plan levels. Maxio also offers the flexibility for users to handle taxation through Avalara.

API rate limit

Recurly allows 1,000 requests per minute. Only Get and Head requests count towards the rate limit. If a user exceeds the rate limit, the API returns a 429 status code indicating Too Many Requests.

Maxio manages call limits based on concurrency instead of the usual rate limits per second. It allows a maximum of 4 concurrent API calls per subdomain at a time, not limited to 4 requests per second. If the concurrency exceeds 4, additional requests may be queued for processing once the concurrency returns to an acceptable level.

Recurly vs. Maxio: Pricing

Recurly's Starter plan begins with a monthly platform fee of $249 and includes a 0.9% fee based on revenue. In 2023, they have a promotional offer for this plan; details here. For the Professional and Elite plans, Recurly offers custom pricing.

Maxio’s pricing does not include a free trial, starting with the Essentials Plan at $599 per month, $1 million in annual billings included. However, the overage charge of approximately 0.9% of revenue could potentially add up significantly for high-volume users. For the Growth and Scales plans, pricing is upon request. According to the Fififinance’s review, Maxio’s 0.9% plans include a fixed fee and overage charge on revenue.

Which solution is the best for you?

Recurly and Maxio cater to subscription and recurring billing, and offer comparable subscription billing features. Both platforms empower businesses to establish recurring billing cycles, manage exceptions, and handle invoicing operations efficiently. However, these software packages may not be flexible enough for handling complex pricing models and usage-based billing. In such instances, it's worth exploring alternatives that better accommodate intricate billing scenarios.

Lago, the Chargebee and Maxio alternative

Lago is an open-source metering and usage-based billing solution. It offers a self-hosted and cloud-based, scalable, and modular architecture to manage subscriptions, usage-based billing and all the nuances in between. It's the go-to choice for companies that require a powerful tool to handle complex billing scenarios, allowing you to build a comprehensive billing system from scratch with ease.

For further information and detailed comparisons:

👉 Recurly vs. Lago comparison: here

‍👉 Maxio vs. Lago comparison: here

TL;DR: Table of comparison Recurly vs. Maxio

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