Recurly: Subscriptions That Scale
How Recurly is powering reliable growth for subscription brands
Recurly understands the challenge of growing a business through subscriptions. Many companies struggle with churn, payment failures, and complex billing. Recurly makes that simpler. It handles billing, automates retries on failed charges, and recovers revenue at scale. In 2023 alone, it recovered about $1.2 billion for its clients.
When Joe Rohrlich became CEO in January 2024, he brought a track record of growth at Top Hat and Bazaarvoice. He joined Recurly to lead its next chapter and position it for long-term market leadership.
Under his leadership and with Drew McChesney as Managing Director, Recurly focused on features that truly moved the needle. They invested in AI powered insights that predict churn and shape pricing, helping companies optimize plans in real time. They built tools to let subscribers pause plans, create loyalty rewards, and tailor pricing, features that improve retention and engagement.
More than 50 innovations shipped recently. Recurly Compass is its AI engine, using data from over 2,200 businesses and 67 million subscribers to feed predictive insights and recommended actions. Recurly Commerce and Recurly Engage emerged after acquisitions, bringing ecommerce billing and subscriber engagement into the same unified platform.
The result is a platform built for scale. Recurly handles over 50 million subscribers and more than $10 billion in annual payments. Brands like Paramount+, Twitch, BarkBox, and Sling rely on it to manage billions of recurring revenues across multiple currencies and regions, with near perfect retention.
What this means for businesses is clear. Recurly removes the friction of managing subscriptions. It offers data backed guidance so companies do not just survive churn, they anticipate and prevent it. Behind this is a leadership team focused on product clarity and real customer value. That is how Recurly fuels sustainable growth for brands around the world.
The Rise of Recurly as a Subscription Powerhouse
Recurly started in 2009 to tackle the common pain point of inconsistent, manual subscription billing. Within a year, it had attracted its first 100 customers and raised seed funding, laying the groundwork for today’s scale. Now, Recurly processes over 10 to 12 billion dollars in recurring revenue annually and manages more than 50 to 67 million active subscribers served by over 2,200 merchants worldwide. Its global footprint includes offices in San Francisco, Boulder, and London, and it serves markets across digital media, SaaS, streaming, retail, travel, and hospitality.
Recurly’s platform is built for complexity: tiered plans, proration, pause and resume features, usage-based billing, global gateways, compliance tools, and automated dunning flows. What sets Recurly apart is its dual focus: automating vast billing systems while recovering revenue from involuntary churn.
In 2023 alone, it recovered 1.2 billion dollars through predictive retry logic and recovery events, extending subscriber lifetime value by a median of 141 days for those at risk. With high customer retention, even a reported 98% repeat rate across five years, and backed by investors like Accel KKR, Recurly is positioned as a reliable, financially stable growth engine for its clients.
Smart Subscription Tools That Drive Growth
Recurly offers more than billing. It delivers growth tools. Its platform combines automation, payment orchestration, data insights, and intelligent retry logic designed to prevent churn before it happens. Recurly’s analytics dashboards display conversion rates, churn triggers, gateway performance, and pricing levers. Customers can benchmark their metrics against peers with built-in comparisons on key data like renewal invoice paid or decline rates.
Artificial intelligence powered features enable proactive recovery: when payments fail, the platform launches optimized retry sequences and communication flows in real time, recovering lost revenue at scale. It is not generic software. It is purpose built for subscription companies. Clients like Paramount Plus, Twitch, BarkBox, Sling, and FabFitFun rely on it to handle billions in recurring transactions and subscriber lifecycle events.
The Spring 2025 product release packed over 50 new features, including expanded alternative payment method support, e-commerce integrations, automation workflows, and deeper artificial intelligence led insights to boost conversion and reduce manual lift. The logic is simple: smarter billing drives higher retention, lifetime value, and predictable growth, all while minimizing manual overhead.
Revenue Recovery: Churn Management That Works
What this really means is that Recurly recovers revenue that many companies assume is lost forever. In 2023, Recurly’s recovery engine successfully reclaimed 1.2 billion dollars in failed charges across its client base, saving up to 72% of at-risk subscribers with smart retry events and dunning strategies. Subscribers rescued through these events stay an additional 141 days on average.
So revenue is not just saved, it continues to grow. That recovery system links directly with built-in analytics. Recurly benchmarks things like trial to paid conversions (median 50%), renewal invoice paid or declined rates (paid approximately 96%), and churn percentages (around 4%) to inform recovery optimization.
Instead of treating failed payments as write offs, clients can handle them as opportunities: retry, adjust, personalize plans, pause subscriptions, often saving relationships rather than losing them. Recurly’s ability to handle complex lifecycle events at scale is compelling for subscription businesses focused on maximizing value from every subscriber. It is not just billing. It is churn management and smart retention at scale.
Data Led Strategy and Benchmarking for Subscribers
Recurly does not just offer software. It shares insights. Its annual “State of Subscriptions” report pulls data from thousands of merchants and tens of millions of subscribers. The 2024 report revealed that subscriber growth persisted despite reduced acquisition spend, with retention improving, trial to paid conversion at median 50%, and signup approval at 89%.
The platform now provides embedded benchmarking dashboards so clients can see where they stand versus industry peers on key metrics like decline rates or churn patterns. That transparency pushes better decisions: should you tweak pricing, adjust gateway mix, tailor retry messaging, optimize plan customization?
Brands using plan add-ons saw a 272% revenue increase; pause and resume features drove adoption across 40% of customers in 2023, reducing cancellation rates. Recurly also helps merchants optimize their payment gateway setup: tuning for conversion, fees, regional access, and fraud risk. That kind of performance insight, rooted in real industry data, turns billing from a cost center into a growth lever.
Leadership and Vision: Joe Rohrlich at the Helm
Spotlight on leadership: Joe Rohrlich took the Chief Executive Officer role in January 2024, coming from Top Hat, where he scaled engagement software across over 750 universities, and Bazaarvoice, where he led EMEA and revenue growth. His perspective centers on customer centricity first.
He built teams to reverse engineer problems from subscriber pain points and go to market with scalable solutions. Rohrlich emphasizes speed and focus, calling out a new mantra, “TNT” (Today Not Tomorrow), to drive innovation and execution across the company. He positions Recurly as a product led company. “Our product is our promise,” he said, referencing a Spring 2025 release with over fifty features addressing artificial intelligence automation, payment flexibility, and e-commerce integration. Rohrlich balances long term strategy with immediate value.
He is leading Recurly to deeper industry penetration while expanding into sectors like travel, retail, and hospitality alongside its digital media and SaaS strongholds. And outside work, he travels with family, plays tennis in Austin, and roots for the Michigan Wolverines, lending a personal touch to his professional brand.
Serving Industries Across Vertical Markets
Recurly is not limited to one vertical. Its roots are solid in digital media, entertainment, streaming, and SaaS, but it is expanding into retail, consumer packaged goods, travel, hospitality, and education. Customization is key: multi currency billing, global gateways, flexible plans, and compliance tools serve diverse needs. Case in point: clients like Paramount Plus, Twitch, and BarkBox rely on tiered plans, usage based pricing, and complex regional billing flows, and Recurly handles scale across billions in payments.
Travel and hospitality clients benefit from pause and resume features, flexible billing schedules, and global payment methods. Retail and consumer brands gain from add on upsells and subscription personalization options. Even the higher education segment, acquainted with Recurly via Joe Rohrlich’s tenure at Top Hat, is ripe for growth. Recurly’s design is modular. It can plug into Shopify with Recurly Commerce, integrate marketing automation with Recurly Engage, or handle revenue recognition via RevRec modules. That flexibility makes it attractive to established subscription leaders and newcomers alike.
What Makes Recurly Different: Focus and Insight
Recurly is not a general payment processor. It is a subscription first platform staffed by domain experts. Its focus shows in every feature: lifecycle automation, predictive recovery, customization tools, and deep analytics. Where others offer billing basics, Recurly offers benchmarked insight, proactive churn prevention, and strategic guidance on gateway optimization.
It stands out in revenue recovery, reclaiming over 1.2 billion dollars in 2023, plus extending subscriber lifetimes measurably with smart retries and retention nudges. Its data driven approach turns billing into a strategic lever. Customers can compare their trial conversion rates, churn trends, and decline patterns against industry norms directly within the platform.
Plan customization, add on bundles, and pause capability let subscribers shape relationships, reducing cancellation risk and boosting loyalty. Founder commitment from investors like Accel KKR and agencies backing growth ensures high retention, for example, reported five year retention of 98% among clients. Under Rohrlich’s leadership and a product first mindset, Recurly continues to innovate and partner closely with customers to share not just software, but strategy and insight.
The Future: AI, Personalization, and Global Expansion
Projecting forward, Recurly is betting on artificial intelligence and personalization to shape the future of subscription commerce. Its Spring 2025 update included features for artificial intelligence led churn prediction, dynamic pricing recommendations, and automation to optimize subscriber engagement and revenue recovery.
The platform is designed to support personalized subscription experiences, customizable plan structures, pause and resume logic, usage based pricing, and seamless add ons at scale. In 2023, firms offering customizable plans drove 2.2 billion dollars in incremental revenue, while embrace of the pause feature rose to 40% of clients, helping reduce churn.
Recurly is expanding its verticals further, targeting markets beyond digital media into travel, retail, education, and global enterprise, backed by multi currency, compliance, and gateway flexibility. With a growing suite of artificial intelligence tools, embedded benchmarks, smarter payment orchestration, and deeper product leadership under Joe Rohrlich, Recurly is positioning itself as not just a billing vendor but a strategic partner for companies building recurring revenue models worldwide. Investors see the payoff. Customers get predictable growth. And Recurly’s product vision continues driving toward smarter, global subscription commerce.
