Chargebee vs Recurly vs Stripe Billing: The Real Rate
Fact-checked and signed by Seonrye Kim, who checks each figure against the provider's own published pricing page. · Updated 2026-09-03
Chargebee's Flow product's Pay-as-you-go plan is priced at $0 plus 0.80% of billing volume, per the interactive pricing calculator on its current pricing page.
Chargebee's Flow pricing calculator now defaults to a $20,000/month billing-volume example and computes the Pay-as-you-go plan's total to $160/mo — the $0 base plus 0.80% of that $20,000 volume.
Chargebee's Flow 'Commit monthly' option charges a $99 flat fee plus 0.65% of billing volume — a lower percentage rate than Pay-as-you-go's 0.80% in exchange for that fixed floor.
Chargebee's top Flow tier, Enterprise Plus, raises the usage-event ingestion ceiling to 500M events/month (versus 100M included on the base Flow plan).
Chargebee's CPQ Lite tier is free for a company's first 50 quotes.
The most common misreading of a subscription billing platform's price page is assuming the listed rate is the whole cost. In practice, card processing fees come out first, and the billing platform's rate is charged separately on top of that. Until you add both layers together, you cannot tell which platform is cheaper.
The table below includes only what Chargebee, Recurly, and Stripe Billing actually state on their official pricing pages. Every cell is footnoted to show where its number came from, and where a vendor does not disclose a figure, the cell says so instead of being left blank.
Chargebee · Recurly · Stripe Billing — only what is published on official pricing pages (confirmed on September 3, 2026)
Chargebee · Recurly · Stripe Billing — only what is published on official pricing pages (confirmed on September 3, 2026)
Customer portal included; $10 per month for a custom domain15
The number on the pricing page is not the number you pay
Every rate in the table above sits on top of card processing. A subscription billing platform does not replace your payment processor — it orchestrates invoices, proration, dunning, and renewals, and then hands the actual charge to a gateway that takes its own cut. So the real cost of running subscriptions is two rates stacked, not one.
This matters most at the low end. A platform advertising a fraction-of-a-percent rate can still be the more expensive choice once its required monthly floor is included, because that floor is charged whether or not you bill anything that month. Conversely, a pure percentage with no platform fee costs nothing in a slow month and scales linearly in a fast one. Which shape is cheaper depends entirely on your billing volume, not on which number looks smaller.
One thing we could not settle from the public pages: whether Chargebee's platform rate is charged on gross billing value before the gateway's cut, or on what remains after it. The pricing page does not say, and the distinction changes the effective rate. It is listed among the open questions below rather than resolved by guesswork.
Pricing stops being published exactly where it starts to matter
All three vendors publish a rate for the entry tier and stop publishing somewhere above it. Chargebee lists an ingestion ceiling for its top tier without a price. Recurly names a monthly billing-volume minimum for its top tier and describes the rate qualitatively rather than numerically. Stripe Billing states plainly that past a threshold, pricing becomes custom.
This is not an oversight, and it is worth reading as information rather than as an obstacle. It tells you that above a certain size, the rate is negotiated — which means the published rate is a ceiling for a large merchant and a floor for a small one. If your volume is near any of the disclosed thresholds, the useful move is not to compare published rates but to ask all three for a quote and compare those.
Add-ons are priced like separate products, because they are
Revenue recognition, retention tooling, and quote-to-cash are sold alongside the billing platform rather than inside it, and each carries its own floor. A team that assumed revenue recognition came bundled can find the add-on costing more than the billing platform it attaches to — and the add-on floors we could verify are billed annually, so the commitment is a year, not a month.
When comparing platforms, compare the set of modules you will actually turn on. A lower headline rate on the core platform tells you very little if the module you need is priced separately on one vendor and included on another.
FAQ
How much does Chargebee's billing platform charge per month?
Chargebee's Flow product (its current primary billing-platform offering) has no base platform fee on Pay-as-you-go — it charges 0.80% of billing volume. The calculator's own default example, set to $20,000/mo in billing volume, computes that plan's total to $160/mo. The alternative Commit-monthly option instead charges a $99 flat fee plus a lower 0.65% rate.
Does Chargebee offer a free subscription billing plan?
Chargebee's core Flow/Billing platform is not free. One adjacent product is confirmed free under conditions: CPQ Lite is free for an initial batch of quotes. Chargebee's Growth product previously advertised a conditional $0 'Starter' tier, but its price is not published anymore on the current pricing page — only a feature checklist is shown.
How much does Recurly charge for subscription billing?
Recurly's entry-level Starter plan costs $249/month plus 0.9% of billing volume, with an initial tranche of monthly billings excluded from that percentage charge.
What do Recurly's Engage and RevRec add-ons cost on top of the base billing platform?
Both are priced separately from Recurly's core subscription plans: Recurly Engage (churn prediction/retention) starts at $1,600/month billed annually, and Recurly RevRec (revenue recognition) starts at $850/month — neither figure is included in the Starter or All-Access base price.
Is Stripe Billing a separate fee from Stripe's payment processing fees?
Yes. Stripe Billing's Pay-as-you-go rate of 0.7% of Billing volume is charged in addition to Stripe's standard card-processing fee — Billing and payment processing appear as two separate line items, which is the double-charging structure this whole category can obscure.
What billing volume does Stripe Billing's cheapest flat-rate 'Pay monthly' tier cover?
The lowest 'Pay monthly' tier costs $620/month (an 11% discount versus Pay-as-you-go at that volume) and covers up to $100,000 of Billing volume per month, with any volume above that charged an extra 0.67%.
At what point do these subscription billing platforms switch from published percentage pricing to custom enterprise pricing?
Each vendor has its own undisclosed-rate ceiling: Chargebee's top published Flow tier (Enterprise Plus) requires a custom quote once a business exceeds its top listed usage-ingestion tier, Recurly's All-Access plan already requires a $1M/month billing-volume minimum with only a vague 'as low as under 1%' rate disclosed, and Stripe Billing explicitly moves to custom, sales-negotiated pricing above $1,000,000/month in Billing volume.
Before you rely on these numbers
Not on the provider's pricing page:
Chargebee's current pricing page no longer shows a price or eligibility condition for a Growth 'Starter' free tier — the Growth plan comparison (Starter vs. Enterprise) lists only a feature checklist, with no dollar figure and no mention of a Chargebee Billing customer requirement.
Billing volume included before overage — Chargebee
Rate above the included volume — Chargebee
Rate above the included volume — Recurly
Revenue recognition sold separately — Chargebee
Revenue recognition sold separately — Stripe Billing
Free entry point — Chargebee
Free entry point — Recurly
Chargebee's classic tiered 'Starter/Performance/Enterprise' legacy Billing pricing (historically marketed as a flat percent-of-revenue schedule) is not shown on the current /pricing/ page; Chargebee instead surfaces its newer 'Growth Flow' product's usage-based calculator as the primary billing-platform pricing shown to visitors on first load, so all Chargebee evidence here reflects Flow, not a separately-priced legacy Billing SKU.
Chargebee does not disclose numeric pricing for its RevRec Performance/Enterprise tiers, its full CPQ tier, or its Flow Enterprise Plus tier — all four are gated behind 'Talk to sales' / 'Book a demo' / 'Schedule a demo' with no listed dollar figure, so no verified number could be captured for them.
Recurly's All-Access and All-Access-for-Shopify tiers only disclose a qualitative 'as low as under 1% of billing volume, billed annually' rate with 'More volume, better rate!' — the exact rate schedule by volume tier is gated behind a sales conversation ('Speak with an expert') and was not found published on Recurly's page.
Stripe's usage-based billing capability (powered by Metronome, a separate Stripe-owned product) has no pricing disclosed on stripe.com/billing/pricing — Stripe routes that inquiry to 'Contact Metronome' rather than listing a rate.
None of the three pricing pages were checked for region- or currency-specific variants (e.g., EU/UK/APAC pricing pages); all figures captured here are the USD amounts shown on the default page load, which is presumed US-locale but was not explicitly confirmed via a locale switcher.
Whether Chargebee's Flow 0.80%/0.65% platform rates are charged in addition to, or already net of, the underlying payment gateway's own processing fee is not stated in a single explicit sentence on the pricing page — Chargebee describes Flow as working 'plug-n-play with 40+ payment gateways,' which implies the gateway's own processing fee is a separate line item, but this inference is not backed by a direct quote and is recorded as an inference rather than a verified fact.
As of the 3 September 2026 recheck, Chargebee's pricing page no longer discloses a price or eligibility condition for a Growth 'Starter' free tier (previously '$0, exclusively for Chargebee Billing customers') — the Growth plan comparison now shows only a feature checklist (Starter vs. Enterprise) with no dollar figure attached, so that fact could not be re-verified and has been dropped from the comparison rather than left stale.
Sources
Gathered with AI assistance; every figure was checked against the linked provider page and signed off by Seonrye Kim.
Chargebee's Flow product's Pay-as-you-go plan is priced at $0 plus 0.80% of billing volume, per the interactive pricing calculator on its current pricing page. — https://www.chargebee.com/pricing/ (verified on: 2026-09-03)
Chargebee's Flow pricing calculator now defaults to a $20,000/month billing-volume example and computes the Pay-as-you-go plan's total to $160/mo — the $0 base plus 0.80% of that $20,000 volume. — https://www.chargebee.com/pricing/ (verified on: 2026-09-03)
Chargebee's Flow 'Commit monthly' option charges a $99 flat fee plus 0.65% of billing volume — a lower percentage rate than Pay-as-you-go's 0.80% in exchange for that fixed floor. — https://www.chargebee.com/pricing/ (verified on: 2026-09-03)
Chargebee's top Flow tier, Enterprise Plus, raises the usage-event ingestion ceiling to 500M events/month (versus 100M included on the base Flow plan). — https://www.chargebee.com/pricing/ (verified on: 2026-09-03)
Chargebee's current pricing page no longer shows a price or eligibility condition for a Growth 'Starter' free tier — the Growth plan comparison (Starter vs. Enterprise) lists only a feature checklist, with no dollar figure and no mention of a Chargebee Billing customer requirement. — https://www.chargebee.com/pricing/ (verified on: 2026-09-03)
Recurly's Starter plan costs $249 per month plus 0.9% of billing volume, with the first $40,000 of monthly billings excluded from that percentage fee. — https://recurly.com/pricing/ (verified on: 2026-09-03)
Recurly's All-Access plan requires a $1M/month billing-volume minimum and charges a rate described only as 'as low as under 1% of billing volume,' billed annually, with the exact rate undisclosed and dependent on volume. — https://recurly.com/pricing/ (verified on: 2026-09-03)
Recurly Engage, a retention/upsell add-on sold separately from the core subscription-billing platform, starts at $1,600 per month, billed annually, based on prompt volume. — https://recurly.com/pricing/ (verified on: 2026-09-03)
Recurly RevRec, a revenue-recognition add-on sold separately from the core subscription-billing platform, starts at $850 per month — but that floor is billed annually and scales with the merchant's billing volume, so it is not a flat monthly price. — https://recurly.com/pricing/ (verified on: 2026-09-03)
Stripe Billing's Pay-as-you-go plan charges 0.7% of Billing volume, with no separate recurring monthly fee — and this 0.7% is charged in addition to Stripe's underlying card-processing fee (2.9% + 30 cents), since Billing volume and payment processing are billed as distinct line items. — https://stripe.com/billing/pricing (verified on: 2026-09-03)
Stripe Billing's lowest annual-commitment 'Pay monthly' tier costs $620 per month, described as an 11% discount versus paying the 0.7% Pay-as-you-go rate at that volume; three higher tiers exist at larger volume commitments with steeper discounts. — https://stripe.com/billing/pricing (verified on: 2026-09-03)
Stripe Billing's lowest 'Pay monthly' tier ($620/mo) covers up to $100,000 of Billing volume per month, after which an additional 0.67% is charged on any overage volume. — https://stripe.com/billing/pricing (verified on: 2026-09-03)
Once a merchant's Billing volume exceeds $1,000,000 per month, Stripe Billing switches from its published flat-tier pricing to custom, sales-negotiated pricing. — https://stripe.com/billing/pricing (verified on: 2026-09-03)
Stripe Billing includes a self-serve customer portal at no extra cost, but charges an additional $10 per month if the merchant wants that portal on a custom domain. — https://stripe.com/billing/pricing (verified on: 2026-09-03)
