Recurly handles subscription billing. Measure connects contracts, billing, rev rec, and commissions in one system. Here's the real difference.

The short answer

If you run a B2C subscription product or a high-volume consumer app and need battle-tested dunning with 140+ payment gateways, Recurly is a strong fit. It has processed $16B+ in annual payments and powers millions of subscriber transactions. For this use case, it works.

If you're a B2B SaaS finance team with contract-driven deals, usage-based pricing, or a need for ASC 606-compliant rev rec without a third tool, Recurly will leave you managing spreadsheets. You'll spend the first week of every month reconciling billing data against your general ledger, manually calculating recognized revenue, and praying your commission spreadsheet matches what sales actually closed.

Keep reading if:

• You're evaluating whether to replace Recurly or build around its gaps
• You need native revenue recognition and can't afford another point solution
• Your finance team is spending 15+ hours per month on manual reconciliation
• You're running usage-based, contract-driven, or hybrid billing models

What Recurly does well

Recurly does several things genuinely well and we’ll give credit where credit is due. Understanding those strengths helps you make a clearer decision.

Subscription billing at scale

Recurly has processed over $16 billion in annual payment volume across 100+ million subscribers. That's real scale. Their core billing engine handles high-volume, recurring transactions reliably. For companies with straightforward subscription tiers and predictable billing cycles, the infrastructure is battle-tested.

Dunning and payment recovery

Recurly's intelligent payment retry logic is legitimately good. They publish a 12% monthly revenue recovery rate through their dunning automation. That's meaningful money. If failed payments are your primary revenue leak, Recurly's retry algorithms and card update features address the problem directly.

Global payments and gateway breadth

With 140+ payment gateways and broad international coverage, Recurly handles the complexity of global payments well. Multiple currencies, regional payment methods, and gateway redundancy are built in. For companies selling into dozens of countries with diverse payment preferences, this matters.

Developer tooling

Recurly's REST API is well-documented. Webhook reliability is solid. If your engineering team needs to build custom integrations, the developer experience won't slow them down.

Where Recurly falls short for B2B SaaS

Here's where the conversation changes. Recurly was built for B2C subscription commerce. The product decisions that made it great for subscription boxes and streaming services create real friction for B2B SaaS finance teams.

No native revenue recognition (ASC 606 / IFRS 15)

Recurly doesn't handle revenue recognition. It handles billing. Those aren't the same thing.

If you're a B2B SaaS company with any complexity in your contracts (ramp deals, professional services, usage components, mid-term changes), you're either building spreadsheets or buying a separate rev rec tool. Maxio, NetSuite ARM, or something custom. That's another vendor, another integration, another place where data can drift.

Most companies we talk to are spending 3-5 days per month just on rev rec reconciliation. Not because they're bad at spreadsheets. Because Recurly doesn't give them the foundation to automate it.

Limited contract and CPQ support

Recurly starts at billing. But B2B SaaS deals don't start at billing. They start at a contract.

Your sales rep closes a custom deal with annual ramps, a 90-day pilot, and usage-based overages. Someone on your team manually translates those contract terms into Recurly's billing configuration. If they get it wrong (and they will, eventually), your invoices are wrong, your revenue recognition is wrong, and your commissions are wrong.

There's no contract layer in Recurly. No place where the deal terms live as the source of truth that billing, rev rec, and commissions all reference.

No commission tracking

Sales comp lives somewhere else. Probably a spreadsheet. Maybe Spiff or CaptivateIQ. But definitely not connected to the system that knows what was billed and what revenue was recognized.

This creates a monthly reconciliation exercise: Did what sales say they closed match what billing says happened? Did the commission payment match the recognized revenue? For companies running SPIFs, accelerators, or clawbacks on churned deals, the complexity compounds.

Usage-based billing requires external metering

Recurly can ingest usage data. It doesn't meter it. If you're billing on API calls, compute hours, seats, or tokens, you need an external metering layer that captures events, aggregates them, and pushes the totals to Recurly.

For B2B SaaS companies adopting usage-based pricing, this means building or buying yet another tool. Another integration point. Another place where data can go missing or arrive late.

MRR and SaaS metrics aren't SaaS-standard

Here's a detail that matters: Recurly's MRR calculation includes discounts in the base figure by default. This differs from SaaS-standard definitions used by most finance teams and investors. Paddle's documentation on ProfitWell metrics explicitly calls this out as a divergence.

If you're reporting MRR to your board and using Recurly's numbers, you may be showing a different figure than what your investors expect to see. That's a conversation you don't want to have.

Fragmented stack means slower month-end close

The real cost isn't any single gap. It's the combination.

Recurly for billing. A rev rec tool (or spreadsheets) for ASC 606. A commission tool (or spreadsheets) for sales comp. A BI layer (or spreadsheets) for SaaS metrics. NetSuite or your ERP at the end, hoping everything reconciles.

Each seam is a place where data drifts, manual work accumulates, and month-end close gets longer. We've talked to finance teams running 8-10 day closes not because they're slow, but because their stack makes it impossible to be faster.

What Measure does differently

Measure isn't a billing tool that competes with Recurly on billing features. It's revenue infrastructure that connects the pieces Recurly leaves fragmented.

Revenue infrastructure, not just billing

The contract is the source of truth. Everything else flows from it.

When a deal closes in Salesforce or HubSpot, the contract terms propagate to billing schedules, revenue recognition rules, and commission calculations automatically. Change the contract? Billing updates. Rev rec adjusts. Commissions recalculate. One source of truth, not four systems you're hoping stay synchronized.

Contracts, billing, rev rec, and commissions in one system

This isn't about convenience. It's about accuracy.

When billing and rev rec live in separate systems, you're trusting that someone correctly mapped the connection. When rev rec and commissions are disconnected, you're trusting that someone correctly reconciled them. Every manual translation is an error waiting to happen.

In Measure, recognized revenue is calculated from the same contract data that generates invoices. Commission rules reference actual recognized revenue, not billing approximations. The CFO looking at the P&L and the VP Sales looking at commission statements are working from the same numbers.

Built for B2B SaaS finance teams, not eCommerce

Recurly's heritage is B2C subscription commerce. That's not a criticism. It's a statement about product priorities.

Measure was built for B2B SaaS finance teams navigating contract complexity: ramp deals, usage-based components, mid-term amendments, multi-year contracts with annual true-ups. The product decisions reflect that focus. ASC 606 compliance isn't an add-on. It's native. SaaS metrics use standard definitions. QuickBooks integration is built in, not bolted on.

Feature comparison

Pricing comparison

Recurly pricing

Recurly offers three tiers: Starter, Professional, and Elite. For mid-market B2B SaaS companies, Professional typically runs $1,500-$3,000/month depending on transaction volume. Elite is custom pricing for enterprise needs.

But that's just billing. Rev rec tools add $800-$1,500/month. Commission platforms add $400-$800/month. ERP integration work can run $10,000-$50,000 in professional services.

Measure pricing

Measure's pricing is transparent and includes contracts, billing, rev rec, and commissions in one system. No separate line items for capabilities that should be connected.

Total cost of ownership

The real comparison isn't Measure vs. Recurly. It's Measure vs. the stack Recurly requires you to build around it.

A typical B2B SaaS company at $5M ARR runs Recurly ($2,000/month) plus a rev rec module ($800/month) plus a commission tool ($400/month) plus 15+ hours of manual reconciliation per month. That's $3,200 in software plus a meaningful chunk of your finance team's time.

And that's before you account for the errors, the delayed closes, and the lack of confidence in your numbers.

Use case fit

When Recurly is the right choice

Choose Recurly if:

• You run a B2C or SMB subscription product with simple, flat-rate billing
• Transaction volume is your primary scaling challenge (1M+ subscribers, high-frequency transactions)
• You need the broadest possible payment gateway coverage globally
• Rev rec, commissions, and CPQ are handled elsewhere in your stack and you want to keep them separate
• Your finance team has the bandwidth for manual reconciliation work

Recurly does what it was built to do. If that matches your needs, it's a solid choice.

When Measure is the right choice

Choose Measure if:

• You're a B2B SaaS team at $3-10M ARR with contract-driven deals, custom terms, or usage-based pricing
• You need ASC 606-compliant rev rec without buying a second platform
• Your finance team is spending the first week of every month reconciling billing against rev rec against commissions
• You want contracts, billing, rev rec, and commissions in one auditable system
• You're integrating with QuickBooks, Salesforce, or HubSpot and need depth, not just connectors
• You're preparing for an audit or investor diligence and need a clear trail from contract to recognized revenue

See how Measure replaces Recurly.

What B2B SaaS teams say

Finance leaders at companies like yours have made the switch from fragmented billing stacks to Measure. The consistent feedback: month-end close drops from 8+ days to 2-3. Revenue recognition stops being a spreadsheet exercise. Commission disputes disappear because everyone's working from the same source of truth.

The value isn't in any single feature. It's in the connected system that makes finance operations actually work.

Frequently asked questions

Does Measure replace Recurly entirely?

Yes, for B2B SaaS. Measure handles the full revenue lifecycle: contract management, subscription and usage-based billing, ASC 606-compliant revenue recognition, and commission tracking. You don't need Recurly as a separate billing layer. Everything that Recurly does for B2B SaaS, Measure does. Plus everything Recurly doesn't do that B2B SaaS finance teams need.

Can I migrate from Recurly to Measure?

Yes. Measure's implementation team handles data migration from Recurly, including historical billing data, subscription configurations, and customer records. Most migrations complete in 4-6 weeks depending on complexity. We'll work with you to ensure continuity. No billing gaps, no customer disruption.

Does Measure support usage-based billing?

Yes, natively. Measure includes built-in metering and usage tracking. No external events pipeline required. You can bill on API calls, compute units, seats, tokens, or any custom usage metric. Usage data flows into the same system that handles revenue recognition and commissions, so there's no reconciliation gap between what customers consumed and what you recognize.

What about ASC 606 compliance?

ASC 606 compliance is native in Measure. Revenue recognition rules are configured at the contract level and applied automatically as billing occurs. You get compliant revenue schedules, audit trails, and the ability to handle contract modifications (like upgrades, downgrades, and amendments) with proper rev rec treatment. No spreadsheets. No separate rev rec tool. No month-end scramble.

Ready to see the difference?

If you're evaluating whether Measure can replace Recurly and the tools you've built around it, book a 30-minute demo. We'll show you exactly how contracts, billing, rev rec, and commissions work together in one system. And we'll be honest about whether Measure is the right fit for your specific situation.

Book a Demo

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