Thanks for the mentions of Recurly, we built our subscription billing engine from the ground up to make it as simple and easy to deploy subscription as possible. The untitled startup did a great unbiased review of the various subscription billing options out there (which you can find here: http://www.untitledstartup.com/2010/02/accepting-payments-on...). They ended up choosing Recurly for their subscription billing.
There are several items to consider when choosing a subscription billing option. Many have already been mentioned (cost, implementation time, the country you're doing business in) but you should also consider the size of each transaction you're doing.
Will you be doing lots of small transactions? Fewer large transactions? The answer to that question will have a big impact on the fees you'll pay for the off the shelf solutions (as well as your merchant account/payment gateway).
I'm not quite sure why they still have county lockouts (except for the potential marketing release dates, but still).
Its fascinating though to see such consistently strong numbers for increase in downloads due to the removal of DRM. We'll see if dollars incent publishers to ease their usage of DRM in the future.
There are several items to consider when choosing a subscription billing option. Many have already been mentioned (cost, implementation time, the country you're doing business in) but you should also consider the size of each transaction you're doing.
Will you be doing lots of small transactions? Fewer large transactions? The answer to that question will have a big impact on the fees you'll pay for the off the shelf solutions (as well as your merchant account/payment gateway).
In addition to transaction fees, there are a number of other hidden challenges and "gotchas" to be aware of when billing online. You can see some of our suggestions on our blog here: http://blog.recurly.com/2010/01/lessons-learned-in-online-su...
Recurly also supports the largest amount of international payment gateway (you can find the full list here: http://support.recurly.com/faqs/payment-gateways/payment-gat...
Let us know if you have any other questions we can assist with, we're happy to help. Thanks! Tim