Best Subscription Billing Software in 2026

Chargebee is a subscription and usage-based billing platform led by co-founder and chief executive Krish Subramanian. It is sold as a set of modules: Billing, CPQ, Receivables, RevRec and Growth, so that a company can run quoting, invoicing, collections and revenue recognition on one customer record.

Its billing engine supports flat-fee, tiered, stairstep, volume, usage and seat-based pricing, multi-decimal price points and backdated invoicing, and connects to more than 40 payment gateways and more than 50 payment methods across 100-plus currencies. By November 2026 Chargebee had repositioned much of its marketing around AI companies, adding token- and credit-based pricing, real-time usage limits and an MCP server and command-line tool for AI coding agents.

The self-serve Flow plan includes 100 million usage events a month; the Enterprise plan adds multi-entity management for up to 100 entities, parent-child account hierarchies up to 30 levels and data export to warehouses such as Snowflake. The trade-off is that pricing is calculated from invoicing volume through an interactive calculator rather than a fixed price list, and several features, including CPQ for Salesforce and multi-entity management, are paid add-ons.

Stripe Billing is the recurring-revenue product of Stripe, the payments company headquartered in San Francisco and Dublin. It sits alongside Stripe's subscriptions, invoicing, tax and revenue-recognition products, and is most often used by companies that already process payments through Stripe.

Stripe completed its acquisition of Metronome, a usage-based billing company, on 14 January 2026, and now lists Metronome in its product menu under "usage-based billing". Stripe Billing's own pricing includes a usage-metering API with up to 100 million events a month.

Pricing is the most transparent of the large platforms. The pay-as-you-go plan charges 0.7% of billing volume, covering billing transactions processed both on and off Stripe but excluding one-off invoices. Companies that prefer predictable costs can sign a one-year contract with a monthly fee from US$620 that covers a set billing volume, with 0.67% charged on volume above the tier. Card processing is charged separately, at 2.9% plus 30 cents per successful card charge in the US. The principal limitation is that Stripe Billing is built around Stripe Payments; companies that want to route payments through several processors usually choose a gateway-agnostic platform.

Zuora is an enterprise billing and monetization platform based in Redwood City, California, founded by Tien Tzuo, who remains founder, chief executive and chairman. Tzuo describes Zuora's vision as having sparked the shift to the "Subscription Economy"; the platform is aimed at large companies with complex catalogues, multiple legal entities and recurring, usage-based and hybrid revenue models.

Zuora was listed on the New York Stock Exchange until February 2025. On 14 February 2025 Silver Lake, in partnership with an affiliate of Singapore's sovereign fund GIC, completed its acquisition of the company for US$10.00 per share in cash; Zuora's Class A stock ceased trading and the company became privately held. Stockholders had approved the deal the previous day.

Zuora does not publish list prices. Its pricing page directs buyers to speak to its sales team, and the only figures it shows are illustrative prices inside product screenshots. That, together with implementation projects typical of enterprise billing systems, makes it less suited to small companies. As a private company it no longer publishes quarterly financial statements, so recent revenue and customer figures are not available from filings.

Recurly was founded in 2009 and is based in San Francisco, with offices in Boulder, New Orleans and London. Its chief executive is Joe Rohrlich, formerly chief executive of Top Hat. The company names Sling, Twitch, BarkBox, FabFitFun, Paramount, Lucid and Sprout Social among its customers.

Recurly is oriented towards direct-to-consumer subscription businesses, especially media, streaming and subscription boxes. Its platform is sold as four products: Subscriptions (billing), Commerce (subscriptions running natively on Shopify), Engage (in-app offers and cancel-save flows) and RevRec (revenue recognition). Its marketing emphasises churn prevention and payment recovery, including AI-driven retry logic in the higher plan.

Recurly is one of the few established vendors to publish an entry price: the Starter plan costs US$249 a month plus 0.9% of billing volume, with the first US$40,000 of monthly billings included, and comes with a 90-day free trial. The All-Access plan requires a minimum of US$1 million in billing volume and is billed annually at a negotiated rate below 1%. Starter is limited to one dunning campaign and static churn-prevention tools, so most scaling businesses need the higher plan.

Maxio is a billing and financial-reporting platform for B2B SaaS and AI companies, operated by Maxio LLC. It combines billing and invoicing, subscription management and usage billing with SaaS metrics and revenue reporting, aiming at the finance team rather than the product team.

The company publishes an annual B2B Growth Report that it says benchmarks growth against more than US$14 billion of anonymised SaaS data, drawn from its customer base. Its website announces Maxio AI, described as agents built for quote-to-cash processes.

Pricing is partly published. The Grow plan costs US$599 a month and is intended for businesses with up to US$100,000 in monthly billings; the Scale plan, for higher volumes, is quote-based. Maxio's FAQ states that default agreements are paid annually, with monthly and quarterly payment available at a premium, and that multi-year agreements may be discounted. The pricing page does not offer a self-serve free trial. Compared with percentage-based platforms, the flat fee can be expensive for very small companies but predictable for growing ones.

Paddle is a merchant-of-record platform for software, apps and digital products. Rather than billing on the seller's behalf, Paddle becomes the legal reseller to the buyer, which means it handles payments, sales tax and VAT, fraud, chargebacks and buyer support across what it describes as more than 300 markets.

Paddle Billing provides checkout, subscriptions, invoicing for B2B customers and retention tools, and the company also offers ProfitWell Metrics, a subscription-analytics product it describes as free. Paddle states that it has more than 10,000 customers, has processed 190 million transactions and remitted US$130 million in sales taxes in the last year.

The standard price is 5% plus 50 cents per checkout transaction, with no monthly, migration or other fees, and custom pricing is available for high-volume or low-value transactions; sellers of products under US$10 are invited to request bespoke pricing. There is no lock-in period. The all-in rate is higher than a billing tool plus a processor, but it includes tax registration and filing that a seller would otherwise handle itself. Paddle is not suitable for physical goods.

Zoho Billing is the billing product of Zoho, which sells a suite of business applications including Zoho Books and Zoho CRM. It covers quotes, one-time and recurring invoices, subscription management, a customer self-service portal and payment reminders, and is aimed at small and mid-sized businesses.

Its main advantage is price. The Standard plan, intended for one-time billing, costs US$39 per organisation per month billed annually (US$50 monthly) and supports up to three users; the Premium plan, which adds subscription billing, costs US$79 billed annually (US$100 monthly). Both include a 14-day free trial. Additional users cost US$7.50 a month billed annually.

The plans carry limits: the Standard and Premium plans allow up to 100,000 invoices a year and annual billed revenue of no more than US$1 million, beyond which a custom arrangement is needed. Zoho also sells an Enterprise edition. Integration is strongest with other Zoho applications such as Zoho Books and Zoho CRM, which suits companies already using the suite but offers less to those standardised on other ecosystems.

Recharge is a subscription-commerce platform for ecommerce brands, based in Santa Monica, California, whose website copyright dates from 2014. It is built primarily on Shopify and states that the Shopify-Recharge pairing sits behind more than US$30 billion in recurring revenue. The company says it is used by more than 20,000 businesses, naming quip and Dr. Squatch among them.

Unlike B2B SaaS billing systems, Recharge is designed for physical products sold on repeat, such as supplements, coffee, beauty and pet food. Its features include a subscription widget for product pages, a no-code customer portal, bundles, cancellation-prevention flows, failed-payment recovery, loyalty, referrals and SMS.

Pricing combines a monthly fee with a per-transaction processing fee: the Starter plan costs US$149 a month plus 1.50% and 20 cents per transaction, and the Scale plan US$499 a month plus 1.25% and 20 cents, with hands-on implementation; a Custom plan uses volume-based rates. The per-transaction fee comes on top of Shopify's own payment fees. Recharge is not designed for usage-based or B2B contract billing.

Orb is a billing platform built around usage-based and hybrid pricing, targeting AI, developer-tool and infrastructure companies where invoices are calculated from large volumes of usage events. Its core is real-time event ingestion, from which it calculates invoices, sends usage alerts, enforces spend controls and supports price changes without code changes.

Orb sells on a credit-based model: the Business plan costs US$6.00 per credit, with volume discounts, and includes real-time event ingestion and alerting, hybrid and usage billing, Orb Invoicing with accounts-receivable ageing, Adyen and Stripe payment integrations and finance and tax integrations. The Custom plan adds customer hierarchies and divisional billing, collections automation, NetSuite and Salesforce integrations, data exports, audit logs and a 99.9% availability SLA; a separately priced Enterprise Support Bundle offers a 99.99% SLA and a dedicated support channel.

Because Orb charges for processing rather than taking a percentage of revenue, cost tracks billing activity. However, several capabilities that larger B2B companies need, including multiple billing entities and the NetSuite connector, are not in the Business plan.

Metronome is a usage-based billing platform covering real-time metering, pricing, billing and reporting, aimed at companies with both product-led and sales-led revenue. Its chief executive is Scott Woody. Its website quotes HubSpot's vice-president of pricing strategy among its users.

Stripe completed its acquisition of Metronome on 14 January 2026, describing it as "the leader in orchestrating billing for the most complex usage-based models". Stripe said the combination would bring deeper integration across Metronome and Stripe, and it now lists Metronome as its usage-based billing product.

Metronome's product lets companies give their own customers an in-product billing dashboard showing real-time usage and spend, with configurable alerts and limits, and lets internal teams filter and export granular billing data to track revenue daily. It does not publish prices. Buyers that do not use Stripe for payments should check how the product roadmap evolves after the acquisition, since the stated aim is closer integration with Stripe.

Lago is a metering and usage-based billing platform distinguished by its open-source edition, licensed under AGPLv3, which companies can run in their own cloud account or on premises free of charge. A hosted version, Lago Cloud, is offered in US and EU regions. Lago names CoreWeave, Mistral AI and PayPal among its customers.

The product meters events such as AI input, output and cached tokens separately, applies spend alerts and prepaid credits, and generates invoices; its documented API lets developers define plans and charges in code.

Lago Cloud has three plans. Launch has no minimum commitment and includes a one-time allowance of the first US$100,000 of processed billings and first five million production events free, then charges 0.7% of billings and US$20 per million events. Scale has a US$12,000 annual minimum and billing rates from 0.6%. Enterprise, which can be deployed in the cloud, a virtual private cloud or on premises, is custom. The self-hosted edition requires the customer's own engineering team to operate it.

FastSpring is a merchant-of-record platform for companies selling SaaS, downloadable software, apps, games, e-books and online courses. Like Paddle, it acts as the legal seller, handling taxes including VAT, payments and fulfilment, and adds subscription billing, localised checkout, B2B quotes and digital invoicing.

FastSpring states that it has more than 3,200 customers, processes more than US$2 billion in transactions a year, and supports more than 35 currencies and 21 languages across over 200 regions. It also offers an affiliate-marketing programme to help sellers find buyers.

FastSpring does not publish a single rate. Its pricing page uses a calculator in which a seller enters product type, monthly gross transaction volume, transaction count and geographic split to receive a price, so the effective rate depends on the business profile. For buyers comparing merchant-of-record options, that means a quote is needed before costs can be compared with Paddle's published rate.

Billsby is a subscription-billing service aimed at small businesses. Its distinguishing feature is a free plan with unlimited users, testing and time, which lets a company configure everything before going live and then move to a paid plan.

The Core plan costs US$45 a month plus 0.4% on revenue above US$15,000 a month and includes five users, unlimited products, plans and cycles, metered billing, prorated billing, automated dunning, custom branding and a QuickBooks integration. The Pro plan costs US$135 a month plus 0.5% on revenue above US$30,000 a month and adds 25 users, user permissions, multiple payment gateways, ACH payments, multiple tax regions, FreeAgent and TaxJar integrations, advanced reporting and multi-language support. Automated tax calculation costs US$0.02 per transaction.

The limitations are those of a small vendor: the Core plan supports only one payment gateway and one tax region, live chat runs from 04:00 to 21:00 Eastern time, and the integration list is short compared with the larger platforms.