Subscriptions, invoices, refunds and reconciliation live in the same API as payments, at no additional percentage. Recurring billing is not a separate product with its own price.
Why one API matters
When billing and processing are separate products, a subscription lives in one system and the charge it produced lives in another. Reconciling them — and the refunds, proration and disputes that follow — becomes an integration problem you own rather than something the platform handles.
With payments, customers, subscriptions, refunds, payouts and webhooks in a single API, a subscription and its charges are the same object graph.
The cost nobody quotes
For a subscription business, the largest payments-related cost is usually not the processing rate. It is the revenue lost to charges that simply fail.
| Failure rate | At risk monthly | Lost annually at 60% recovery |
|---|---|---|
| 5% | $2,500 | $12,000 |
| 8% | $4,000 | $19,200 |
| 12% | $6,000 | $28,800 |
Most of those failures are expired or reissued cards rather than customers deciding to leave — see involuntary churn and dunning.
Annual billing
An annual plan is a subscription on a twelve-month interval. Beyond the retention benefit, it is the fastest legitimate way to shorten CAC payback, because it pulls a year of cash forward without changing LTV, the LTV:CAC ratio, or anything about acquisition.
It also costs less to process: one charge instead of twelve means the fixed fee is paid once. On a $49 plan that is roughly $14.51 in fees annually against $20.65 billed monthly.
GOOD QUESTIONS
Frequently asked
Is recurring billing priced separately?+
No. Subscriptions and invoices sit in the same API as payments and carry no additional Paydude percentage. Several providers price billing as a distinct product on top of processing, which on recurring revenue can exceed the rate difference itself.
What does the subscriptions API cover?+
Subscriptions is one of six resources alongside payments, customers, refunds, payouts and webhooks. Because they share one API, reconciliation between a subscription, its charges and its refunds does not cross a product boundary.
How do I handle failed renewals?+
Webhooks emit the events, and you build the retry and dunning sequence on top. Retry on different days of the month rather than at fixed hourly intervals — insufficient-funds declines often clear after a payday, and aggressive retries lower authorisation rates across the board.
Does Paydude support annual plans?+
Yes — an annual plan is a subscription with a twelve-month interval. Annual billing is also the fastest legitimate way to shorten CAC payback, since it pulls twelve months of cash forward without changing anything else about the business.