Automating recurring billing and payments
Automating recurring billing means your customers’ cards are charged on schedule, failed payments retry themselves, receipts go out alone, and late payers get chased by software instead of by you. For a business with subscriptions, retainers, memberships or installments, this typically recovers 5 to 10% of revenue lost to forgotten invoices and failed cards, and removes hours of monthly admin. I set it up from USD 300 on Stripe or PayPal, the rails your international customers already trust.
The manual billing tax
Charging the same customers every month by hand has a predictable failure pattern: invoices go out late (so cash arrives late), some months a customer is simply forgotten, awkward “friendly reminder” messages consume owner energy, and a failed card quietly becomes two months of unpaid service before anyone notices. None of this is anyone’s fault. It is what happens when recurring money depends on human memory.
What the automated version does
Built on a processor like Stripe, the machine handles the full cycle:
- Scheduled charges. Monthly, quarterly, annual, or installment plans, charged on the dot with the receipt emailed instantly.
- Smart retries. Failed cards (expired, no funds) retry on a schedule tuned to when retries succeed, recovering a large share without any human involved.
- Dunning. When retries fail, the customer gets polite automatic emails with a secure link to update their card. This is the feature that recovers the most silent churn.
- Proration and changes. Upgrades, pauses and cancellations compute themselves.
- A clean ledger. Every charge lands in your records automatically, which feeds the numbers I talk about in automatic reports: stop building spreadsheets by hand.
For customers who pay by transfer instead of card, the same system still automates the invoicing and the reminders, and just leaves the reconciliation click to you.
What I set up, and for how much
From USD 300: products and plans configured in Stripe or PayPal, checkout or payment links your customers use to subscribe alone, retry and dunning rules, receipts, and the connection into your records. If billing is one piece of a bigger operation (customer portal, service delivery, permissions), that points to a custom system from USD 2,500, described with everything else on my pricing page. Working from Argentina with fixed prices, I typically quote at a fraction of US agency rates for identical Stripe work, and the first integration usually pairs well with the ones in what is an integration and why it saves hours every week.
Frequently asked questions
What does Stripe itself charge?
Roughly 3% plus a small fixed fee per successful charge, varying by country and card type. For almost every service business, that fee is far below the cost of the manual chasing it replaces.
Is it safe to store customers’ cards?
You never store them: the processor does, under PCI security standards banks are audited against. Your system only holds a token, so a breach of your site cannot leak card numbers.
Can customers cancel by themselves?
Yes, through a self service portal, and you want that: forced friction cancellations end in chargebacks and bad reviews. The dunning emails meanwhile rescue the accidental cancellations, which outnumber the intentional ones.
My clients are on retainer with different amounts each. Does this still apply?
Yes. Per customer plans handle different amounts and dates, and metered or adjustable billing covers retainers that vary month to month. If you invoice the same person twice, it qualifies.
Want your billing to run without you? Message me on WhatsApp and within 48 hours you get a written price and delivery date.