Just get a merchant account and program it yourself - it's super easy to do. I don't even understand a need for 3rd party recurring billing companies - programming something to charge someone $X amount every X days is pretty dang easy...
+ What happens when someone gets a card declined for an unspecified? Retries? What if the error was fatal? Sends an email? Does it cut their service immediately or after a grace period? If they pay on day 2 of the grace period, do they get 30 days of service or 28?
+ What happens if someone wants to upgrade from the $29 / mo account to the $79 / mo account on the 4th of March if their anniversary date was the 25th of February in a leap year?
+ A bug screwed up Bob's data and we're offering him $125 of credit to say we're-so-sorry. You built that feature, right?
+ Our accountant wants to know "How much have we billed this year?", "How much have we collected this year?", and "How much money have we collected that have we not earned yet?" You built that, right?
+ Foo Corp filed a chargeback against payment #123456. This means we got a callback ping and did something consequential as a result of it, right?
+ Why are you answering these questions when you could be writing code that people actually pay for?
5) select sum(amount) from charges where date='this year'... the other thing is just accounting by dates, up to individual company... easy reporting by date
6) chargeback you get a fax or letter - respond back and keep templates for each case - EASY
7) b/c then you're not paying someone else for a trivial service.
Your time is worth money. There is always going to be a magic number that makes it worthwhile to pay someone to do something than to do it yourself. There is a good chance these recurring billing systems fall under that magic number.
If you're not sure how to work out that magic number, just work out how much it costs you to live for 2 weeks, if this is going to take you 2 weeks to develop, there's your number.
