PayPal Changes Fees for Recurring Billing Use

PayPal cannot seem to figure out what to do with their new recurring billing service. At first they said it was like setting up a subscription but with a separate control panel and greater payment control you and the client shared and that in January 2011 you would only pay $19.99 a month to have the service.

However, clearly this has changed as just this last month they decided that to get recurring billing you had to have web payment pro or virtual terminal set up in your account which is a $30 per month fee plus then the $19.99 billing on top of that monthly starting 1/1/11 for the recurring billing option. That’s a whooping $49.99 a month to use recurring billing. Talk about a changeroo! I had to phone PayPal to get the $30 removed from my account and am now no longer offering recurring billing as an option to customers.

Additionally, when they set up the recurring billing in my account they moved all my subscription customers who pay a set fee monthly into the recurring billing control panel. When I asked for the $30 credit they deleted all my subscriptions!

Hey, I thought subscriptions were different from recurring billing and recurring billing was only $19.99 a month. So what gives PayPal? As for me this is just way too expensive of a monthly fee for me to use the service for just a few customers so I am going back to the free subscription set up. Too bad as I did think recurring billing from PayPal was a really good idea.