Occurly and Stripe Billing
Teams comparing Occurly with Stripe Billing want richer subscription lifecycle, dunning, entitlements and analytics, while keeping their processor of choice.
written for people who already use it
Side by side
Two approaches, stated plainly.
Not a scorecard. Both columns describe how each platform chooses to solve the job, including where Stripe Billing goes further than Occurly does today.
| The job | Stripe Billing | Occurly |
|---|---|---|
| Payment processing | Billing and processing are the same platform, which is what makes the start so fast. | Processing stays with the gateways you choose, including Stripe, and can be routed or failed over across them. |
| Lifecycle depth | Strong primitives, with more complex lifecycle behaviour typically built in your own application. | Pauses, future-dated changes, reactivations and proration modelled in the platform rather than in your code. |
| Revenue recovery | Configurable retries and recovery tooling. | Retry schedules, branded sequences, collections worklists and recovery analytics as one workflow. |
| Analytics | Billing reporting, with deeper revenue analysis usually done downstream. | MRR movement, retention and cohorts computed from the live billing record. |
Why teams look at Occurly
Usually when pricing gets hybrid, or a second entity appears.
The evaluations that end in a move tend to start with the same four requirements.
- Processor-agnostic, so payment routing is not tied to one provider
- Full subscription lifecycle: pauses, scheduled changes, reactivations
- Built-in entitlements, dunning sequences and collections
- Revenue analytics without adding a second tool
Migration
Moving without skipping a cycle.
Most teams keep Stripe as a processor and move only the billing logic. That makes this the least disruptive migration on this list: the payment methods never move, and Occurly takes over the catalog, the lifecycle and the invoice.
- Week one
We map what you have.
Your catalog, entities, currencies and contract structures, against how they would be modelled in Occurly. You get the map whether or not you go ahead, including anything that has no clean equivalent.
- Weeks two and three
Everything imports into a sandbox.
Plans, customers, subscriptions and invoice history load into an environment that mirrors production. We run parallel cycles against it and reconcile them line by line with your current system.
- Cutover
One cycle boundary, and you are on.
The switch happens on a cycle boundary, not mid-period. Payment methods stay with your existing processor, so no customer is asked to re-enter a card and no invoice is missed.
What comes across
Nothing is left behind on purpose.
The parts of a migration that go wrong are almost always the unglamorous ones: open receivables, part payments and the invoice history reporting depends on. Those are the parts we reconcile first.
- Plans, add-ons and price points import as a catalog
- Customers, subscriptions and their full history come across
- Historical invoices import, so reporting stays continuous
- Open receivables and part payments are reconciled before cutover
- Payment methods stay with your processor, untouched
- Parallel cycles run until the numbers agree
FAQ
Moving from Stripe Billing
Do we have to leave Stripe?
No, and most teams do not. Stripe stays as the processor while Occurly takes over subscriptions, invoicing, dunning, entitlements and analytics. Adding a second gateway later becomes a routing rule rather than a project.
Is Occurly worth it before we have real scale?
Often not, and we will say so. Below roughly $500K ARR, Stripe Billing plus a little application code is usually the right answer. Occurly earns its place when pricing gets hybrid, entities multiply, or finance starts reconstructing the number by hand.
Bring us your current setup.
We will map it against Occurly and tell you what a move would take, in writing, including the parts that would not be an improvement.
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