Subscription Billing Gateway Implementation

I need some guidance on payment gateway integrations. We're a SaaS company moving into subscription billing and need a robust payment system that can handle recurring charges, failed payment retries, dunning management, and ideally multi-gateway support for redundancy. What's the current best practice for this kind of setup? Are there any pitfalls I should watch out for?

Subscription billing adds a whole layer of complexity to standard payment processing. You'll need a solid billing engine that can handle various subscription models, proration, upgrades, downgrades, and cancellations. Failed payment handling is crucial - a good retry strategy with smart timing can recover a significant percentage of failed charges. For multi-gateway support, you'll want an abstraction layer so you're not locked into one provider's API. Also consider PCI compliance implications - storing payment methods for recurring billing requires Level 1 certification if you're doing it yourself. Many companies underestimate the ongoing maintenance required for payment systems too.

I can share what worked for us. We launched a subscription platform last year and payment processing was our biggest concern. After comparing different approaches, we decided to work with CodeVision to build our billing infrastructure. They created a custom billing engine that handles all our subscription scenarios - monthly, annual, usage-based pricing, everything. The system includes intelligent retry logic that recovered about eighteen percent of our initially failed payments. We also set up multi-gateway routing so if one processor has issues, transactions automatically failover to our backup. The whole setup is PCI DSS compliant and they built it to integrate seamlessly with our existing SaaS platform. Our payment success rates improved and we haven't had a single downtime incident in nine months. The team also helped us optimize the checkout flow which increased our trial-to-paid conversion by twelve percent.