Collect recurring payments without building your own billing engine - plans, retries, and lifecycle handled for you.
Whether you're launching a SaaS product, a membership service, or a usage-based platform, you get all the components for subscription billing out of the box.
What is Billing & subscriptions
Billing & subscriptions is a Revolut Merchant feature that automates recurring payment collection.
Instead of building your own recurring billing engine on top of saved payment methods, you define subscription plans, attach customers to those plans, and let Revolut handle payment scheduling, retries, and lifecycle events.
Key features
How it fits your Merchant account
Billing & subscriptions builds on your existing Revolut Merchant account. You use the same Merchant API keys, the same payment processing infrastructure, and the same dashboard. If you already accept one-off payments with Revolut, you can add subscription billing without additional onboarding.
To use Billing & subscriptions, you need an active Revolut Business account with a Merchant account. If you haven't set one up yet, see Get started.
Why use Billing & subscriptions
Building a recurring billing system from scratch is complex. You need to schedule payments, retry failed charges, save and tokenise payment methods, handle expiring cards, track billing cycles, manage subscription lifecycle states, and reconcile payments - all while staying compliant with payment regulations.
Billing & subscriptions handles all of this for you, at no additional cost:
How it works
Use cases
The scenarios below show how businesses use Billing & subscriptions in practice - and the pricing models each one relies on.
Some industries and business models are not supported for merchant accounts - see Prohibited and restricted industries and business models on the Revolut Business help centre.
SaaS and API products
- Charge customers a monthly or annual subscription for access to your software product.
- Offer tiered plans (for example, Starter, Pro, Enterprise) with different feature sets at each tier.
- Bill per-seat for team-based tools where the number of users changes over time.
- Apply usage-based metered billing for API platforms, charging based on the number of calls, storage used, or transactions processed.
Membership and content
- Collect monthly membership fees for gyms, clubs, or associations.
- Charge recurring fees for access to premium content, streaming services, or online communities.
- Offer free trials to attract new members, then transition to paid plans automatically.
E-commerce and retail
- Sell subscription boxes or product-of-the-month clubs with recurring delivery and billing.
- Offer instalment plans for higher-value products, splitting the cost across multiple payments.
- Run promotional pricing for the first few months to incentivise sign-ups, then move to standard pricing.
Professional services
- Bill clients for ongoing services such as consulting, maintenance, or support retainers.
- Charge recurring fees for ongoing legal advice or accounting packages.
- Use package-based pricing to bundle multiple services into a single monthly fee.
Pricing models
Billing & subscriptions supports the following pricing models, the building blocks behind the scenarios above. Each model can be used independently or combined within a single plan.
| Pricing model | Description |
|---|---|
| Fixed / flat-rate recurring | Charge a fixed amount at regular intervals (e.g., £9.99/month) |
| Per-seat / per-unit | Charge based on the number of units or seats a customer subscribes to (e.g., £5/user/month) |
| Usage-based (metered) | Charge based on actual usage reported during the billing period, priced per unit or in volume tiers (e.g., £0.10 per API call) |
| Free trials | Offer a trial period before the first payment is collected |
| Introductory & promotional phases | Apply discounted or custom pricing for a limited number of billing cycles before transitioning to the standard price |
| Instalments | Split a larger charge into multiple recurring payments over a set period |
| Multi-currency | Serve customers across regions by creating matching plans in each currency you support |
| Package / bundle | Charge a single price for a predefined bundle of features or services (e.g., £29/month for the "Pro" package with 5 features included) |
You can combine multiple pricing models within a single plan - all combined charges are collected at the same time, in the same billing cycle. For example, a plan can charge a fixed base rate plus per-seat pricing, with a free trial for the first 14 days.
For detailed explanations of each pricing model and how to configure them, see Subscription plans.
Subscription lifecycle
Every subscription follows a predictable journey - from sign-up, through recurring billing, to a clearly defined end.
Revolut drives this journey automatically and keeps every subscription in a well-defined status, so you always know who is paying, who needs attention after a failed payment, and when a subscription has ended. Each stage maps to a business moment you can act on - provisioning or revoking access, prompting customers to update their payment details, and reconciling revenue.
For a detailed explanation of subscription states and transitions, see Subscription lifecycle.
Choose your approach
Billing & subscriptions offers two ways to get started: a no-code approach using the Revolut Business dashboard, and a full API integration for custom checkout experiences. The right choice depends on your technical resources, customisation needs, and how much control you want over the customer sign-up flow.
At a glance
| No-code | API integration | |
|---|---|---|
| Who it's for | Businesses that want to start billing quickly without development work | Businesses that need a custom sign-up flow, automated plan management, or integration with an existing platform |
| Setup time | Minutes - create a plan and share a payment link | Hours to days - build and test the integration |
| Customer sign-up | Customers sign up via a hosted payment page (payment link) that you share via email, SMS, or any channel, or embed on your website | Customers sign up directly on your website or app through a checkout flow you build and control |
| Plan creation | Create and manage plans in the Revolut Business dashboard | Create and manage plans programmatically via the Merchant API |
| Subscription management | Update payment methods, change plans, and cancel subscriptions from the dashboard | Automate subscription management end-to-end via the API |
| Usage reporting | Not available in the dashboard - usage-based plans require API integration for reporting | Report usage programmatically via the Merchant API |
| Customisation | Limited to hosted payment page branding (logo, colours, cover image) | Full control over the checkout UI, plan selection, and customer experience |
| Webhooks | Not available - you monitor subscriptions manually in the dashboard | Receive real-time webhook events for subscription state changes |
If you're new to subscription billing, start with the no-code approach to understand the plan and subscription model, then move to the API integration when you need more control.
The no-code approach lets you create subscription plans and start billing customers entirely from the Revolut Business dashboard - no development required.
How it works:
- Create a plan in the dashboard - define the pricing model, billing interval, currency, and any trial or promotional phases.
- Generate a payment link - Revolut creates a hosted payment page for your plan. The page is branded with your logo and colours.
- Share the link - Send the payment link to customers via email, SMS, or any channel. You can also embed the hosted payment page directly on your website.
- Customers sign up - When a customer opens the link and signs up with their payment details, Revolut creates a subscription and saves their payment method for future automatic charges.
- Manage subscriptions - View active subscriptions, update payment methods, change plans, and cancel subscriptions - all from the dashboard.
- You're getting started with subscription billing and want to launch quickly.
- You don't have development resources or need to involve your engineering team.
- You run a small number of plans with straightforward pricing.
- You want to share subscription sign-up links via email, SMS, or social channels.
- You want to embed a subscription sign-up page on a simple website without building a checkout flow.
Guide roadmap
This guide is organised into the following steps: