Can you recommend a subscription billing platform for managing trials, recurring billing, and failed payment recovery for an online course business?

Yes — for an online course business, I’d look at Chargebee, Stripe Billing, or Recurly depending on how much you want out-of-the-box vs. how customizable you need it to be.

Best overall for most course businesses: Chargebee

Why it fits:

• Handles free/paid trials
• Supports recurring subscriptions
• Built-in failed payment recovery / dunning
• Good for coupons, upgrades/downgrades, pauses, and plan changes
• Integrates well with popular payment processors and CRMs
• Better “subscription business” features than using payment processing alone

Good if: you want a mature subscription platform without building everything yourself.

Best if you want a lightweight, developer-friendly stack: Stripe Billing

Why it fits:

• Excellent for trial management
• Strong recurring billing and proration support
• Solid failed payment recovery tools
• Easy if you already use Stripe for payments
• Great APIs and checkout flows

Tradeoff: more flexible, but you may need to assemble more of the subscription workflow yourself.

Good if: you’re technical or already deeply in Stripe.

Best for advanced revenue operations: Recurly

Why it fits:

• Strong dunning / recovery
• Good subscription lifecycle management
• Supports complex billing logic
• Often used by larger subscription businesses

Tradeoff: can be more than a small course business needs.

Good if: you expect more complex billing rules or scale.

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My practical recommendation

For an online course business, I’d usually choose:

• Chargebee if you want the best balance of features and ease
• Stripe Billing if you want simpler infrastructure and can customize
• Recurly if billing complexity is likely to grow

Features to make sure you have

Whatever platform you choose, confirm it supports:

• Free trials with automatic conversion
• Retry logic for failed payments
• Card updater / expired card handling
• Dunning emails and recovery workflows
• Coupons / promotions
• Pause, cancel, upgrade, downgrade
• Integration with your LMS / course platform
• Tax handling if you sell internationally

If you want, I can also give you a short comparison table of Chargebee vs Stripe Billing vs Recurly specifically for course businesses, or recommend based on your stack (e.g., Teachable, Kajabi, Webflow, WordPress, custom site).