As business is coming more distributed it's becoming more popular to leverage cloud base Software as a Service (SaaS).  Business models are changing to create cloud based apps that simplify the day to day business operations. Most of these tools come in the form of paid members to subscription based services like Salesforce, Hubspot, and Brightcove. 

In turn, Drupal has become a popular Content Management System (CMS) to manage paid memberships because of it's native ability to give out very detailed permission sets based on roles that can easily be created inside of Drupal.  The complex part comes in when you start to architect how to handle the upgrading, downgrading, or cancelling subscriptions. 

Even with Drupal's ability to handle all subscription states, we have found that leveraging Recurly's API can be a much more cost effective solution to our clients. 

Recurly features an infrastructure that will allow you to: 

• Create and manage multiple subscription levels for nontechnical users
• Account dashboard to easily charge, credit, and refund customer accounts. 
• Manage and create coupons /  discount for promotions. 
• PCI Compliance on all transactions. 
• Pulled detailed reports. 

The feature sets Recurly provides can be duplicated with in the Drupal infrastructure. However, for the level of effort that it takes to implement all the features Recurly provides, it's normally more cost effective to integrate with the Recurly API for $70/per month. 

Blog picture provided by Piano Piano!