My 3 year old site depends on recurring billing so this is something I've researched pretty well. If you have many non-US customers, as I do, the short story is that PayPal is really your only option. All alternatives depend on credit cards, which are not nearly as common outside the US.
I am aware of the horror stories around PayPal but I haven't had any serious problems in the last few years and I do hundreds of (recurring) transactions per day with them.
That said there is a pretty long list of annoying bugs in PayPal's recurring billing solution and most of the bugs have been in there for years. The technical bugs you can work around, but the "usability" bugs are quite annoying:
* If a user changes his credit card it will cancel all his subscriptions, unless he follows a specific set of steps that he won't find out about until it's too late
* If a user want to change a subscription and uses a different account to log into PayPal than the one he signed up with he gets the unhelpful error message that his "subscription has expired"
* If a user has two or more subscriptions and tries to change one PayPal will present him with a list of which one to change. This is a list of cryptic numbers. If he picks the wrong one it is near impossible to correct without canceling and resubscribing
* There is no way to pro-rate a subscription: if someone makes an annual payment for bronze tier and a day later decides to switch to silver tier PayPal will not charge the new price until a year from now.
I could go one. There are also internationalizations issues but I guess those only apply when you are outside the US like I am. (E.g. If you are outside the US then all the amounts in messages to your customers get formatted with a comma as a decimal separator, even if your customers are in US and you have your language set to US English). I've filed a bunch of bug reports over the years but I've never gotten a bug actually fixed.
I am aware of the horror stories around PayPal but I haven't had any serious problems in the last few years and I do hundreds of (recurring) transactions per day with them.
That said there is a pretty long list of annoying bugs in PayPal's recurring billing solution and most of the bugs have been in there for years. The technical bugs you can work around, but the "usability" bugs are quite annoying:
* If a user changes his credit card it will cancel all his subscriptions, unless he follows a specific set of steps that he won't find out about until it's too late
* If a user want to change a subscription and uses a different account to log into PayPal than the one he signed up with he gets the unhelpful error message that his "subscription has expired"
* If a user has two or more subscriptions and tries to change one PayPal will present him with a list of which one to change. This is a list of cryptic numbers. If he picks the wrong one it is near impossible to correct without canceling and resubscribing
* There is no way to pro-rate a subscription: if someone makes an annual payment for bronze tier and a day later decides to switch to silver tier PayPal will not charge the new price until a year from now.
I could go one. There are also internationalizations issues but I guess those only apply when you are outside the US like I am. (E.g. If you are outside the US then all the amounts in messages to your customers get formatted with a comma as a decimal separator, even if your customers are in US and you have your language set to US English). I've filed a bunch of bug reports over the years but I've never gotten a bug actually fixed.