Simple Protocol for Recurring Payments
What is Recurr?
In billing systems, there are fundamentally two approaches to payments:
- Pull-Payments
Where money is pulled automatically from a customer (e.g. Credit Cards). - Push-Payments
Where money is requested and customers action that payment manually (e.g. Direct Deposit).
Recurr primarily focuses on supporting the latter (Push-Payments) by defining a simple standard that operates upon the same principles as an RSS feed. Recurr also provides quality reference applications that can then read these feeds.
Traditionally, the solution for push-payment subscription services has been to notify customers through various available channels (email, paper bills, etc). Recurr untangles this process by allowing users to view and invoke payment of all these bills in one application, shortening the bill paying procedure to just a few clicks.
This makes Recurr not only suitable for traditional push-payment subscription services but also cryptocurrency-based subscription services. Cryptocurrency requires push payments by-design and current approaches to recurrent billing in cryptocurrency-based services (e.g. Smart Contracts) present several drawbacks that Recurr aims to solve.
As Payment Actions are defined as simple URL links, it is possible to easily integrate Recurr with existing services and almost all modern payment gateways/methods.
How it works
Recurr's design is simple — it only requires services to code a single endpoint meaning implementation can usually be done in a matter of hours.
It also does not rely on any central server. In this sense, it is decentralized — the only connections made are to the feed endpoints and their associated resources.
In short, Recurr functions as follows:
-
Service provides a unique JSON endpoint (Feed) to each user.
- This feed can contain lists of bill, balance and receipt items.
- Each item can contain several actions (e.g. Payment Options).
-
These actions are defined as URL links.
(Meaning Recurr can integrate with almost any payment gateway or service.)
- User then scans this feed endpoint into a Recurr-compatible App.
- User's Recurr App then polls these feed endpoints for updates at set time intervals or upon app focus.
Live Example
The following are live examples of Recurr feeds that can be scanned into the app.
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Try opening the Recurr WebApp and scanning in the QR Codes to the right/below.
(Alternatively, you can also use the "Open with Recurr WebApp" link below the QR Code.)
To get started supporting Recurr on your service, see the Developer Documentation.
