Switch billing providers without losing a single customer
- No re-entered cards
- No cutover night
- No revenue gap
Sound familiar?
The fear that keeps teams stuck on the wrong billing platform
Three objections come up in almost every migration conversation. All three were true once. None of them has to be true now.
We can’t migrate: our customers’ cards are locked in
The oldest form of vendor lock-in: your subscribers’ payment methods live in someone else’s vault, and asking thousands of customers to re-enter a card is a churn event you’d never sign up for voluntarily. So the vault holds you hostage.
We’ll lose subscribers during the switchover
Everyone has heard a cutover horror story: renewals that didn’t fire, customers double-billed by two systems, a weekend of reconciliation spreadsheets. If migration means one high-stakes night, the rational move is to keep postponing it.
The engineering lift is too high to justify it
Billing touches everything: checkout, provisioning, accounting, the data warehouse. The quote from engineering comes back in quarters, not weeks, and the platform you’ve outgrown quietly wins another year by default.
Reframe
Why billing migration feels riskier than it is
Most of the risk is about tokens, not the platform
Plans, coupons, and billing rules are just configuration: tedious to recreate, but safe. The genuinely scary asset is the vaulted card tokens, because they’re the one thing you can’t ask customers to redo at scale. Name the real risk and the problem gets much smaller: solve for the tokens, and the rest is project management.
Token portability changes everything
Two things broke the old lock-in. Processors now support PCI-compliant token transfers between certified vaults, and orchestration platforms store tokens in processor-agnostic vaults you own. Once the tokens are portable (or better, once they were never captive to begin with), the vault stops being a hostage situation.
A parallel-run approach eliminates downtime risk
The horror stories all share one feature: a single cutover moment. Run both platforms in parallel instead (new customers on the new system, existing subscriptions migrating in batches between billing cycles) and there is no moment where everything has to go right at once. The rollback plan is simply the old platform, still running.
Four levers, one platform
How PaymentKit handles token portability
Tokens stored independently, not locked to your current PSP
An agnostic vault means your customers’ payment methods belong to you.
New payment methods are tokenized in PaymentKit’s processor-agnostic vault, so any processor you connect can charge them, today or three years from now. Existing tokens keep working because your processors stay connected, and where a processor supports PCI-compliant token migration, saved cards move over too.
- Processor-agnostic vaulting with total data portability.
- Existing PSP-vaulted cards keep charging from day one.
- Export your data anytime. The lock-in never restarts.
Customers never see the migration happen
The only acceptable customer experience of a billing migration is none.
Renewals charge the same card through the same processor before, during, and after the move. No “please update your payment details” email blast, no re-authorization campaign, no support tickets asking why the charge looks different. If a customer can tell you migrated, something went wrong.
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Subscriptions continue uninterrupted through the switchover
Migrations happen between billing cycles, never in the middle of one.
Each subscription batch moves after its renewal fires and before the next one is due, then renews on PaymentKit with its state intact: plan, trial status, discounts, and next-bill date. A subscription is only deactivated on the old platform once it’s confirmed live on the new one: the rule that makes double-billing and missed renewals structurally impossible.
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Processor-agnostic vaulting with total data portability.The playbook
The parallel-run approach: how to migrate without downtime
Step 01
Connect PaymentKit alongside your existing platform
Link your processors, recreate your catalog, and validate with test charges in a sandbox. Your current platform keeps billing everything while you set up.
Step 02
Run new customers through PaymentKit immediately
New signups start on PaymentKit from day one. You’re validating the full flow (checkout, renewals, dunning, metrics) with real volume, at low stakes.
Step 03
Migrate existing subscriptions in batches
Move cohorts between billing cycles, reconcile each batch against defined checks, and only then move the next. Pace is yours: a week or a quarter both work.
Step 04
Decommission the old platform when ready
Once the last batch reconciles, cancel the old subscriptions and the old contract. Until that moment it’s your rollback plan, which is why there’s never a cliff.
Starting points
Migrating from your current platform
The playbook is the same everywhere; the export quirks aren’t. Here’s what changes per platform.
Migrating from Recurly
Recurly’s gateway-agnostic setup works in your favor: your processors already exist independently, so they reconnect to PaymentKit directly. Export customers and subscriptions via Recurly’s API, and plan around its dunning state so in-recovery invoices aren’t dropped mid-sequence.
Migrating from Chargebee
Chargebee’s bulk export covers customers, subscriptions, and invoices cleanly. The main planning items are its add-on modules (map what RevRec or Retention were doing before you switch them off) and its cumulative-billing pricing, which stops accruing the day your volume moves.
Migrating from Maxio
Maxio migrations are really two exports: billing data from the Chargify side, analytics history from the SaaS Optics side. Subscriptions and catalog move like any Chargify migration; historical metrics can be archived for reference since PaymentKit rebuilds metrics from live billing data.
Migrating from Stripe Billing
The easiest of the four, because Stripe stays connected as a processor: existing Stripe-vaulted cards keep charging with zero token work. You’re moving the billing logic (plans, subscriptions, schedules) while the payment rails underneath don’t change at all.
The payoff
What you can do after migration that you couldn’t before
Route payments across multiple processors
Every charge goes to the processor most likely to approve it, with automatic failover when one has a bad day. This is the capability that justified the move. No traditional billing platform offers it.
Access unified revenue metrics across your entire stack
MRR, churn, LTV, and cohorts calculated one way, from one source, across every processor, instead of exports from a billing tool reconciled against each gateway’s own dashboard.
Run native dunning without paying for a separate tool
Adaptive retries, recovery emails, and configurable failure handling are part of the billing layer, not a bolt-on with its own subscription.
Benchmark PSP performance and optimize routing rules
Authorization rates by processor, card type, and region, side by side: the visibility that turns “which processor is underperforming?” from a quarterly mystery into a dashboard row.
Free resource
Download the migration checklist
Every step, in order, with the gotchas flagged
The same checklist we walk migrating teams through, from platform audit to final decommission, including the two mistakes that cause real damage: canceling old subscriptions before confirmation, and migrating mid-cycle.
- Platform audit & data export prep
- Batch scheduling around renewal dates
- Per-batch reconciliation checks
- Token & processor planning
- Rollback triggers to define upfront
- Decommission & contract-exit steps
