ReCurr – Subscription Billing

ReCurr is the WooCommerce subscription billing plugin built specifically for South African businesses using PayFast. Sell annual subscriptions with automatic renewal, secure card tokenisation, and customer self-management — all native to WordPress and WooCommerce.

Whether you run a membership organisation, an annual SaaS, a recurring donation programme, or any business with annual recurring revenue, ReCurr gives you the foundation to bill your customers reliably every year on the same date.

Why ReCurr?

Most subscription plugins built for WooCommerce focus on US/EU payment gateways. ReCurr is built from the ground up for PayFast, South Africa’s leading payment gateway, with proper handling of:

• PayFast tokenisation for secure recurring payments
• Anniversary-based annual billing (renews on the same date each year)
• PayFast ITN (Instant Transaction Notification) verification
• Failed-payment retry logic with customer notifications
• Customer self-cancellation from the WooCommerce My Account area

Features

• Annual subscription billing — customers pay once a year, automatically renewed via PayFast tokenised card
• PayFast integration — full tokenisation, ITN handling, and recurring payment support
• Customer self-cancellation — from the standard WooCommerce My Account area
• Failed-payment retry — automatic retry on failed renewals (3 attempts, then on-hold)
• Email notifications — activation, renewal success, payment failed, cancellation
• Customisable email templates — edit every transactional email’s subject and body with merge-tag placeholders
• Admin dashboard — view, filter, search, and manually manage all subscriptions
• CSV export — export the subscriptions list (respects the active filter and search)
• At-a-glance widget — WordPress dashboard widget with active counts, annual recurring value, and upcoming renewals
• WooCommerce Blocks support — works with both Classic and Blocks checkout
• HPOS-compatible — declared compatible with WooCommerce High-Performance Order Storage
• GPL-licensed, plain readable PHP — no obfuscation, no phone-home calls, no telemetry

About this plugin

This plugin provides annual subscription billing only. It is fully functional with no licence required, no time limits, and no usage restrictions. A separate, more advanced subscription plugin is sold by the same developer at https://recurr.co.za — it is not bundled with, downloadable from, or required by this plugin.

Requirements

• WordPress 5.8 or higher
• WooCommerce 5.0 or higher
• PHP 7.4 or higher
• SSL certificate (HTTPS) — required for PayFast
• PayFast Merchant Account with tokenisation enabled

Privacy

ReCurr does NOT collect any usage data, telemetry, or analytics. The plugin makes no outbound calls to any server other than PayFast (for processing payments) and your own WordPress site. No data is shared with the plugin author.

PayFast itself is a third-party payment service. When customers complete a subscription purchase, their card is tokenised by PayFast and the token is stored in your database for future renewals. See PayFast’s privacy policy at https://payfast.io/privacy-policy/ for details on how PayFast handles cardholder data.

External services

This plugin connects to one external service: PayFast, the South African payment gateway. PayFast is required — the plugin cannot process subscription payments without it, and this processing cannot be performed locally. You must have your own PayFast merchant account to use this plugin.

The plugin contacts PayFast in three ways:

1. Hosted checkout (https://www.payfast.co.za/eng/process, sandbox: https://sandbox.payfast.co.za/eng/process). When a customer places a subscription order, the customer is redirected to PayFast to enter and tokenise their card. The data sent is the order amount, a signed request signature, the customer’s billing first name, last name and email address, the order ID, the item name, and your PayFast merchant ID/key. This happens once per signup, at checkout.

2. Instant Transaction Notification validation (https://www.payfast.co.za/eng/query/validate, sandbox: https://sandbox.payfast.co.za/eng/query/validate). When PayFast notifies your site of a payment result, the plugin posts the received notification back to PayFast to confirm it is genuine. The data sent is the exact notification payload PayFast sent. This happens once per payment event (signup and each renewal).

3. Ad Hoc charge API (https://api.payfast.co.za/subscriptions). On each annual renewal, the plugin charges the stored card token. The data sent is the renewal amount, item name, your merchant ID, a timestamp, and a signed request signature. This happens once per subscription per year (on renewal).

No data is sent to the plugin author or any analytics/telemetry service. PayFast’s general terms and conditions: https://payfast.io/legal/general-terms-conditions/ — PayFast’s privacy policy: https://payfast.io/privacy-policy/