Recurring billing merchant account: NMI customer vault or Authorize.net ARB

Do I need a merchant account for recurring billing?

Yes. The vault stores the card and the scheduler decides when to charge it, but every charge is approved and settled through a merchant account, and the gateway features stay off until one is connected. Services that let you start billing in an afternoon have a merchant account too; it is theirs, shared across every business on the platform, which is why holds and sudden closures happen there. A dedicated account is underwritten for your business and your billing model up front, and we provision NMI or Authorize.net with the vault and recurring module enabled.

Is Authorize.net ARB free, or is there an ARB fee?

Ask us what recurring billing costs on your account. The public record on ARB pricing is inconsistent: third-party pages still quote a monthly charge from when it was a paid add-on, and we do not repeat a figure we have not verified. What Authorize.net does publish is the monthly gateway fee, the transaction pricing and Account Updater; those figures are on our Authorize.net page. Because the gateway fee is part of what we quote with your processing, we confirm what applies to your account in writing before you rely on it.

Does NMI recurring billing cost extra?

On NMI's side the Customer Vault and the recurring module are add-ons to the base gateway, and NMI publishes no price list because it sells only through resellers; every NMI price you see online is that reseller's own pricing. Through Stratamize the modules you need are part of the gateway quote, and we give you the gateway fee and your processing together as one figure. Tell us that you bill on a schedule when you apply and the vault and recurring are enabled before your first login.

What happens when a customer's card expires or a payment fails?

Two different problems. An expired or reissued card is handled by an account updater: the card networks pass the new number or expiry to the gateway and the token in the vault is refreshed, so the next charge goes through without you chasing anyone. Authorize.net bills Account Updater per update; on NMI the automatic card updater is enabled where available. Ask for it; it is the feature that most reduces involuntary churn.

A decline is different: insufficient funds, a lost card, a bank block. On Authorize.net, ARB can suspend the subscription and retry it automatically rather than cancelling it. On NMI, decline handling depends on the recurring configuration on your account, and we walk through those settings before go-live. Neither gateway sends dunning emails on its own; that is a billing-platform job.

Can I store a bank account for recurring ACH payments?

Where boarded. Both gateways can hold a bank account alongside a card and run it on a schedule: NMI in the Customer Vault, Authorize.net as eCheck on an ARB subscription. The condition is on the merchant-account side, not the gateway: ACH has to be boarded for your business, and not every account is. Tell us on the first call if you want to bill by bank account, because it goes into the application from the start, and ACH returns behave differently from card declines, so the retry rules are set separately.

Is it legal to keep a customer's card on file?

Yes, when it is done the way the card networks require. The customer has to agree to it, and the agreement has to say what will be charged, how often and how to cancel; a checkbox at checkout or a signed authorization form both work. The card number itself should never be kept by you: the gateway stores it as a token in the vault and your staff see only the last digits, which keeps your PCI scope small. If you keep numbers on paper or in a spreadsheet today, stop, and we will move those customers into the vault.

Can I run a free trial that converts to a paid subscription?

Yes, and underwriting will ask about it, so be ready to describe it. The card networks have rules for trials and introductory offers: tell the customer before the trial ends, say plainly when the first real charge happens and for how much, make cancelling as easy as signing up, and keep a descriptor the customer will recognise. Those rules exist because trial-to-paid is where subscription chargebacks come from. On the gateway side a trial is a subscription with a delayed start date or a different first amount; both gateways can do it. We go through the consent and reminder flow with you before you apply.

Can I move my subscriptions from Stripe or another provider?

The stored cards often can, the schedules cannot. Card data belongs to the gateway or processor that tokenized it, so moving means asking the old provider to transfer the cards to the new gateway through a secure migration, which Stripe and most gateways support; some charge for the export. Once the tokens land in the NMI vault or in CIM, the subscriptions are rebuilt, because a schedule does not travel with a token. The order matters: open the new account, migrate the cards, rebuild the schedules, then stop the old billing.