Frequently Asked Questions

Abowire is an "order-to-cash" software platform that wires together and automates everything you need to run and maximize revenue of a subscription-based business. Automate recurring billing, collections, quoting, integrated revenue recognition connected with your bank, subscription metrics, and much more.

Subscription businesses are not just about regularly charging customers. You'll need to keep up with constant business changes and their complexities, as well as to comply with the latest government policies. You'll need to offer different payment methods and pricing options to different customers. All while offering your customers the best experience you can. Slowly this can become a second product within your company, which is time-consuming and expensive to maintain. Would you rather have your talented engineers spend their time maintaining billing systems or building your product? Abowire handles the ugly parts for you.

Abowire is a month-to-month service so there are no long-term commitments, and you can cancel at anytime.

Our first priority is to offer a secure and reliable service. To achieve that, we have built our infrastructure to be highly available and distributed across multiple independent regions. All our customers get Enterprise-grade availability SLAs, no matter the size.

You cancel your account at anytime by emailing us at support@abowire.com .

It's pretty simple: your first 30 days are completely free.

Abowire does not charge a setup fee. You can sign up and start implementing Abowire for free right away. We only charge our fees once you go live and are already generating money yourself.

Your first month is free. After that your pricing is based on the plan you’ve selected. See a complete pricing details on our pricing page. If you have any questions, please ping us on chat or talk with a billing specialist.

No. Financial institutions separately charge their own fees, and merchants are responsible for those merchant account fees.

You can payout to your bank account directly via the Payment Gateway you choose to use. Abowire never gets in the way between you and your funds.

Because you use your own merchant account provided by your Payment Gateway, Abowire has no access to your funds.

You will also need a merchant account to get started with Abowire. A merchant account is a specific type of bank account built for businesses, which lets them accept payments (usually via debit or credit cards, but sometimes via other means).

Yes, you'll need to signup with any of the supported Payment Gateways (currently Adyen, Paypal & Stripe). We plan to support more, so let us know which one you use!

Payment gateways are responsible for processing transactions and distributing funds into your merchant bank account.

Abowire bills your customer's credit or debit card on whatever schedule you define. In addition to processing one-time and recurring transactions, Abowire can handle free trial periods, one-time fees, promotions, refunds, email receipts, and even dunning (reminders for failed credit card payments) management.

No. We make paying recurring bills easier for your customers by offering autopay, which collects their payment automatically.

Yes. You can bill your customers as many times per month as you like.

Totally! Abowire allows you to create custom subscription plans and charge at any interval. Abowire’s subscription management tools are flexible and easy to use. Feel free to customize your billing intervals, trial periods, introductory pricing, one-time fees, and more.

In a transaction initiated by the cardholder (customer), we give them the opportunity to try again or use a different card. On recurring payments, we send them an automated email so they can retry at a different time or with ta different card by themselves.

Yes. With Abowire, you can automatically retry declined payments based on the optimal time to maximize approvals on your renewals.

Abowire does not store actual credit card data. The cards are stored in the gateway's secure vaults, and we store a token that can be used to charge that card on your gateway.

If you leave Abowire, your credit card vault data remains with your gateway provider. You will need to work with your gateway directly if you need to export that data.

If you need access to your subscription, customer, or transaction data, you can use the Abwoire API or our CSV Export feature.

Abowire works with your payment gateway's secure vault to store your customers' billing information in a PCI-compliant way. We work with your gateway so you don’t have to worry about managing this sensitive information.

Abowire does not store credit card information of any kind. We work in conjunction with your payment gateway's secure "vault" to store your customers' credit card information in a secure, PCI-compliant location. As we continue to add additional payment gateways, this may change but will be dependent on your gateway.

We know that your bank details are sensitive data. That's why it's very important to us that your data is safe! We have developed a detailed security concept that allows us to give you absolute data security. We use the finAPI PSD2 license supported by Bafin regulations.

We encrypt your data at the highest level and secure your data only on high-security servers in Germany. Your data is safe with us! In addition, only you can view your data - because the key to your data is only yours.

Your customers can be located almost anywhere in the world and they can buy from you via Abowire. As long as they have a type of credit card that is supported by your payment gateway (usually Visa, MasterCard, and American Express, and sometimes others), or a Bank Account your customers can purchase from you using Abowire.
Your location matters. You need to be able to conduct legal business (or at least have a bank account) in one of the countries where we have supported payment gateways.

Depending on the payment gateway you've chosen, Abowire can support different currencies. For a current list, please see our documentation on Currency Selection.

Abowire automatically checks in two ways the VAT ID specified by your customer:
1) A syntactic check: The syntactic check evaluates the plausibility of the VAT ID entered on the order page. If the entered VAT ID does not consist of the two-digit country code as prefix and a maximum of twelve following aplhanumeric characters, the completion of the order is prevented until a syntactically correct or no VAT ID is stored.

2) A query at the VAT Information Exchange System (MIAS / VIES) of the European Commission: Abowire automatically queries the validity of the VAT identification number stored in the VAT information exchange system VIES of the European Commission after a successful syntax check. Further information on VIES can be found here.

The check verifies if the VAT ID is currently valid. Queries to determine if the VAT ID fits the country of the customer or company name are currently not included.