Recharge

Recharge is the subscription and recurring-billing platform behind a large share of DTC subscription programmes, handling plans, renewals, swaps and churn.

Subscription events are economically different from one-off orders: a new subscription carries a lifetime value a single checkout does not. Treating them as the same conversion is where most subscription brands lose the plot on acquisition.

Recharge sits alongside the storefront and owns the recurring relationship. When a shopper buys a subscription, Recharge creates a subscription object and then generates a charge on each billing cycle, emitting webhooks for created, updated, cancelled, skipped and reactivated states. The subscription and the charge are separate objects, which matters: one subscription produces many charges over its life. Recharge also handles swaps, pauses and address changes, each of which updates state without producing an order in the usual sense.

Recharge knows the difference between a first charge and a renewal. Almost nothing downstream does, because both arrive looking like revenue. Upstack reads that distinction and preserves it: new subscriptions can be forwarded as their own conversion, renewals as recurring revenue, and cancellations as state changes rather than silence. Ad platforms then optimise toward acquiring subscribers instead of re-finding the ones you have, and flows stop welcoming people who have been subscribed for a year.