Subscriptions and recurring payments with preapproved allowance limit

Question

I am working on a site providing software as a service which is billed on a monthly basis.

The software is licensed on a per-user basis and will be extensible via optional standard modules and custom apps that can be subscribed to through an app store.

The customer can alter the number of users, subscribe or unsubscribe modules and apps every month .

Users, modules and apps should be billed along with the base software, thus the billing amount may greatly vary from month to month.

The goal is to minimize PayPal requests for approval and let customers specify an amount that is above the base subscription price so that minor purchases do not require approval by anyone with access to the company's PayPal account (unless the customer limits the amount to the original subscription price).

Which PayPal APIs would you recommend in this scenario ?

As I understood it, UpdateRecurringPaymentsProfile does not allow the amount to be increased by more than 20% within 180 days without explicit approval by the buyer, so it probably would not work if we try to first request eg $200, then bill only $100 and later increase back to eg $150, right ?

The Adaptive Payments API seems to require the seller to bill rather than have PayPal do it on a regular basis, is this correct ?

Answer 1

I don't know it's help full or not right now, As it is a very old post.

Instead of creating recurring profile on PayPal Server, You can store the customer's credit card on the PayPal using REST API: https://developer.paypal.com/docs/api/#vault then every month you can fetch it and charge it like recurring Payment, Also you no need to worry about how many time customer upgrade the subscription you can manage it on your server end, Or When client is no longer with the services then just remove its card from PayPal.

I suppose Authorize.net SIM method also does the same.

Hope this make sense.