If you are building SaaS in India, the payments question answers itself faster than almost anywhere else: Stripe is invite-only for Indian businesses, so most founders cannot just sign up. Razorpay is the practical default. This guide covers what Razorpay gives you for subscriptions, the RBI rules that make Indian recurring billing genuinely different, and where the rough edges are.
What Razorpay is
Razorpay is India's leading full-stack payments company, founded in 2014 by Harshil Mathur and Shashank Kumar and backed by Y Combinator. It raised a $375M Series F in December 2021 at a $7.5B valuation, and processes well over $150B in annualized payment volume across millions of businesses. Beyond the payment gateway it offers subscriptions, payouts, and neobanking via RazorpayX. For an Indian SaaS, it is the closest thing to a default.
Pricing
Razorpay's standard rate is 2% per successful transaction on domestic payments (cards, UPI, netbanking, wallets), with no setup or annual fee. International cards are up to 3%. GST of 18% applies on the platform fee, not on the transaction amount. For subscriptions specifically, Razorpay adds 0.9% on top of the gateway fee for card-based recurring billing, so a card subscription effectively costs roughly 2.9% plus GST. UPI and e-mandate subscription pricing is quoted on request.
Subscriptions: how recurring billing works
Razorpay supports three recurring methods, and the differences matter:
- Cards - standing instructions on Visa, Mastercard and RuPay.
- UPI AutoPay - recurring over UPI, supported by all the major apps (PhonePe, Google Pay, Paytm) and 40+ banks. This is huge in India, where UPI is the dominant payment rail.
- e-Mandate (eNACH) - bank-account auto-debit, authorized via netbanking, debit card or Aadhaar.
Note that EMI and wallets are one-time methods only - you cannot use them for subscriptions.
The part that surprises everyone: RBI recurring rules
This is where Indian billing diverges sharply from the card-on-file world Stripe founders know. The Reserve Bank of India regulates recurring payments tightly. Under the consolidated e-mandate framework, recurring charges require:
- Additional Factor of Authentication (AFA) to register a mandate and on the first transaction.
- A per-transaction limit of Rs 15,000 that can be auto-debited without re-authentication. Above that, the customer must re-authenticate every single charge.
- A higher Rs 1,00,000 limit only for specific categories: insurance premiums, mutual-fund subscriptions, and credit-card bill payments (Razorpay's mandate docs).
- A mandatory pre-debit notification at least 24 hours before each charge, with the option to opt out of that specific debit.
The practical implication: if your SaaS plan costs more than Rs 15,000 per cycle and you are not in an exempt category, every renewal needs the customer to actively re-authenticate. That is real friction Western founders never deal with, and it shapes how you price and package in India. e-Mandate (eNACH) supports much higher limits, up to Rs 1 crore per debit, which is why higher-ticket B2B billing in India often runs on bank mandates rather than cards.
UPI AutoPay is central to Indian recurring billing, but RBI rules cap auto-debits at Rs 15,000 without re-authentication.
Failed payments and retries
When a recurring charge fails, Razorpay automatically retries. The subscription moves to pending and Razorpay retries once a day for three days (T+1, T+2, T+3). If all retries fail, the subscription moves to halted. The customer gets an email with a link to update their card, and your backend gets webhooks on each state change.
This works, but be honest about what it is: a fixed three-day schedule, not a decline-aware smart-retry engine. It does not time attempts around when the customer's salary lands, vary by decline reason, or escalate across multiple channels. It is one email and three evenly spaced attempts. For many businesses that leaves recoverable revenue on the table, because involuntary churn is a large share of total churn and basic retries only catch part of it. If you want the concepts, our guide to dunning and how much MRR you are losing break it down. (Note: dedicated recovery tools like Rebounce automate smart retries and multi-channel outreach for Stripe, Paddle and Square; they do not integrate Razorpay today, so on Razorpay the native retries are what you have.)
What about international customers?
Many Indian SaaS companies sell beyond India, and this is where Razorpay's edges show. It does accept international cards (at up to 3%), but its multi-currency and global coverage are narrower than Stripe's, and the smooth UPI and e-mandate machinery is India-specific. A common pattern is to run Indian customers on Razorpay (UPI AutoPay, INR, RBI-compliant mandates) and reach for a global processor or a Merchant of Record for the rest of the world. If that is you, weigh whether the operational cost of running two providers beats the simplicity of one, and read our provider-selection guide before committing.
Pros, cons, and when Razorpay wins
Pros: built for India end to end - UPI AutoPay, eNACH, RBI-compliant mandates out of the box, INR settlement, self-serve onboarding, and a deep local ecosystem (payouts, RazorpayX, lending). If you bill Indian customers, nothing else is this turnkey.
Cons: the Rs 15,000 AFA cap adds renewal friction on higher-priced plans; native retry and dunning are basic; subscription fees stack (2% + 0.9%); and international or multi-currency coverage is weaker than Stripe's.
When Razorpay wins: you are an India-domiciled SaaS billing Indian customers in INR, the case where Stripe is effectively unavailable and Razorpay is the obvious choice. Razorpay is also expanding in Southeast Asia, having acquired Curlec in Malaysia and launched in Singapore. When something else wins: if your revenue is mostly global or USD and you can get Stripe access, or you want a Merchant of Record to handle global tax, in which case see our guide to choosing a provider.