Coinbase Launches Subscription Payments

We’ve been working on subscription/recurring payments for quite some time, and today they are launching in beta! Recurring payments are an important addition to our merchant tools and something that a number of merchants have requested.

Recurring payments are necessary for a ton of services — anything where you periodically receive a bill.

Some examples include:

• Publication subscriptions

• Collecting rent

• Maid services

• Ride sharing

• Gym memberships

• Recurring donations

• And many more

Outside of a customer/merchant context, we also added the ability to:

• Buy and sell bitcoin at regular intervals — great if you’d like to scale in to owning Bitcoin gradually

• Send or request bitcoin from other people This is helpful if you’d like to pay rent, bills, friends, etc on a regular basis, or regulating invoice clients.

Recurring payments can be set up per day, week, month, year, etc.

Here is what they look like:

How it works

Bitcoin at its lowest level is a “push” technology, meaning the customer needs to initiate each outbound payment. This can be tedious for certain products like the ones mentioned above (e.g. web hosting) and result in late payments for merchants.

Coinbase solves this by letting customers opt in to recurring payments that can be automatically paid from their Coinbase wallet. This is essentially a “pull” technology on top of bitcoin. Customers retain the right to cancel recurring payments at any time from their Coinbase account, and never need to contact the merchant to do this.

You can read more on our documentation page about how to integrate recurring payments into your website as a merchant.

Or if you have a Coinbase account you can create your own recurring payment here.