WooCommerce recurring billing — the two-system problem nobody explains

Question

A lot of devs assume WooCommerce Subscriptions "just handles" recurring billing. It doesn't, not alone. There are two separate systems doing the work: the subscription plugin (schedule + customer state) and the payment gateway (actual card charge + tokenization). Most renewal failures I see on client sites aren't plugin bugs — they're expired cards with no dunning retry sequence configured.

If you're scoping a subscription build for a client, budget for both the plugin cost (official WooCommerce Subscriptions is ~$199/year, YITH has a usable free tier) and gateway compatibility — not every gateway supports recurring charges the same way, and switching later means re-migrating every active subscriber.

Wrote up the full breakdown including a setup cost table and common failure points: https://amanurrahman.com/blog-post/woocommerce-subscriptions-recurring-payments-cost