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Ask HN: How are Indian folks managing recurring payments now?

2 points by abhijat ↗ HN
I have a bunch of subscriptions which are gradually starting to fail over the last year or so because of RBI rules controlling recurring payments.

For some (like jetbrains, namecheap etc) I was able to talk to the service provider to use a workaround like paying in advance or using a wallet.

For some more obscure payments, like a usenet subscription for example, the recurring payment I had set up before the rule kicked in just failed and my subscription was cancelled. Even my audible.com subscription got cancelled because I could not make a payment through my credit card.

What are folks in India doing to easily manage recurring payments?

Is there a service or something to make sure these recurring payments work everywhere?

6 comments

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aurizon
India is losing track of dollars, and their added taxes, so they are creating hurdles in the payment process to make sure their tax component is collected and they get it. There are a host of countries doing the same thing = compiles PITA for sellers on all payments, so this adds costs to payment processors, some say fukkit and leave that market - some solve it with/without 'cheating' India.

https://cleartax.in/s/rbi-reserve-bank-of-india

virtualmic
My recurring payment for ChatGPT (USD 20 + GST) is working fine with SBI credit card.

Spotify and similar which have Indian presence work good of course (with SBI as well as ICICI cards).

I do have a Jetbrains subscription, but I can't verify if the subscription still works, because I got a 3Y one during one of their promos and it's still active.

abhijat
Spotify etc. work for me too, as they have worked with the RBI rules. My Jetbrains yearly subscription was about to lapse but their sales team helped me make a payment (non-recurring) which avoided the subscription being cancelled.

The chatgpt one seems interesting, I do not have an SBI card but I might look into getting one to try out, thanks.

darthShadow
FWIW, I haven't had any failures in ~3-4 months now. Every subscription using Stripe has been working flawlessly for the same time. Even usenet subs have renewed fine this year (just had an automatic renewal processed yesterday).

I use ICICI, Axis & HDFC Cards and all 3 have worked fine.

abhijat
This is strange as my usenet (eweka.nl) renewal failed this week on my Kotak card, and when I retried with an ICICI card that failed too, although the amount is quite low.
darthShadow
Eweka hasn't come up for renewal this year yet but the last year, I had to cancel my sub and set it up again due to the renewal issues. You may want to try doing the same since their BF promo is valid year-round: https://www.eweka.nl/en/landing/unlimited-usenet-special

Newshosting was the one that got renewed a few days and it went through fine without any manual intervention.