Is Paypal retiring Auto Bill and how does that effect my customers on auto bill?

[Murray_Rushmore]

Today I saw this message in my Recurring Payments Dashboard

"PayPal will be retiring Auto Billing from our suite of recurring payments products on January 31st, 2023. Merchants will not be able to use Auto Billing to receive payments after January 31st, 2023. If you use the Auto Billing product, please sign up for PayPal’s Subscription management product to continue receiving payments after 31st January 2023."

"Please be aware any customers currently signed up for recurring payments using the Auto Billing product will need to create new Subscription billing plans to prevent disruption in service and that you may need to reach out to your customers to manage any outstanding payments that were enabled by Auto Billing."

Does this actually mean I am going to need to contact all of my individual customers and have them sign up for an entirely new auto pay subscription by January 31st?

[Sass193]

Wondering the same thing!

[safetyfirst360]

I am wondering the same thing.... PayPal please give us a response on this.

[kstubs]

Wow!  I just saw this notification and am looking for a seamless transition for my subscribers.  I'm also wondering if the recurring payment model I am using now is considered to be Auto Billing.  Originally I setup recurring payments with a PayPal recurring button.  Is this what is retiring?  This will be devastating if this goes away.

[Ivan_dav]

Are there any explanations?
Someone from PayPal can confirm that 'Auto Billing' is shut down?

[Murray_Rushmore]

I was able to get clarification from PayPal. This effects institutions like a utility bill or other bill that varies in amount from month to month, and is billed separately each other. It does not effect regular subscriptions at set rate each month.

[algo_coder45]

I called and they said the exact opposite to me. They said all recurring payments that were created via these APIs will stop working on January 31st 2023:

https://developer.paypal.com/docs/api/payments.billing-plans/v1/

https://developer.paypal.com/docs/api/payments.billing-agreements/v1/

I escalated again and the supervisor said the same thing. I asked if all my existing profiles will stop collecting payments as well (we have hundreds), and he said "yes". I can't believe it. I asked them to escalate again since it would be very hard to comprehend how PayPal thinks 3 months is sufficient for companies to migrate to new APIs with no notice, or very little notice (and pretty unclear based on everyone's confusion).

I would highly suggest everyone impacted by this to call in today to say it's urgent to keep everything up longer with much more lead time to migrate.

[Murray_Rushmore]

Hmmm, when I called and talked to them, they said SUBSCRIPTIONS (which are in auto bill) would not be interrupted. 🤔🤔 And I wouldn't need to do anything. We've also got 100s of subscriptions, and cannot afford to lose any...let alone reach put to every single one and have them resign up. Basically, our business would be bankrupt.

[algo_coder45]

Which APIs are you using? If you open the URLs I shared, notice at the top it has this deprecation notice:

Deprecation notice: The /v1/payments/billing-plans endpoints are deprecated. Use the /v1/billing/plans endpoints instead. For details, see Subscriptions Integration.

If you're using these Subscription APIs, you'd be fine. 

https://developer.paypal.com/docs/api/subscriptions/v1/ 

But it's all very unclear to me. I am not confident of the extent of the impacts and it sounds like they are confused internally as well. I'm on the same boat as you. We would get destroyed if all of our recurring payments stop working.

[Murray_Rushmore]

100% Agree. This is confusing, and I am concerned. We would also be destroyed. They assured me on the phone we are good, but ill have to ask our dev to confirm, as I'm just the boss, not the tech, gahhh! Please update if you discover more news. I'll follow up with them again soon.