How crypto recurring payments work, from push to capped pull.

What is the difference between push and pull crypto payments?

A push payment moves money only when the payer signs it, and a pull payment lets someone the payer approved start the transfer later. A blockchain transfer is push by nature: tokens leave a wallet when the owner's key signs a transaction, and at no other time. A card works the other way round. You hand over the number once, and the merchant charges it each month.

That gap is why crypto subscriptions were awkward for years. Stripe, announcing its own stablecoin subscriptions in October 2025, called the need to sign each transaction "a fundamental limitation of blockchain-based payments". The payment standard most Solana merchants know does not close it either: the Solana Pay specification defines a transfer request and a transaction request, each one payment, and has no recurring request at all. Why Solana Pay has no recurring payments goes through both request types.

Pull in crypto is built from delegation: the owner of a token account authorises another address to move up to an amount of that token. A plain delegation has no schedule and no destination, which is the problem Solana token delegation explained walks through. A subscription needs a program on top that says how much, how often and to whom.

What are the ways to bill crypto on a schedule?

There are four working models for billing crypto on a schedule, and two of them need nothing from the customer after the first signature: streaming, which pays by the second, and capped pull, which charges a set amount once a period. Each row below names what the customer signs and a public example, checked on 15 October 2026.

Vendors mix models. NOWPayments, in a guide dated 8 October 2026, renews automatically only when the customer pays the first invoice through a ChangeNOW account; for any other wallet, "Future renewal invoices must be paid manually." Helius offers an opt-in Crypto autopay built on the Subscriptions program next to its default invoices. Coinbase describes Base Spend Permissions as "a one-time approval that remains active until cancelled", with the merchant's own backend charging each period. The billing platforms themselves are set side by side in stablecoin subscription billing platforms compared.

Streaming fits payroll and per-second metering, and it stops when the sender's balance runs out. Invoices fit a yearly contract with a finance team on the other side. For a monthly product with many small customers, every manual step is a chance to lose the renewal, and capped pull removes them while keeping a fixed price per period. Which public services renew by themselves and which send a link is the subject of does crypto auto-renew.

How does a capped pull renewal work, step by step?

A capped pull renewal works in two moves: the customer signs one transaction that sets the limits and pays the first period, then a collector asks the program for each later period and the program checks the limits before anything moves. Here it is with real timings, for a Quillfern Labs plan at 25.00 USDC a month sold through Fianto.

1. Quillfern Labs creates a recurring price of 25.00 USDC, Monthly (every 30 days), in the dashboard. When the first subscription checkout session for it is created, Fianto publishes a matching plan on the Subscriptions program: the amount per period, a period of 720 hours, and the wallets the money may go to.
2. On 1 November 2026 at 10:00 UTC a customer opens the checkout and signs one transaction. It gives the program the wallet's USDC approval if the wallet has none yet, creates the subscription and pulls the first period. The cap per period is the price plus the Fianto fee plus the network fee: 25.00 + 0.00 during the beta + 0.01 today = 25.01 USDC.
3. The period ends on 1 December at 10:00, exactly 30 days later. Two minutes after the boundary, at 10:02, Fianto's charging key asks the program to collect 25.01 USDC.
4. The program refuses a signer that is not on the plan's puller list, a destination that is not on the plan and anything above the cap for the period. If all three pass, 25.00 USDC lands in the Quillfern wallet and the network fee, 0.01 USDC today, in the Fianto treasury, in one transaction that Fianto signs and pays the SOL fee for.
5. The next boundary is 31 December at 10:00. A yearly plan works the same way with 8,760 hours, 365 days.

The customer did nothing on 1 December, and the merchant did not pay a network fee. Nothing was prepaid either: the USDC sat in the customer's wallet until the charge. The parts of the signed approval, and each check, are listed in recurring USDC payments. After the beta the Fianto fee will be about 0.1 to 0.5% on top of the price, paid by the customer: on 25.00 USDC, between 0.025 and 0.125 USDC.

What happens when the wallet is short on renewal day?

When the customer's wallet cannot cover the charge, nothing moves and Fianto tries again on a fixed schedule: four attempts in all, the last one a day after the boundary. For the Quillfern plan the attempts fall like this.

Four reasons count as a failure: too little USDC, a revoked approval, a frozen USDC account and a closed one. Any other error is retried without counting. A charge either takes the full amount or nothing, and a period that ended unpaid is never billed later. The merchant-side detail is in failed renewals and retries.

What does your server see during a pull subscription?

Your server sees a signed webhook for each change in the subscription, and no order: a Fianto subscription sends subscription.* events, and order.paid never fires for it.

Grant access on created, extend it on renewed and remove it on ended. Deliveries are at least once and in no fixed order, so key your handler on the event id. The full lifecycle with every state is on the subscription lifecycle docs page.

Which recurring model should a merchant pick?

Pick capped pull when customers already hold stablecoins and the plan is monthly, because it is the only model that charges a fixed amount once a period with nothing asked of the customer. Pick something else in these cases:

• Your customers have no wallet. Card billing asks them for nothing new. A crypto plan asks for a wallet, USDC and a little SOL.
• You bill once a year, by contract. An invoice and a manual payment is fine at that rhythm, and your customer's finance team may insist on one. Fianto has no invoices.
• You need weekly, usage-based or per-second billing. Fianto bills every 30 or every 365 days, nothing else, and has no free trials. Streaming or metering tools exist for the rest.
• Your customers pay on another chain or in another token. Fianto takes USDC on Solana only.

What changes for the person paying, from the first signature to getting the rent back, is in paying a subscription with crypto.