Recurly and Claude: how to ask your billing data questions in plain English

What connecting Recurly to Claude through MCP actually gives your team, how to set it up in about fifteen minutes, and the first questions worth asking.

By Thomas Fitzgerald, Marketing · 2026-10-18

Claude and ChatGPT can now connect to the tools your business already runs on, through a standard called MCP (the Model Context Protocol). Connect Recurly that way, and anyone on your team can ask about customers, signups, charges and churn in plain English, and get an answer from your live data.

Here is what that looks like in practice, and how to set it up.

What changes for your team

Most billing questions today take one of three routes: someone exports CSVs and builds a pivot table, someone asks an analyst and waits, or nobody asks because it isn't worth the effort. With Recurly connected to Claude:

• Ops leads ask "how many trials converted last week, by plan?" and get the number.
• Support finds a customer on every brand by email, with their last charges, in one question.
• Finance asks "how much did we refund this month, and why?"
• Fraud and risk asks "did any traffic source have an unusual decline rate today?"

Why not the API directly?

You can point an AI at Recurly's API with a raw connector, but a billing system needs more than API access:

• Live, across brands. Answers should include this morning, and cover every Recurly site you run in one question.
• Questions, not endpoints. "Decline rate by affiliate" means pulling transactions and accounts and joining them. Retrixus does that and returns the answer.
• Honest about limits. If a question needs more records than can be read, it says how far it got. It never hands you a partial count as if it were complete.
• Changes only within your rules. Refunds and cancels are checked against your limits, shown first, and recorded. Nobody's AI can do more than their role allows.
• No API keys in chat. You sign in to Retrixus; your Recurly key stays in a secret store and is never shown to the AI.

Setting it up

About fifteen minutes, one person:

1. Sign in to the Retrixus portal with Google or an emailed link.
2. Connect a Recurly site. Create a private API key in Recurly (Integrations, then API Credentials) and paste it in once. Start with your sandbox if you have one.
3. Add Retrixus to Claude. In Claude, add a custom connector with the Retrixus address, then sign in. No keys to copy.
4. Review your refund rules if you'll allow changes.
5. Invite your team, each with a role.

The step-by-step guides are in the docs: quickstart and connecting Claude.

Your first five questions

Once you're connected, try:

1. "How many new subscriptions did we get yesterday, by plan?"
2. "Find sam@example.com and show me their subscription and last three charges."
3. "What share of renewal charges declined in the last 24 hours, and the top reasons?"
4. "Which traffic sources sent the most trial signups this week, and how many converted?"
5. "Which invoices have failed five or more times and are still being retried?"

The second works on the free plan. The others use live analysis, part of Team and Business.

The free plan

Connect is free for one Recurly site with customer lookups, enough to see your own data in Claude. Team ($49 a month) adds live analysis across up to three brands; Business ($149 a month) adds refunds and cancels under your rules, watches, bulk fixes and the Agent Console.

Start free.