In house solutions. Once a company becomes large enough where paying a company like Stripe's fees becomes larger than hiring enough people to create and maintain an internal billing system, then you do it yourself.
This is something that companies that are near public company size do since the amount of work required to meet payment regulations alone, not to mention all of the infrastructure to support things like subscriptions is staggering.
This is why there aren't many solutions to this problem. It's a very difficult problem.
I have migrated 2 companies away from internal billing systems (one went to Stripe and the other went to Chargify). The amount of hacks that went into maintaining these internal systems was shocking. One company literally devised its own currency to deal with the complexity.
Managing and developing your own billing system is a almost always a bad idea, no matter how big your company is.
There is a high likelihood that you will end up running a business within a business if you go that route.
Yea it depends on the technological competencies of the company. I have a friend who works at a company who implemented their own, and they seem to be doing fine, but you hit the nail on the head saying
> you will end up running a business within a business if you go that route.
Take a look at open-source solutions, specifically Kill Bill [1] (disclaimer, I'm a core contributor)
It provides a subscription management platform with all the features you would expect out of the box (recurring billing, plans management, dunning, notifications, etc.), but with also a plugin framework where you can implement your own billing logic.
You can continue to use processors like Stripe to handle the recurring charges (and compliance associated with storing cards), but they are only used to charge the payment methods. The mess that OP mentions stays in-house, where you have tighter control over it.
This is something that companies that are near public company size do since the amount of work required to meet payment regulations alone, not to mention all of the infrastructure to support things like subscriptions is staggering.
This is why there aren't many solutions to this problem. It's a very difficult problem.