Payfast Integration: Automatic Recurring Payments and Tokenization Setup

Does your native Payfast integration support automatic recurring card deductions, or does it send renewal invoices that customers must pay manually?

We completed a successful R5 live card payment through Pabbly checkout.

Pabbly subscription ID: 6ab5177001da614a8997ef25

Test configuration:

• - Paid trial: R4.35 + 15% VAT = R5 for one day.

• - Recurring payment: R5 including VAT weekly.

• - Pabbly shows the next payment due on 25 September 2026.

However, no matching subscription appears in Payfast’s Customer Subscriptions, and no ad hoc agreement is visible. Payfast’s “Enable Tokenization” setting is currently OFF.

Please confirm:

1. 
   

2. 1. Does this integration automatically charge subsequent payments, including after a paid trial?

3. 2. Must Payfast tokenization be enabled? If so, what exact Notify URL and other settings are required?

4. 3. Did this Pabbly subscription capture the authorisation/token needed for future automatic deductions?

5. 4. If configuration changes are needed, can this existing subscription be used, or must the customer complete a new checkout?

Pabbly’s Payfast configuration only shows Merchant ID and Merchant Key, with no passphrase field. Please explain how any required passphrase is handled.

I’ve attached the Pabbly subscription and Payfast settings screenshots. 

Please provide exact setup instructions for this integration.

Hello there,

Thanks for contacting us.

Regarding your concerns, I've forwarded the details to the relevant team to look into the settings and provide information regarding your concerns. We will get back to you as soon as we hear from the Team. It may take up to 48 hours to get back to you.

Pabbly Payment of R5.00 is Overdue.eml (23.9 KB)

Your Payment of R5.00 is Overdue.eml (30.6 KB)

An update for the specialists investigating this:

• Subscription ID: 6ab5177001da614a8997ef25

• Product/plan: LS Billing Live Test – Initial + Weekly

• Initial R5.00 payment succeeded on 24 September 2026; invoice JLO-INV-1 is paid.

• The one-day paid trial ended on 25 September. Renewal order JLO-ORD-3 for R5.00 is now Pending, and Pabbly sent overdue emails.

• As of 26 September, the subscription shows Pending, with only the initial payment listed as successful.

• No matching customer subscription or ad-hoc agreement appears in Payfast.

Please confirm:

1. Was an automatic renewal charge attempted for JLO-ORD-3? What was the gateway response?

2. Was a reusable payment token/agreement created during the initial checkout?

3. What exact configuration is required for automatic Payfast renewals, including tokenization and the Notify URL?

4. Can this existing subscription be corrected, or must we create a new checkout after configuration?

Please investigate the existing records before we make another live test payment.

I cannot add further attachments to this thread, so here are the results of a second live test through a Pabbly checkout:

• Plan: PayFast Monthly Integration Test — monthly recurring, no trial or setup fee

• Initial card payment: R5.75, successful on 28 September 2026 at 13:49:58

• PayFast payment ID: 330608763

The payment appears in PayFast Online Transaction History. I checked Transactions → Customer Subscriptions with Status set to All; there is no new subscription. Reports → Customer Saved Cards says, “You do not have any tokenization agreements yet.” Under Settings → Recurring Billing, tokenization is Off and the Notify URL is blank.

Please trace payment 330608763 and confirm whether this Pabbly checkout requested a PayFast subscription or tokenization agreement. Does Pabbly’s native PayFast integration support automatic monthly card charges? If so, please give the exact settings we must change in both accounts and tell us where the agreement should appear. If renewals instead require the customer to pay each invoice manually, please confirm that explicitly.

We need to resolve this before using Pabbly checkout for client subscriptions.

Please allow us some time. We will get back to you with an update soon.

Hello there,

Currently, we support recurring payments only through trusted gateways such as Stripe, PayPal, Razorpay Subscriptions, and Authorize.net.

The remaining payment gateways support one-time payments only. We have not implemented recurring payment management for these gateways because integrating and maintaining recurring payment functionality across multiple providers can become quite complex.

For example, supporting features such as paid trials, coupons, refunds, subscription renewals, cancellations, and other recurring-payment scenarios would require custom handling for each gateway. Since every gateway has its own APIs, workflows, and edge cases, this could lead to significant code-management and maintenance complexity.

Therefore, for better reliability and maintainability, recurring payment functionality is currently limited to gateways that have dedicated subscription/recurring payment support.

In the case of PayFast, we currently support it for one-time payments, but recurring payments would require a separate custom integration to handle the subscription-related scenarios mentioned above.

That said, you can add PayFast recurring payments to our roadmap and ask users to vote for the feature. If we receive a significant number of votes, it would help us understand the level of demand and determine whether it is worth investing the development effort required to implement and maintain the integration: https://roadmap.pabbly.com/pabbly-subscription-billing