We had the same desire. We ended up with the following solution:

the user can register for free to get a standard profile where we have disabled almost all the functions. So if the member want to take any advantage of The Educated Singles Club, he or she has to upgrade.

we have implemented monthly and annual recurring payment with Stripe. It works fine although I wish una would send more information over to stripe in order to trace subscriptions etc.

Chargebee has more functions to manage subscriptions, it also accepts Stripe Payments & PayPal.