Poll: How do you bill recurring payments?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2201363

by ceslami • 15 years ago

117 93 15 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

patio113• 15 years ago

Spreedly provides the logic, Paypal the gateway. It works, it took vanishingly little time to get working eight (a few hours, total), it is fairly inexpensive, and it didn't require a real merchant account, which would be difficult to get for my business. ("You live where? I see. And your business does what exactly? I see. And you have five figures in yearly sales? I see. Thanks, we'll pass.")

ollysb• 15 years ago

The spreedly FAQ implies that you need a merchant account.

  "How does Spreedly pay me?

  Spreedly never touches your customers' money - it goes straight into your merchant account."

is this not the case?

rlm2• 15 years ago

I assume the "merchant account" is a PayPal account in this case.

sammcd• 15 years ago

Paypal covers both Merchant and Gateway bases. So do Braintree and a few others.

If you have your own merchant account you can use paypal for just the gateway, but I don't think this happens very often.

rlm2• 15 years ago

Are you using the Payments API or just the "regular" Spreedly functionality?

patio113• 15 years ago

Both. Payments to have a totally on-brand signup. The regular "redirect them to Spreedly" to do account upgrades, etc, to save me a day of programming that wouldn't sell accounts.

bradleyjoyce2• 15 years ago

I use Spreedly on TweetSaver.com ... like patio says, it works great and is easy to integrate... main downside is their reporting sucks really bad and they haven't added any new features in a really long time.

jordanvisco• 15 years ago

We did this for one of our startups but had major issues after the first month when it turned out that spreedly doesn't db the credit card cvv ('cause they're not allowed) and then paypal wouldn't let us bill without the cvv code. We've had numerous issues with paypal not letting us do some simple things just because they made a decision at some point that we were sketchy and shouldn't be allowed and they tell us they'll NEVER EVER change their mind.

That said, we still use paypal recurring billing on a few sites cause its just sooo easy to do, even if it is a bit user unfriendly.

SupremumLimit2• 15 years ago

And also, Paypal only allows transactions without CVV for US and Canadian accounts, so if you're in another country Paypal + Spreedly isn't an option for recurring billing. Took an hour on the phone with Paypal to find this out.

catechu• 15 years ago

I use the basic version of PayPal for subscriptions, but I've had issues with canceling customers' subscriptions without their explicit request, and the PayPal support is horrendous.

The fees are a little higher than some of the other services, but it integrates fine, so if you're okay with a clunky but easy to set up service, you might find it useful as well.

ceslami• 15 years ago

So if PayPal has issues with canceling subscriptions, has horrendous support, is clunky, and has higher fees, why do you still use it?

mutru• 15 years ago

Unfortunately PayPal is pretty much the only option, if you're based in Europe and want to do recurring payments.

I agree with all the points above: the support is worst I've ever experienced, the user experience is horrible and hasn't improved over the years, and the recurring payments clearly don't belong to the product.

jpallen• 15 years ago

I use Paypal's recurring billing API directly. It's not an ideal solution, but being based in the UK without a merchant account it's the only one I have available. I use ActiveMerchant and some extensions to talk to the Paypal API but I've had to write the logic to handle recurring billing myself. I'm trying to extract that logic into a gem and make it more robust. I'd like to eventually release it and possibly save some headaches amoung small developers who just want to get up and running quickly.

marquis• 15 years ago

We have also dealt with this manually. We'd love to see a more robust API out there that would integrate better with our existing payments solution as we do a mix of subs and license sales. Please post to HN if you get anything of the ground!

lsc2• 15 years ago

I use freeSide; not sure I'd recommend it, but hey, open source and it handles things like service credits much better than most of the webapps I've tried. I use paypal and/or checks for actual billing

I'm considering switching to one of the webapps you kids seem to like, but most of them seem more like payment processors than billing systems, really, and if I have to maintain my own separate billing system, what's the point?

I am very interested in what other people's experiences have been with the webapps, though.

charliepark2• 15 years ago

We use Braintree's "Vault" for card storage and have a custom-built set of methods for handling the rebilling. Like jpallen, I'd like to release our logic as a gem, as it took us longer than it should to hack it together. They offer a rebilling service, but I really want to know how my billing system is working, so that if it breaks somehow, I know what's going on with it.

steveklabnik3• 15 years ago

> I'd like to release our logic as a gem,

Good! Do it! It's really easy: http://timeless.judofyr.net/making-ruby-gems

Is your stuff built on top of braintree's gem, or did you re-implement all of the actual calls to the API? You might want to check that out, it could simplify your code...

charliepark2• 15 years ago

Sorry. Just saw this now.

Our code is built on top of their gem. We focused on the rebilling logic, which replicates some of their own vault / rebilling code, which most people here would say was a waste of time / money. (Probably was?)

When it comes to billing stuff, though, I really want to know what's going on behind the scenes ... hence ... rolling our own.

As we work out the bugs, I'll try to get a gem together. Would love to have people dig into it and make it better.

lautis• 15 years ago

We use PayPal Adaptive Payments. It's far from perfect: all paying customers must have a PayPal account and (in Europe) payments can be set up only for a year in advance. The term "preapproval" is also likely to frighten some customers.

Adaptive Payments was chosen as the standard recurring billing API doesn't allow us to automatically manage subscriptions, which becomes an issue if you have multiple plans. However, we had to implement billing scheduling ourselves. PayPal was for us the only option which didn't require us to store CC information on our servers.

jarin• 15 years ago

I've used Netbilling's recurring payment API before (patched support into ActiveMerchant a while back), but now I'm using Recurly with a PayPal gateway.

tzs2• 15 years ago

We keep the credit card numbers on file (yes, fully complying with PCI) and handle the recurring billing ourselves.

steveklabnik3• 15 years ago

Impressive. Do you feel this is worth the money and effort? How big is the company?

tzs2• 15 years ago

We peaked several years ago at around 100k credit card transaction a month, but that line of our business is in an area that is in decline generally (I don't want to go into detail since I'm not a spokesman for the company, but basically it involves selling something that some very big and powerful companies have a strong interest in making free as it is a compliment to their products).

I suspect that the smaller companies like us will be out of this line of business in a year or two, and even the big players will be out of it in 5. Nowadays we're down to about 20k transactions a month.

Back then, it was worth it both for cost and flexibility but now there are a lot more options so I'm going to reevaluate.

garrettdimon2• 15 years ago

We use Braintree's vault, and we use ActiveMerchant to access it. We wrote all of the recurring/billing/invoicing logic ourselves. Beyond the initial implementation, we've done one sweeping overhaul of the logic to make some improvements and simplify things after learning a lot from the first pass.

We built it in late 2008, and either the companies that handled recurring stuff didn't exist when we were building it, or we weren't aware of the ones that did. Otherwise, it's unlikely that we would have gone down this route. However, now that we have it, it is pretty nice to have control over every detail of how it works.

When we made the enhancements, we briefly considered switching to a provider for handling it, but given our existing infrastructure, it was actually easier for us to improve our own instead of migrating to another provider.

steveklabnik3• 15 years ago

I did the same thing a while back; you might want to look into the actual braintree gem itself, it's pretty solid. AM is now (for BrainTree, anyway) a pretty simple wrapper on top of it: https://github.com/Shopify/active_merchant/blob/master/lib/a...

garrettdimon2• 15 years ago

Thanks for the recommendation. Unfortunately, we've been with Braintree so long that we're on their original platform, and the gem only works with the new platform.

The migration to get on the new platform wasn't worth it for us right now. It definitely looks nicer, though, and I'm a little envious of those that signed up later and get to use it.

JonLim• 15 years ago

Freshbooks with Authorize.net as the payment gateway.

primigenus2• 15 years ago

We're using Spreedly on top of Ogone and Atos Worldline. The notable thing about our setup is that we're based in the Netherlands and it took us 6 months of painstaking research and headaches to figure out the combination of services that would allow us to accept subscription payments. I wrote a blog post about the ordeal last week; I recommend it to anyone in a similar situation (eg. non-UK Europe): http://blog.quplo.com/2011/01/looking-back-on-the-quest-for-...

thibaut_barrere• 15 years ago

I plan to use exactly Spreedly on top of Ogone (I bought a Spreedly kit a while back and I'm in France).

Thanks for your blog post!

ag• 15 years ago

Adyen (www.adyen.com) is based in Amsterdam, did you check them? Anyone has any experience with them?

primigenus2• 15 years ago

We passed on them because their homepage didn't feel professional and trustworthy.

andrewwebb• 15 years ago

We just selected MetraTech for all of our billing needs due to the complexity of our pricing models. However there are lot of great less expensive services if your needs are simpler. A few that come to mind are Zuora, Vindica, Monexa and Aria. If you are pre-revenue Zuora may be a good choice because they have a pricing model that charges a percentage instead of requiring a significant upfront investment.

jcampbell1• 15 years ago

I use Paypal, Authorize.net, and First Data, and we use their built in recurring payment options. It is torture. For First Data, I have to maintain a screen scraper because they don't even have a Reporting API.

locusm2• 15 years ago

Any comment from Australian devs as Im about to go through this myself. PayPal is the anti christ, not an option for me.

maayank• 15 years ago

Anti-christ because of things done in the past that you are generally afraid will affect your startup or because of a general sentiment of them being "evil"? If the latter, then not evaluating them because of it sounds like bad business mojo to me...

locusm2• 15 years ago

Bad experience at both the merchant and user end. Spreedly who I had never heard of till this post integrate with 2 Australian payment gateways so that will be worth checking out I think.

Tones125• 15 years ago

We are trying to go through NAB now for a US billing merchant account and honestly they are the Antichrist. It's been three and a half months and we are still not there yet. Painful is an understatement.

El34• 15 years ago

Paypal website payments standard is your only option here. Unless you want to bill in AUD, you can't really use a merchant account in Australia. It's technically possible to use NAB to acquire in foreign currencies (ie. USD), but it's not feasible for small startups due to cost and complexity and the bank not actually knowing how. I lost my real HN account because I'm an idiot or whatever, but send questions to wtfaustralia@soundfolder.com if you want to hear about our various failed attempts at recurring cc billing.

SupremumLimit2• 15 years ago

This is interesting. I'm in the process of getting a merchant account from BNZ in New Zealand, they are a subsidiary of NAB. They are the only option here for billing in USD but at least they have an actual product for it called CurrencySelect and it seems like this is a workable solution and nobody is too confused by it. The fees are pretty high though - starting at 8.1% per transaction and only going down starting from $25K in volume.

SeanOC• 15 years ago

I've used CheddarGetter (http://cheddargetter.com) for a few projects and I've been extremely happy with their service.

* API is reasonably nice to work with (wrote a Python client called Sharpy https://github.com/saaspire/sharpy) * Lots of options to control exactly how and when your customers get billed. * Support for a bunch of payment gateways * Tools for handling tracked items and one-off charges (e.g. discounts or fees) as part of your subscriptions. * Fantastic support - I don't think I've ever waited more than a few hours for a response and their support team has been very helpful.

epynonymous• 15 years ago

failed to list cybersource, zuora, and netsuite.

holdenc• 15 years ago

Amazon Simple Pay is quite good and easy to set-up as well. There are no monthly fees and you get a lot of control over the subscriptions, but the payment experience is hosted by Amazon unfortunately.

meier2• 15 years ago

Plimus

MicahWedemeyer• 15 years ago

Switched from Amazon FPS to Amazon SimplePay to Chargify. Although very pricey, Chargify is much, much nicer. I really cringe when I see the bill, but I cringe more when I think about how much things sucked before we made the switch.

I talk more about it here: http://peachshake.com/2010/06/15/saas-subscription-billing-o...

Dbodbo• 15 years ago

Recurly with PayPal gateway is a scalable solution for startups through large transaction levels. API approach and extreme ease-of-use key to their strengths.

jqueryin• 15 years ago

We're using CheddarGetter, they have their own gateway as well. Any positive or negative comments would be appreciated as we're just getting underway.

nopal• 15 years ago

I couldn't get a merchant account through them because I didn't estimate that I'd make $10,000 in my first months.

cgbystrom2• 15 years ago

Same for us, their gateway turned us down.

bobx11• 15 years ago

I use chargify but I don't want to vote them up

moklett• 15 years ago

If you're willing to share your reason, I'd love to know. I work on Chargify.

dh• 15 years ago

Sorry to hear that, as a founder I would love to learn how we can do better. Feel free to contact me anytime and chat.

voxmatt• 15 years ago

Question: It's a bit out on the horizon, but in the not too distant future we're going to be implementing a payment system that charges a % of the transaction to us. For example: $110 payment in, $100 to seller, $10 to us.

I've had a real problem finding a recurring billing company that allows payments to be split like this. Any suggestions?

BluSynergy2• 15 years ago

We are doing this for one of our clients, give us a call: 731-INVOICE (731 468-6423)

shazow3• 15 years ago

I hate the construct that you must be a business in order to make money. Not only that, but you must be a reasonably-successful business. Talk about a chicken and egg problem.

I'm trying to bootstrap a product that charges between $10-40/mo per user. Right now I have no users, but I hope to get a few over the next couple of months. What are my options?

Do I have to incorporate in order to get a merchant gateway? Do I cut my losses by using Chargify or Recurly and pay $30-40/mo while I am making less than half of that in revenue?

If I'm to remain economical, I'm forced to use Paypal (or Amazon's SimplePay, or Google Checkout) until I graduate to a better position with more customers.

I imagine a more efficient economy someday in the future when peer-to-peer transactions are commonplace and streamlined. Everyone should be able to provide a service or product in an ad-hoc nature before having to invest in incoporation, etc.

As much as I love to hate Paypal, I have to appreciate their forward thinking.

marketer• 15 years ago

I think Cheddargetter is friendly to bootstrappers - they have a free plan for up to 20 customers.

noodle2• 15 years ago

not that friendly. i applied to their special branded merchant account and was denied due to low volume.

bradleyjoyce2• 15 years ago

one option would be to let your early users help you test things out for free.. with chargify, you can set up your site and everything in test mode, without paying for anything (I believe) as you work out the kinks. then you flip the switch to go from test to "live" when you feel you'll be able to cover the monthly fees.

Alternatively, you could do this, but charge your early customers via a simple Paypal recurring invoice until you're ready to turn on chargify.

pkenjora3• 15 years ago

Free is an option. You could also slap a big "Or Buy This Better Thing" button generated by PayPal somewhere on the signup page. Thats a better option.

Why?

Because, its a great way to A/B test if what you're hoping to sell will get traction even with one person.

Set the expectation for payment early, Dan Martell wrote a solid post on why this has worked for him in the past. If you give it away free with no expectations of payment, it de-values your product. So set the expectation of payment, slap a "Buy This" button ont there.

I sold 6 tea kettles once before knowing where to get them myself. I sent an email to 3 saying sorry were out of stock (fairly true). Then I searched the web for kettle distributors. Sent the email to other 3 asking if its ok if they are a few weeks late. All 3 sold, and several dozen since then. All from a Buy Now Button on a landing page.

shazow3• 15 years ago

I worry about the scenario of building something that people are unwilling to pay for. Also the service can get rather resource-intensive so I can't afford many free users.

pkenjora3• 15 years ago

Just use PayPal, especially if you bootstrap.

Set up a recurring payments button and drop the HTML into a page. The IPN does the rest. Its simpler than you think:

http://blog.awarelabs.com/2008/paypal-ipn-python-code/

If within your first month of operation you have customers changing subscription plans then worry about how to deal with it.

Don't solve problems you dont have yet. If you don't have customers yet you've got more pressing concerns.

Having gone through this recently, Im hoping to save you pain.

shazow3• 15 years ago

I agree, that's what I ended up doing yesterday.

lefrancaiz2• 15 years ago

I think you're taking bootstrapping to an extreme.

You should have at least a little bit of cash to burn (let's say $100 per month) until you get enough users to cover your costs.

techsupporter• 15 years ago

Intuit's GoPayment[1] service is a real merchant account and they take unincorporated sole proprietors. The basic service is free (it's positioned as a competitor to Square) and there's even "an app for that" on iPhone and Android. Their user interface leaves a little to be desired, but it is functional and there's a place for recurring payments to be handled (as long as you have authorization from the cardholder, of course).

My relationship with GoPayment: The co-op I help run uses them as an alternative to Square because GoPayment actually accepts EINs for incorporated entities. I'm just a satisfied customer.

1- http://gopayment.com/

jagira• 15 years ago

How about Paypal + Freshbooks API?

- None of the major Indian gateways support recurring billing.

gotrythis• 15 years ago

We use BillingCircle.com, which I see hasn't been mentioned yet. It's good. We even wrote them a testimonial. However, we also use PayPal and it would be so much better if all the reporting ended up in one place. They said that feature was coming, but that was over a year ago.

John.

SteveC• 15 years ago

PayPal and WorldPay

PonyGumbo• 15 years ago

I use Authorize.net with CIM, but handle the recurring billing piece myself.

Travis• 15 years ago

Same here. I do both recurring (over a time period, recharge) and on-use (essentially saving their cc info, but without storing the cc number...)

I think if I did it over, for the time-based recurring payments I would use chargify or one of the others mentioned in this thread.

pkenjora3• 15 years ago

We use PayPal. The solution we found was to cancel the subscription and create a new one. Sure this isn't atomic but we haven't had anyone drop mid flow yet.

It looks and feels atomic to the user.

PayPal could go a long way to document their API better. The number of customers with PayPal accounts is large enough that we're willing to deal, especially since setup is a one time cost.

PayPal does not support monthly recurring billing between Germany and United States. Thats no good.

I think someone can displace PayPal but not enough payers are comfortable using services other than PayPal, especially on a startup site.

Hope this helps someone.

lefrancaiz2• 15 years ago

Braintree

danburkhart• 15 years ago

[full disclosure - I am a co-founder of Recurly] I'll do my best to be objective and help frame an inclusive approach to the answer.

First - you need to decide what kind of billing mechanics your business needs. (simple X$/mo or advanced- multiple plans, upgrades downgrades, add-ons, coupons, dunning, multi-currency support etc) - this is typically the first step in the build vs. buy eval.

Secondly - you need to evaluate your own available time/resources. Most eng. projects require 2x original estimate...you can easily apply 5-10X for billing since even the most talented developers don't get it 'right' the first time (add PCI and ongoing customer support + gateway recourse to your total estimates). The best developers can usually 'get it working' - but then realize they end up spending tremendous time to 'get it working well'.

Third - [Assume now you're buying vs. building] You need to choose a service that gives your business room/flexibility to grow. Many businesses decide to change gateways at some point - when new business needs emerge - [multi-currency support, better rates, customer support]. Don't hem yourself in by choosing a service that doesn't store your card data, and let you easily switch gateways. Numerous horror stories exist on this topic - won't cover here. Also important, don't choose ANY service that won't commit to returning your customer credit card data if/when you decide to leave them. [Braintree was a leader in this area, and Recurly fully supports the Data Portability Standard as well].

Compare core feature capabilities AND 'high frequency use' capabilities of available recurring providers. Core features might be: add-on support, upgrade downgrade + proration, customizable emails, API documentation + API behaviors, Push notifications for sync to your systems, free trials, coupons etc. 'High frequency use' aspects include reporting, data exports, third party integrations, account dashboard + common customer support functions (can you easily credit, refund, charge, modify info, upgrade/downgrade) from any customer account page. This is a critical aspect and most evaluations fail to consider what it will be like to actually 'live with' a vendor's solution.

Lastly, the payment processor options + combinations. Merchant Bank Accts - (We really like FeeFighters.com for helping entrepreneurs to choose a merchant bank).

Payment Gateways - Your payment gateway decision should be made not just on fees alone, but also consider the kinds of error fidelity you will receive (How many error/decline messages and what type of info is returned). Another important consideration is multi-currency support. Does your business need to accept many different kinds of currencies from around the world? (Dramatically improves conversions if you don't force your customers to pay in $USD). PayPal does a better job with currency conversion than just about any other gateway (For US companies). Some gateways will require you to be incorporated in each country you would like to accept currencies from..

Most importantly, talk to customers from your prospective recurring billing provider. The 'Net promoter score' opinions are very palpable across vendors. Don't just take the 'reference' customers provided by the vendors, but do your homework and you'll find quickly where the raving fans are.

Hopefully this was helpful, balanced, fair and objective.

-Dan

asnyder• 15 years ago

I recommend trying PayLeap (http://www.payleap.com) They're both a gateway and Credit Card processor. They're also very developer friendly, have the best rates around and have FREE recurring billing. We just switched after meeting them at a developer conference and are very happy with them. Here are their base rates:

$29 Monthly Processing Fee

Transaction Fee: $0.25

Credit Card Rate: 2.15%

No Annual Fee

No Monthly Minimum Fee

No Monthly Gateway Fee

Free Reporting and API

Free Recurring Billing

dan335• 15 years ago

Recurly. Chargify's prices are a little steep when you're only charging a few dollars per month.

seanharper2• 15 years ago

These results are very biased by the early-adopters that frequent hackernews.

There are WAY more people out there are using the recurring functionality of the gateways (ex. Auth.net, Braintree, Linkpoint / First Data Global Gateway) than one of the standalone recurring billing systems (recurly, chargify, etc).

However using those legacy solutions is a SHAME because they are in general quite horrible. They are certainly cheaper, and may seem like the path of least resistance, but they don't do the job well enough for serious companies.

You want something like Recurly, Chargify, Zuora, CheddarGetter, if you are doing either recurring or metered charging of your customers. It will make your life easier and is worth the expense.

seanharper2• 15 years ago

Clarification -- as a gateway providers like Braintree, Linkpoint/FDGG, Auth.net, etc are perfectly fine, but their recurring functionality is not robust enough for most subscription or metered businesses. I must have written this before my coffee or something.

Sorry Bryan.

jbhelms• 15 years ago

I use the Google Checkout recurring payments. I think it is still in beta, but it hasn't failed me yet.

dschn• 15 years ago

Paypal Adaptive Payments for chained payments which allows splitting of proceeds at a percentage between one or more partners. When it works most of the time it's great, but there is no recurring API forcing you to use preapprovals and those have a lot of restrictions and caveats. Amazon FPS is only other provider I'm aware of that provides similar functionality.

melvinram• 15 years ago

We use a few different approaches, thought we're consolidating:

- Authorize.net + CIM + ActiveMerchant

- Authorize.net + Reoccurring Billing

- Authorize.net + Freshbooks

nicholasreed• 15 years ago

I send out invoices through Freshbooks and get paid by snail mail. I've tried to move clients over to subscription billing, but I get major pushback each time I try.

endtime• 15 years ago

Authorize.net, though we don't really like it. The API is ugly and we can't update a recurring bill (so if someone changes their plan we have to ask for their payment info all over again). It's not enough of a priority to change it right now, because most of our clients pay us offline anyway, but eventually we'd like to move to something a little more modern.

dangrossman2• 15 years ago

You can't change the amount with ARB? I thought you could.

Store their card data in Authorizenet CIM and run a nightly cron job to make the charges you need. You can charge whatever amount you need and never have to ask for payment info twice.

landyman• 15 years ago

Yes, you can change the amount with ARB -- once you have the subscription id, you can change pretty much anything about that subscription.

fastspring• 15 years ago

For an all-in-one subscription management system (merchant account, gateway, order page merchandising, VAT, etc.), there's FastSpring.

tashmahalic• 15 years ago

I'm planning to use Paypal Adaptive Payments for a site I'm building. Can anyone save me?

I'm building a Ruby site and will charge my users automatically on a monthly basis, based on their usage, so their charge varies. They agree to a billing agreement when they sign up, and their charges will vary mostly between $0.25 and $5.00.

I need a payment service that:

(1) enables me to automatically charge my users varying amounts (without them approving each time),

(2) has a decent micropayment fee structure ($0.05 + 5% for less than $10),

(3) allows my users to pay with any credit/debit card without requiring a proprietary login (e.g. Amazon), and

(4) can store my users' billing info so I don't have to be PCI compliant - I just do an API call to charge them.

The only service I've found meeting my needs is Paypal's Adaptive Payments API. I've had some bad experiences in the past with Paypal and I'm wary based on others' feedback (e.g. "Paypal is the Anti-Christ"), but I don't see any other option.

Does anyone know of a good alternative?

peeplaja• 15 years ago

Out of out-of-the box solutions like listed in the Poll, CheddarGetter has by far the best pricing for any bootstrapper.

Our European startup is using Adyen, a Dutch company.

I also use Amazon Payments for a subscription service I have.

dangrossman2• 15 years ago

Authorize.net's CIM to store the payment data, and a nightly cron job to charge whoever's monthly subscription fee is due. It's not that hard, everyone managed before these subscription-as-a-service companies popped up in the past few years.

lsc2• 15 years ago

a general question. Do any of these seem to handle out of band payments? e.g. if one customer wants me to send a check, is that even possible?

BluSynergy2• 15 years ago

Hey folks, an opinion from the cofounder at BluSynergy, the customizable billing provider. Depending on your requirements and your desire to stay focused on your core product:

1. Rolling your own with a gateway like Paypal or Authorize.Net is often the easiest entry point (for US based startups at least), provided your requirements are not too complex. Especially if you are just getting started with an uncertain revenue prediction, there's little justification in trying to take on more sophistication. Do what's easiest for you - sling code or outsource to a SaaS billing provider. Unfortunately, the underwriting process is controlled by the credit card companies and tends to be cumbersome. No shortcuts there.

2. Once you've got a customer base, then you get the feel for the issues. Some examples: Mid-month upgrades/downgrades, chargebacks (customers disputing the charge directly with their credit card issuer), orders expiring, corporate customers wanting to pay by paper check, adding 1 time service charges to monthly bill, house credits or refunds, early termination fees, etc. Then you start thinking stuff like, gee, if I could notify my annual customers in advance I'd reduce a good deal of chargebacks and automate a lot of renewals...and so on... At this point you definitely want to consider either a SaaS billing solution or buying a platform and running it in-house (ya, we do both). And, now that you've got some volume, you'd want to switch CC processors for better rates. Let's hope you can get YOUR data back...

3. If your growth has continued past the above stage, then you want to be able to customize. Typical examples we see: commission and affiliate payouts, master billing (one consolidated corporate bill, a la your corporate telco+internet bill), custom payment retry logic (eg. ACH when paychecks are most likely to hit the bank), customer segmentation tactics (e.g. coupon codes for VIP customers to entice renewals), advanced billing models (eg. peak concurrent usage, or annual averaged billing), blacklisting bad cards, etc. The founders of BluSynergy spent two decades doing this kinda stuff for the big guys. Our specialty is that we designed the system from the ground-up to easily implement this level of customization (often less than a week) while still running in a cost-efficient multi-tenant model. And it's not just for the big guys anymore :)

Now see if any of this applies to your revenue strategy. For many, #1 above is still the best bet if your requirements are simple. There will be a migration effort when you get to stage 2, but at that point it's a "good problem" to tackle.

more rambling thoughts: http://blusynergy.com/features/compare-alternatives

We love to work the challenging cases, give us a call. We are especially eager to work with companies contemplating mobile/"in-app" purchases.

mise• 15 years ago

2Checkout.com.

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