Add recurring billing to your site. No coding, monthly fees, gateways. Code=HN

https://www.pintpay.com

by gpl1 • 15 years ago

180 87 15 years ago

gpl118• 15 years ago

Hi HN readers, we're expanding the PintPay beta and allowing a few more folks to signup. We've added a new beta code for the first 200 hacker news readers. The code is "HN" (no quotes). Thanks!

akamaka2• 15 years ago

Looks great, and it's a shame I can't sign up, since I'm in Canada. Is it just the need for a US bank account that's holding me back?

gpl118• 15 years ago

Our lawyers are looking into the international payments, but the honest answer is that it adds a ton of complication so we're only accepting US merchants at this time. Sorry, but if you email us at feedback@pintpay.com we'll keep you posted about when we intend to support Canadian merchants.

jarin• 15 years ago

Looks very nice, I like being able to design your hosted payment page. Does the "thank you page" redirect pass along enough information to be able to associate the subscription with a user account? Also, do you plan to do some kind of URL postback for when a subscription's status changes?

I was a little bummed to see that your ToS doesn't allow adult, but I also have a dating site client who will be needing subscription billing soon. :)

Edit: Ah, yeah the net 60 is kind of rough.

gpl118• 15 years ago

good questions -- we're working on an api and postback right now during the beta. Should have those up soon. But yes, we'll support URL postbacks for all kinds of subscription changes (new sub, changed sub, etc). The net 60 is just during the beta and we would consider lowering it for anyone we approve/verify as a legit merchant.

Edited.

bitsm3• 15 years ago

Are you guys PCI compliant?

chopsueyar2• 15 years ago

Seriously?

bitsm3• 15 years ago

Since I don't have to be PCI-compliant, it's doubly important that the company I'm trusting to handle my customers' data is doing their job right.

It'd be irresponsible NOT to ask.

A small, three-guy startup running on Linode with little to no background in payment processing or security doesn't automatically win my business.

gpl118• 15 years ago

Good question. From the FAQ:

Do I need to worry about PCI Compliance?

Nope! By using PintPay, you never store credit card information on your servers. In fact, that information isn't stored on our servers either.

(Edited.)

dandandan• 15 years ago

You're on Linode and consider yourselves to be PCI compliant? Even though you're not storing the cards yourselves (probably using tokenization on Braintree or Authorize.net) you need to be compliant as the cards pass through your servers.

dacort• 15 years ago

That didn't answer the question. Just because you don't store credit card information doesn't mean there aren't steps you still have to take to protect cardholder data. PCI compliance applies to both storing and transmitting cc info.

bitsm3• 15 years ago

Yeah, as others have pointed out, that doesn't answer the question. I'm familiar with transparent redirects offered by Braintree and SpreedlyCore.

But Linode (mentioned in the footer) is not PCI compliant by default, so it's worth asking what they are doing since they DO touch the credit cards.

andypants• 15 years ago

He's asking if you guys are PCI compliant.

robflynn• 15 years ago

I was very interested in your product at first, but this answer turned me off pretty quickly.

The site looks good, the service seems nice, but I'm not convinced you are PCI compliant based on the answer here and the Linode tag on your website.

I mean no offense by this comment, but payments are quite important, so I'm just pointing out what is making me feel uncertainty.

chopsueyar2• 15 years ago

This looks pretty interesting. I was using membrr with opengateway for an expressionengine membership site (which requires a merchant account).

Pintpay looks like a great way to test the waters without needing a merchant account.

Best of luck to you guys!

gpl118• 15 years ago

Thanks chopsueyar!

sixtofour• 15 years ago

If my project was farther along than a gleam in my eye at the moment, I'd consider trying this.

But while I was considering it, one thing I'd wonder about is how serious and long-lived the service will be. There's nothing to indicate that you aren't serious, but I do wonder about this when I see a new service for something important; will the service go away after I (and my customers) have relied on it?

Do others have this general concern? Do you hesitate, or just go for it?

For site owners, do you think about this? How do you convey seriousness on your site?

bond• 15 years ago

Generally speaking every commercial business will stay alive as long as it has customers and it's profitable...

ddemchuk• 15 years ago

Guys, net 60 payment on other people's money is absolutely absurd, beta or not. It's obvious you're attempting to bootstrap by using the cashflow of your clients payment processing to grow, but that's not ok in this niche. Raise capital or self fund and do Net 7 max.

gpl118• 15 years ago

Hi, the net 60 is just during the beta period and really there to combat fraud. I assure you it is not to help "bootstrap." We intend to lower it later to 30 days.

Edit: if you email us at feedback@pintpay.com we would consider lowering that number from 60 for approved/verified merchants.

suking• 15 years ago

Hold a 60 day rolling reserve (10%?) instead.

linked• 15 years ago

I see two problems with this strategy: a) New developers still see "60 days" and say "Fuck you!", you should emphasize the shortest available payment schedules on your site (make the "anti-fraud" period seem more like a short hurdle to get over) b) 30 days is still too long for verified publishers; while it's a reasonable "new account" rate (for after your beta period), if I'm verified and doing volume on your service, I expect Net-7 or daily.

But what do I know, I'm just a developer who's looking for a recurring billing platform for my indy service.

patio112• 15 years ago

I'm kind of torn here. On the one hand, as an SaaS developer, I want to get paid my money immediately if not sooner.

On the other hand, as a jaded shareware developer, I can tell you that Net 60 is a heck of a lot closer than Net 7 to the terms you will be offered by most outsourced payment processors. The DigitalRiver family of companies, which have a commanding presence in shareware payments, will get you your money on average about 45 days after the sale takes place. FastSpring, which is the most developer friendly processor I'm aware of, will average about 20 days from sale. (Other alternatives I'm intimately familiar with: Google Checkout will have the money in your bank account about 3 to 5 days from sale. Paypal can ACH to you within about 2 to 3 business days or, if you're using it for expenses, the time-to-spendibility is essentially zero since you can get a Paypal-branded debit card.)

Business reasons for not doing net 7: returns, chargebacks, and various other forms of abuse. (Not even necessarily abuse by the developer. Here's a fun fraud scenario: fraudster signs up for an affiliate account of your developer, buys their software 100 times with stolen cards, earning a few thousand bucks of affiliate payout which is essentially laundered away from the stolen cards. Six weeks later the first chargebacks start rolling in as people receive their bank statements and wonder why they're getting scammed by a payment processor they've never heard of. This is ridiculously common -- search for any of the big brands in processing and you'll find complaint threads of folks convinced that the processor or merchant is the fraudster trying to steal their money.)

gpl118• 15 years ago

Yep, that's exactly why we've gone with Net 60 during the beta. We will definitely consider lowering it in the future. Thanks Patrick!

shazow5• 15 years ago

I agree this abnormally high but this isn't an issue to me personally.

In practice, I'm using Paypal right now and I haven't withdrawn in at least two months. I suppose I should, mostly because I worry about random account freezing that Paypal tends to do. With a service that doesn't have that reputation, holding for 2 months isn't a deal breaker for me.

pbreit• 15 years ago

Downvote. I doubt they are using the funds for operating costs. Most likely to combat fraud.

pknerd• 15 years ago

I would accept any payment system which works for my country

shawnee_• 15 years ago

After reading the story of self-publishing whizkid Amanda Hocking

http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/news/2011-02-09-ebooks09_...

I was inspired to start writing again. Rebuilding emphastic.com, I really wanted to find an easier way to integrate some kind of self-publishing eBook payment system, and this looks test-worthy.

In general, the timing is excellent, too. Google's Samsung Android tablet, the iPad2, etc.; the audience of digital readership is almost ready to eclipse the ebook-ready available content.

runevault• 15 years ago

If you're looking to self publish I'd just focus on Amazon, B&N (if in the US, otherwise publish there through Smashwords), and Smashwords. Sure it's 70/30 split, but you also get on their lists of also bought if you can manage enough sales. I haven't heard of any author making major money self pubbing through their own website, it's been primarily through the major ebook retailers.

It's what the big players like Hocking, Konrath, John Locke, and more do to make a living writing.

mceachen• 15 years ago

+1 -- and having gone through publishing a book on Lulu and Amazon, both services are fine to get dead-tree versions of your book into the hands of your readers (and you don't have to build a payment solution -- or anything other than the marketing verbiage).

patio112• 15 years ago

If you're just looking for "You give me money, I give you downloadable ebook", a quick plug for e-junkie. I've used them for several years at BCC (which used to be "you give me money, I give you license key" although that isn't relevant to most of my customers anymore), and they'll work for you very cheaply if you have a Paypal account.

noodle• 15 years ago

we talked before via email, but i wanted to reiterate -- for me to really integrate this into my site, i need an api available to tell me when a payment was successfully processed. get that up and running and i'll see about pulling this in.

shazow5• 15 years ago

For some reason I assumed that such an API or callback was available. The things I take for granted.

Agreed, this is a deal-breaker for me as well.

gpl118• 15 years ago

Yep, we're working on this now. We'll have that out shortly.

gpl118• 15 years ago

Yep, you're exactly right. We're working on that right now and it'll be up soon.

gpl118• 15 years ago

We'd also like to add CNAME support so you could have pro.yoursite.com show the payment page you make on PintPay. We're also working on an api and webhook / URL postback for info about changes/notifications/cancellations on subscriptions. A lot still to do during the beta!

aeden• 15 years ago

The problem with using CNAME records in this way is that the resulting page would not be protected under SSL. Even if the resulting POST is, there are reasons to ensure that page 1 is also under SSL, such as verification that the page comes from who it says, that it wasn't altered during transmission, and simply as a matter of perception. With a CNAME record unless the domain holder provided you with an SSL certificate and you are able to do multi-homed SSL, then you're going to have to run in under normal HTTP, and with a payment system you really do need all of the pages under SSL.

shazow5• 15 years ago

This is exactly what I've been looking for: Something like Recurly or Chargify but without hefty monthly fees that will eat at my runway before I even get profitable.

Right now I'm using Paypal, and I can't wait to move to something else. It seems Pintpay's fees (3.9% + 30¢) are comparable to Paypal (non-Pro), but I'm fine with that premium as long as it's a better experience than Paypal. I want a nice clean interface that doesn't take 60+ seconds to generate reports on my currency subscribers.

As mentioned in another thread, the callback hooks are a must for me to migrate my service (SocialGrapple) to Pintpay, but everything else looks great. I eagerly await!

Edit: Just found this comparison chart of your fees vs others (Recurly, Chargify, Paypal Pro). Very handy: https://pintpay.com/about/compare

gpl118• 15 years ago

Hi, yep, thanks for pointing out that link. Callback hooks are our top priority right now and will be done soon. We'll keep you posted if you signed up. Thanks!

rishi• 15 years ago

Hey Guys - this is pretty cool. On your homepage I would focus on how easy it is to use rather than the price point. Since almost all services are lower than 3.9%.

Good luck - looking forward to seeing you guys take on the world.

gpl118• 15 years ago

Hi thanks for the feedback. Here's a quick price comparison:

https://pintpay.com/about/compare

But yeah, we hope to add a lot more value in the future than just handling billing.

chow• 15 years ago

Kudos on providing a price comparison page, but it's somewhat misleading that you're including Authorize.Net set up fees in the "Per Month Costs". Isn't that more reflective of first month costs?

Also, why wasn't Spreedly included?

shazow5• 15 years ago

Here's some feedback:

* You should figure out a way not to require the payer to choose a password. Especially if they're already choosing a password on my service, now they're choosing two passwords. I understand that you're using this to handle plan changes and cancellation.

* Allow people to sign up for "free" products, too. This could potentially allow people to completely delegate their pricing pages to you, and you could be involved in the upsell process.

* Allow some formatting in the plan description. Specifically, I want to list things, which looks difficult to parse with a bunch of commas.

gpl118• 15 years ago

Excellent points. We will definitely consider these features going forward. Thanks!

aaronblohowiak• 15 years ago

I suggest markdown as a trivial to implement, useful, and safe template language.

johndbritton2• 15 years ago

+1 on handling free subscriptions

pwim• 15 years ago

My business partner and I were talking about a service like this the other day. If PintPay was to act as an OAuth provider, it might resolve the password issue.

jkkramer• 15 years ago

Allowing subscriptions to be charged yearly would be nice.

gpl118• 15 years ago

Great idea! The reason we didn't include this is because yearly automatic subscriptions causes chargebacks, due to people forgetting about an annual charge. Something we might implement is a renewal type annual feature, which will remind customers to renew.

cynix• 15 years ago

Any plans to make it available outside the US?

kmfrk• 15 years ago

This looks great, and I love the design and simplicity of your site.

With Goodsie and now PintPay, e-commerce is going to be a blast. Maybe you should look into partnering with them? I'd love to have everything in one place.

gpl118• 15 years ago

Thanks a lot kmfrk! Also, Goodsie looks really cool, will have to check them out.

apinstein• 15 years ago

Every merchant agreement I've ever seen doesn't allow you to charge payments for third parties. This is to prevent fraud at a minimum, and I am sure there are myriad other reasons.

I wonder if they arranged special terms with the merchant gateways or if they are just trying to fly under the radar? There's gotta be a reason no one has done this 100x before...

ryduh• 15 years ago

I also wondered how they were doing this. I tried to do something similar with donations for non-profits and got shot down.

magic52272• 15 years ago

Suggestion, you need a big fat section on your site that addresses why I should trust you. Integrating a payment system might be easy, but switching to something else if your system is shut down isnt. So my biggest concern moving to something is, what if your product fails for whatever reason, how can I be assured that I can leave easily and that I will get x days of advance notice. Im sure you can plan for this but letting people know that you'll be around for a long time and what happens in a worst case scenario will help.

Silhouette• 15 years ago

> Suggestion, you need a big fat section on your site that addresses why I should trust you.

I can't upvote this enough, as a guy who's been actively researching recurring billing solutions recently.

For the benefit of the OP, here are a few absolute dealbreakers that would make me not even consider you right now. Please take them as constructive criticism intended to be helpful:

1. You appear to be two guys with Linode, running a business that doesn't yet have a track record. IMHO, that means you need to be backed by either a large, established company or a provable insurance policy that means I'm still getting what's due to me if you go under. Remember, you are asking people to trust you with one of the most important parts of their business.

2. You ducked the PCI question, and apparently didn't even realise that you had. You have just lost all credibility, probably for good if anyone researching you ever finds this thread as it stands right now. I respectfully suggest that, as a minimum, you post a statement here that makes it clear that you do understand the implications of PCI and you know exactly where both you and your prospective clients fit into the scheme of things. (As an aside, I would be interested to know how you can possibly provide the service you seem to be offering while using a shared hosting service and still be PCI compliant.)

3. On a related note, you don't mention anything about getting my customer data out of your system if I ever want to move away. You need a robust, straightforward process to do this, again including a guarantee that there will be an opportunity for me to use it before you disappear to a tropical island/under a bus/into bankruptcy court.

4. Net 60? Ditto to what everyone else said. Additionally, saying it's for fraud protection loses you points: if I'm using a service like this rather than going straight to payment gateways and merchant accounts, using a service that can offer robust fraud protection schemes and fight chargebacks on my behalf is a major plus, which several of your competitors offer to a useful extent. If you think you need to keep all of my money for 60 days (or even 30) in case of chargebacks, I have to wonder how easy it is to game your system.

5. If you don't have a robust API/callback system, I suspect you don't have a product worth anything to most of your target market. Ditto if you can't export comprehensive reports in a format readily imported into common accounting software and/or provided to professional accountants.

6. Given that you're up against relatively well established small-scale opposition now and of course some Internet giants, your fees are uncompetitive. If you don't have the power and the established reputation they do, you need a lot more than a slightly lower rate to stand out.

7. In due course, if you want to handle international transactions for clients based in Europe, you'll need to be aware of the tax and data protection rules, and you'll need to be able to give absolute guarantees that everything you do will fall within those rules (for example, not transferring any personal customer data outside the EEA). Being US-only is a deal-breaker for now for many of us anyway, but you knew that.

I do wish you luck, as intermediary payment services have a lot of potential benefit and more competition is good for all of us. However, looking at the web site so far, my honest view is that you don't look ready for a public beta yet. If you are, I respectfully suggest that your FAQ needs to be a lot less chummy and a lot more to-the-point regarding the questions above so potential customers like me can see that.

blantonl2• 15 years ago

Holding payments with a Net-60 term? That hurts.

gpl118• 15 years ago

Hi, the net 60 is just during the beta period and really there to combat fraud. I assure you it is not to help "bootstrap."

We intend to lower it later to 30 days. Edit: if you email us at feedback@pintpay.com we would consider lowering that number from 60 for approved/verified merchants.

blantonl2• 15 years ago

Thanks for the response. Many of the other comments are now putting this into context.

However, realize that if I were to switch to your service I might see a huge disruption in our business' income. Even 30 days could be tough for some considering Paypal makes our money available instantly.

We bring in approximately 80% of our income through Paypal, and have rolled our own subscription management service. We are also actively looking to migrate that to Recurly in the 3Q of this year.

In that context, how would you differentiate yourself from Recurly and the others (Chargify etc) ? If it is regards to having your own payment gateways, that's great! But I'd be seriously worried about fraud since Paypal (and other payment gateways) have extremely mature fraud protection programs that have matured over many many years. I'd love to hear further how your offering matches up against that.

Thanks!

kolinko• 15 years ago

"You must be in U.S. to use this page."

What if I'm an American Citizen travelling to Europe? What if my company is incorporated in U.S.? Banning IPs is uncool.

jasonlotito• 15 years ago

Yeah, that doesn't matter. Being an American Citizen or being a company in the US doesn't matter. As an American living abroad, I know the pain. It affects not only payment processing regulations, but also copyright as well. For example, despite being a Netflix subscriber, I cannot access Netflix while inside the US.

seanx• 15 years ago

Why USA only? Makes it unusable for me:(.

erics• 15 years ago

I have a Coworking space in Mexico, but run my business from the US. Does that work?

bad_user• 15 years ago

US only.

magic52272• 15 years ago

Another thought, you should speak in general terms how you can offer a lower rate than a lot of other companies. Its another component people will question, are you not charging enough to stay in business (for example)?

barmstrong• 15 years ago

Great idea! On your compare page it looks like there is no need to sign up for your own merchant account which is a big win. So I assume you are using your own? Was curious how you managed to set this up, since I know operating as an "aggregator" of funds is considered higher risk and is harder to get. Do you mind mentioning which provider allowed you to set this up (BrainTree, etc) and how difficult it was to qualify?

Thanks!

ErrantX• 15 years ago

Just on the design of the page for the moment - I'd consider having a simpler "demo image" at the top of the page. I was distracted into reading the text and wondering what QuietWrite was :)

RobIsIT• 15 years ago

"Sorry, you must be in the US to use PintPay"

Ugh. I'm a Canadian. A Maple Tree just died because you made this a U.S. only service.

dholowiski• 15 years ago

Yup, me too. Google killed a ton of maple trees today too.

mwbiz• 15 years ago

If you have a high monthly revenue the 3.9% is pretty steep. The $60/month for paypal get's wiped out above $6k per month. It may be good for a small, low dollar value businesses, but as one commenter mentioned, net 60 days is BS.

There is no free lunch, payment processors get you one way or another.

mikiem• 15 years ago

Holy smokes... Way too expensive! If you are gonna go on the "we aren't PayPal" then maybe you can get away with it, but really, wow! I have to go see if you are double or triple what we pay PayPal. Either way; bad. PayPal fucks up and cancels "subscriptions" too often, and that makes work. However, and extra couple percent in fees can pay a billing person. Call me when you have a sliding price scale. Best wishes.

sandeepshetty• 15 years ago

Not having names and pictures or your physical address on your about page and just referring to yourself as "we" is a big trust issue for me especially for a product handling payments.

martinkallstrom• 15 years ago

Sorry if this question was already asked before: Does it work if my startup is in Europe? Does it work regardless of where on the globe my customer is?

Thanks!

Also, no matter what the answer is, it should be in large lettering on the front page of your service.

Update: And in your FAQ as well.

speleding• 15 years ago

If you're not yet in Europe you should consider starting there. I'm in Europe and the only option I have for my SaaS service is PayPal, for some reason all the other processors require a US merchant account (which you can't get without presence in the US).

I agree with most of the criticism that has been said in this thread already, but if you can fix that your key selling point for me is "no merchant account required", you should target outside the US where that matters most.

marcamillion• 15 years ago

My only issue with this solution is the hosted page. I don't want to hand-off my transaction to a third-party generic page - no matter how good the rates are.

But looks like a solid offering for those that don't mind that one kink.

tzs• 15 years ago

The "Compare" page shows PintPay as cheaper than the three competitors compared to, which is good. However, it is also immediately apparent that all three of the competitors have the same per transaction fee and lower percentage charges than PintPay, so that PintPay only wins because the others also have a fixed monthly fee. At a high enough volume, the higher percentage rate at PintPay (3.9% vs 2.1% at Chargify and Recurly--a HUGE difference) will overcome that.

The volume used for comparison is 150 customers a month, each paying $20, for a total of $3000/month. That's only $36k/year, which is not much at all for a business. Using the rates that PintPay gives for its competitors, Recurly becomes cheaper at $3833/month ($46k/year), Chargify becomes cheaper at $5500/month ($66k/year), and PayPal Web Pro becomes cheaper at $6000/month ($72k/year).

So who is the intended customer for PintPay? Most businesses that I can think of that would need such a service are going to be doing over $46k/year.

vladd• 15 years ago

I found it sneaky that it's not mentioned in the frontpage pitch, I had to look down in the FAQs to find it:

"Unfortunately, to sell subscriptions on PintPay, you will need to be within the United States."

Add recurring billing to your site. No coding, monthly fees, gateways. Code=HN

Related Stories