Commencepayments.com, costs me $40 a month to run (though if I wasn't lazy I could drop it significantly - $20 for heroku + ssl and $20 for cloudflare) launched last February and just hit the $1000 mark!
Very nice. Very cool! How did you start getting customers in the first place?
a lot of time spent in Stripe's IRC chat room, recommendations from Stripe support to users
What Heroku services are you using ?
Their SSL endpoint, I plan on just moving to an ec2 instance
I'm pretty sure you can use cloudflare's free ssl with heroku at this point.
yeah, but I wanted SSL for the complete trip, free SSL would terminate at Cloudflare leaving the connection from Cloudflare to Heroku not-protected (which would be questionable from a PCI perspective). And then for some reason, I couldn't get the connection from Cloudflare to Heroku to work under the *.herokuapp.com ssl cert.
@matthewarkin You may want to use letsencrypt.org for SSL and save further on costs
the ssl itself was only $10/year, the $20/month heroku charges you to use a custom ssl cert.
and why wouldn't I use Stripe directly?
You can, just not everyone has access or the ability to write server-side code. For instance if you used Wix, Squarespace, some generic website builder you often have no access to the underlying server-side code.