Ask HN: Which payments processors to use for recurring subscriptions in India? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Which payments processors to use for recurring subscriptions in India?

10 pointssuperasn8 comments

Hi,

What are Indian startups using to create recurring subscriptions, especially for SaaS sites?

1. Right now Stripe is not available in India (big hopes for Stripe atlas).

2. Paypal is what everybody loves to hate but so far it looks the most promising (unfortunately they prohibit India to India transactions)

3. I used a site called 2Checkout in the past but my experience was horrible. I lost a good amount of money with them because their fraud detection is very poor, and customer support is even worse.

4. Most other services also require a US/UK bank merchant account, TIN number, etc about which I don't have even the slightest idea.

So what other options are there? Right now I'm going with Paypal but would love to hear what other SaaS startups in India are using (especially those catering to a Global audience)

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About 3 years ago I was researching the same thing. There wasn't a lot of options then, and I still don't think there's a lot of options now.

Wrote a blog post to document what I found: http://www.redbridgenet.com/indian-payment-gateways-no-recur....

There's some links in there to discussions of the same. The Quora discussion is starting to fill up with what I think is spam for services that don't exactly solve the problem, but it might be worth checking out.

Thanks. I did come across this link from Google and also the said Quora post. It's very unfortunate that even though there are so many good Payment processors like Stripe, Google, Amazon, Authorize, etc they're mostly restricted to the US.

Also I think a lot of these companies are having a hard time because RBI has this strict OTP only policy so this isn't going to change anytime soon (like you said it was same 3 years ago also).

Anyway, I came across few companies that will setup a US bank account and register a Delaware corp for about $500. It's throwing money down the drain because they don't guarantee anything but it may be worth a shot? I think the founder of SupportBee did this [1]

[1] https://www.quora.com/How-does-SupportBee-or-any-Indian-star...

https://razorpay.com/ https://instamojo.com/

definitely some more

I don't think either of them support recurring subscriptions like Paypal or 2checkout

The problem with recurring billing in India is that it doesn't work at all with the RBI 2 factor guidelines. We do have Standing Instructions, but they are harder to support for SaaS companies.

If you rely on a service like PayPal/2Checkout, you face other issues:

1. Only international credit cards work. Indian market is heavily biased towards Debit Cards as of now 2. your money is processed internationally, which has it's own share of issues.

Disclaimer: I work at Razorpay

This is fine for my use since I have a SaaS startup and most of our customers are from US/UK only. I think less than 2% of our customers are from India right now and they were able to pay with 2checkout with automatic recurring billing (without requiring otp).

The RBI regulation is for companies incorporated in India only. This is one of the reason why Indian startups incorporate out of the US, Singapore etc.

    ‏@vijayshekhar  Mar 4
    "@ConversionChamp @vijayanands @RajanAnandan @dkhare we offer recurring on CC too!"

Paytm now supports recurring payments on wallets. https://twitter.com/vijayanands/status/705993389620092928

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