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Comment by qeorge | Hacker News Reader

In the US, but we've used PayPal's direct payment gateway (Websites Payment Pro) for a number of client sites, and its been great.

The rates are very reasonable ($30/month, 2-3% + $.30 per transaction), and the only weird requirement is that you have to offer PayPal as a checkout option (and we would anyway).

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I'm looking for a subscription model so unless PayPal has a recurring billing, I can't use it. Thanks for the tip anyway.

Perhaps you could combine it with something like Spreedly?

http://spreedly.com/info/payment-gateways/

I haven't used them before, but I am looking for an excuse to try them out.

If you're looking at doing subscription stuff, check out spreedly, http://spreedly.com/. They'll handle all of the subscription and billing stuff for you, and abstract away whomever you end up using as a gateway. They do support Paypal as a backend.

I'm pretty sure Paypal does have recurring payments. I think they call it a subscription payment.

AFAIK this is not available through their gateway - you have to send the user to PayPal.com and even then I believe they have to use a PayPal account to subscribe.

If there's a way around this I would love to know.

subscriptions are available through the direct api (your site) and express api (paypal hop) if using websites payments pro. however, if you offer direct, paypal requires that you offer express as well.

payments standard only supports something similar to express, although it's a totally different beast.

That is awesome, thank you.

They have a NVP API for subscription payments.

https://cms.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/?cmd=_render-content&c...

I haven't tried it yet though.

My experience with payment gateways (note: I have not tried the new subscription services: Chargify, Spreedly, etc) was that their recurring billing support was rather inflexible.

We had to implement it ourselves to get the customer experience we wanted (30 day free trials, that kind of stuff).

So this may be less of a downside than you suppose.

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