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Comment by Travis | Hacker News Reader

Haven't used Amazon payments or Spreedly, so I'm not familiar with their cost structure.

What're you looking for, primarily? Same recurring payment month after month, for the same amount? I think Paypal has a recurring charge option that would be good.

Otherwise I'd suggest using AUthorize.net. They'll get you a little bit less than paypal, in some circumstances. They offer a Customer Info Manager (CIM) that allows you to store a reference to a credit card, so you can charge it in the future again (even for a different amount, which is nice if you expect people to move up or down on your pricing plans).

Basically expect to pay around 3% for processing a credit card. Not sure what the companies that do your recurring charges will add on top of that for the funcitonality that they offer.

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I want a simple way to just set up the plans and have my users redirect to the payment provider's site to put in their card info and get charged.

I would like to get notified when new subscription starts/plan changes/gets cancelled. I want to minimize the amount of code I have to write to do all this since there is already a large list of items I need to address.

I guess so far Amazon and PayPal are the two candidates.

I think Amazon has better rates and API. I would like to get your opinion on the brand image of both companies too. I am afraid when people see the Amazon logo to make a payment they will freak out thinking that the application will be stealing their Amazon information. What do you think?

Regarding their reputations:

Paypal is probably what people associate with online payments. However, there are a LOT of people who have been ripped off or treated poorly by paypal or scammers. So while it has a broader reach (WRT users making payments), it also doesn't have as good of a rep as amazon.

Amazon is consistently at the top of customer satisfaction surveys. People don't generally think of them as a payment source, but this is just the current state of affairs. With their "passphrase" option, and other saas / iaas / services, I think the shift is swinging so that people realize amazon is everywhere.

I'd go with amazon. Paypal customer service SUCKS. Paypal support (even dev support, IME) SUCKS.

I've never had anything but happy thoughts about amazon.

I pretty much started thinking along the same lines too after I talked to a couple of people. It seems like their pricing structure is exactly the same as PayPal and their API is pretty good. I will most likely go with them in the next couple of weeks. I might even release a little open source library that adds a thin layer on top of what Amazon gives to enable ASP.NET MVC integration. Thanks for all your help!

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