Software as a Service Rails Kit | Hacker News Reader

Software as a Service Rails Kit

railskits.com

13 pointspius21 comments

This is really great stuff. I've had a few interactions with Benjamin in the past and he's a real pro.

While I haven't seen the actual code in the SaaS kit, I imagine it's top notch.

Billing is one of the trickiest things to get right. It's also a big time suck. $249 is nothing compared to the number of hours you'll spend writing, testing and re-writing your billing code. Believe me, you don't want to mess up your billing infrastructure.

(* Not a paid advertisement or a happy customer, just someone that has written billing systems over and over, and never been happy with the result.)

Agreed. I've worked with Ben a bit as well (he actually did some tradeout work for RescueTime) and he's an absolute star. Great combination of talent and work ethic.

And he's probably done dozens of rails e-commerce implementations, so I can't imagine someone more qualified to build this than he is.

I wish this site showed more of what is involved. 250 bucks might be reasonable, but I would want more reassurance that my time isn't going to be spent learning an interface whose limitations may haunt me or that is nearly as involved as writing the braintree code myself. I might buy something like this, but I would want to be convinced it would reward me for giving up flexibility, so I know the time savings would be real.

Perhaps a demonstration of some of the UI parts, such as account creation/management and some diagrams of how the billing procedure works, to throw more light on if the system is going to work for us. A demonstration of how we can customise/integrate the system would also be beneficial.

Looks exciting though, but I've never heard of BrainTree - perhaps that's just me! Anyone care to share some thoughts on them?

Braintree is great to work with.

A few weeks back I hadn't heard of them either. My client was going to use TrustCommerce originally, but they couldn't get their act together and decided to not return phone calls or be very responsive. Responsiveness is SO important, especially on the web.

For example, I signed up for a demo (developers) account with TrustCommerce. 5 days later they have a sales lackie call me and ask me if I still needed an account. wtf? 5 days? No way. My client had started getting their application together etc before Christmas and was still waiting on various things from them.

By the time TrustCommerce called back, I'd already found Braintree (it was on the list of supported ActiveMerchant gateways). Submitted some feedback via their Contact Us form on their site, received an email less than an hour later. Then after a few back and forths, the CEO (without ever mentioning that he actually was the CEO, I put that part together later after I found him on LinkedIn) calls me to hash through things on the phone rather than back-and-forth via email.

They've been super great to work with so far. Their developer documentation is a work in progress, but anytime I've needed something (which hasn't been that often at all) I received a response within a few hours from someone on their side.

They have a great recurring billing API, it's extremely flexible, and also a way to get that data back OUT using their query API. They have a 'vault' that you can literally check anything into (jpegs of drivers licenses, whatever) - not just credit card numbers.

In short, their shit just works. The web interface they have isn't all web2.0ish, but it's concise and easy enough to navigate. I'd rate their site 10 out of 10 when compared with any other payment gateway out there. Plus, they blog. I mean, how many gateways do you know of have a blog? ;-)

Thanks for the info, gone part of the way to instilling trust into a previous unrecognised (to me) brand. I'll have to check out their blog.

I have to agree with this. I used to recommend TrustCommerce to everyone, but now I recommend BrainTree to everyone, primarily because of their responsiveness. Of course the payment gateway works -- you'd hope that would be a given, regardless of the provider -- but their excellent service really sets BrainTree apart.

After further investigation, looks like you can only use Braintree if you're in the US (you need a US bank account and address).

Which also means the billing code from railskits is no good for people in the UK.

:'(

If you can point me at a non-US-friendly vendor that does stored transactions like Braintree's Vault, I'd be happy to work in support for that vendor.

You can see some of the UI parts in action by creating a free Catch the Best account, since this code was extracted from that project. Feel free to upgrade to a paying plan to see that functionality, too. :)

http://catchthebest.com/

I'll be throwing up some more info on the site over the next couple of days, too, so thanks for the ideas on what you'd like to see.

Well done on getting some additional information on the site so fast!

$250 for just a demonstration of proper billing code alone is $250 well spent. I'm sure you will get at least $250 worth of ideas and gotchas out of it without even breaking a sweat.

Again, not a shill, advertisement or even a customer. I just know how hard it is to write good billing code. It's a bit of a black box -- not something that many people share. Unless you've built one yourself previously, this is the way to go.

I think you'll find that the code is very easy to get into and bend to whatever you want to do.

I'll toss more details up on the site, soon, though, so hopefully that will help give you a better feel for it.

I already built logon/user accounts code for my app. Does this require your app's user code?

I just updated the site with more details about the implementation. If you are using restful_authentication, it may be as easy as just making 3 one-line changes to your current user code (lib/authenticated_system.rb and app/models/user.rb), depending on how my notion of an Account lines up with how you're managing your customers.

Sounds promising. Would this be able to support a scheme like this:

Rent n units at price y for x hours, where dollars per y-hour is dependent on the number of units n(volume discounts)? Show the user an interface with their current unit-hours and let them draw down against it?

Uh, I guess so... if you implement it. :)

Kidding aside, you can do whatever you want on top of the base application -- it's a standard Rails app, after all. But what you get "out of the archive" is a bog-standard customer pays $x/mo for access to the app which has some limits based on the value of x, and the limits are up to you to implement (aside from the included one, which limits the number of users that can be associated with a customer's account).

I've worked with Ben as well (actually working with him currently on a project). This is going to be a great kit.

Thanks for the heads up.

I'll be buying this for my site in a month or so.

Is it a once off Payment of $249?

Yup, it's a one-time payment for use for one application. If you want to build more than one application using the same codebase as a starting point, it's a one-time payment of $999.

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