Ask HN: I have users, I have traction, How do I get paid?

PayPal is the easiest, so you should start there. As soon as revenues are significant I would go directly with a real payment gateway and merchant account. I've used both authorize.net and Braintree extensively, and both have a secure vault that allows you to build your own recurring payment infrastructure without PCI compliance issues. I have nothing against any of these billing startups—I've never used any of them, and I've set up a lot of payment gateways over the last decade, so take my opinion with a grain of salt—but I have to assume that they charge a significant premium for what isn't that significant of a sunk cost for a web-based startup. In other words, building a recurring payment system is not very hard once you remove PCI compliance from the equation. If you're really short on developer resources then maybe one of these services is a nice stop-gap, but I can't see paying the premium once your revenues are significant.

Again, I'm not really familiar with the value proposition of these services, so anyone with experience (especially a founder of one of these services!) please chime in with a counterpoint.

Google checkout is a nice alternative/complementary option... I always choose this in preference to paypal when shopping - perhaps because I can remember my google password by heart, but not my paypal one?

Afaik google can only do one time payments not subs yet.

Google Checkout can do subscriptions for sure. It's in beta, but works very well:

http://checkout.google.com/support/sell/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...

ah cool thanks :)

The silent majority are using PayPal without problems. They support recurring payments like this, and eliminate the need for you to directly handle credit card details at all.

Just don't leave piles of money sitting in your PayPal account. And once you have things started, assuming it's working out, consider adding additional payment methods as a backup (even if PayPal mostly works, some customers may have trouble with, e.g. their credit cards not being accepted).

When I last checked (a few years ago mind you) PayPal didn't support recurring payments if the merchant wasn't US-based. I was angry to discover this part-way through integrating with their service, as I'm based in Australia.

I'm in the US, so no problems there. I upvoted you for other people who might be looking into using paypal and are outside the US. That would be really frustrating.

I'm in Australia too, although I don't accept recurring payments myself. However, I do make a recurring payment to a New Zealand based company. And by logging into the PayPal Australia website I see an Australian freecall (i.e. 1800) number that I can contact to help set up recurring billing. So it seems things may have changed.

That said, it would be best for people to check more thoroughly first, to avoid any wasted effort!

PayPal do support recurring payments in Aus. We used it (briefly) before ditching it and going with Chargify. Unfortunately it is horrible to use for your customers. It is literally a "recurring payment" not a subscription. I know that sounds like nothing more than a semantic difference, but in practice it is a huge problem for people looking to change plans/unsubscribe.

It supports it in the UK, as that's how I pay for Spotify.

I agree - I've been using PayPal for years without issue, although they did break their support for certain types of transactions they previously had supported.

Frankly I'm surprised you hear as little about PayPal as you do - considering the amount of money they process every year.

If you read the relevant Founders at Work interview, PayPal is actually a fraud risk calculating company who does money transfers as a result.

paypal's likely going to be the easiest. To some extent, whatever your initial results are, factor in a few % who aren't buying solely because it's Paypal. If you have profit, expand in to using Google Checkout as an alternative (though I don't think they have recurring) then look at getting a full merchant account that support recurring (or investigate spreedly or other services).

Good luck.

Google Checkout does have recurring: http://checkout.google.com/support/sell/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...

PayPal might be very quick and easy to get going just like Google Checkout or Amazon Payments but you need to think about what is best for actually serving your customers and making it easier for them to pay.

- Standard PayPal Your customer must have a PayPal account which could lower your conversion and for sure does not give a professional image. You can schedule a payment to happening each month but it is an amount not a product/plan, making managing customers very difficult and reporting almost impossible. Similar issues apply with Google Checkout and Amazon Payments

- PayPal Website Payments Pro This is a gateway and merchant account combination that they offer as a package to try and attract merchants. There are some simple recurring payment options but nothing really. The bigger problem here is errors and support. Try calling PayPal when something does not work, good luck. We have a senior level account manager and direct contact with the Director of Support for this product and this bug has been open for 3 weeks and they still cannot fix. http://support.chargify.com/discussions/support/3296-decline...

- Real gateway and merchant account Your best option and not a lot of effort if you are in the US or have a US bank account. Overseas it is a little more effort but nothing crazy. If you are concerned with getting the best rate and quickly, we have a few partners for this at http://chargify.com/merchant-accounts/. And you can use this and not use Chargify, so it is just there to help you.

While there are many reasons you might want to use Chargify or a similar type of service rather than doing this directly you can of course build it yourself. Just think about what you would prefer to spend your time on. I encourage you to talk to actual customers of any product you pick, look at the community around the company and who participates and then make a decision.

As a founder at Chargify, I would love to see you working with us, but more important I want you to make the right choice for your business so I would say almost anything is better than PayPal.

PayPal definitely is the easiest way to start–and you will want to move up to something better. We did it for the first few years. We never really had any horror stories, but you need to think about how you'll handle the transition.

If you don't want PayPal, I wrote up some details about why I recently did for a new venture (and some other options). Here:

http://callmeed.posterous.com/choosing-a-cmbb-stack-for-my-s...

I like Chargify and use them at our main company ... but they don't support BrainTree's newest version and I don't really like the other merchants they recommend.

As most people have said, PayPal is incredibly easy to get started. I am still using their website payment standard which involves no coding to get started taking payments.

You'll need code later for doing IPN and customizing and encrypting the buttons. But it is definitely the lowest barrier to entry. It is also probably the cheapest option, at least when starting out.

I added Recurly for credit card payment for flexibility and credibility. The costs are much higher per paying user than PayPal. Each credit card authorization costs about 30cents, and if a customer input bad credit card info and you have dunning on, it can cost more than a dollar to have a nonpaying customer.

Hi necrecious,

Recurly only charges for successful purchases and refunds - we don't charge you for bad credit card data. I hope this helps :)

Rachel - Recurly Support

You guys don't but the credit card companies does. Perhaps I am reading my statement wrong from my processor, but I got a lot more authorization charges than transaction charges.

No first-hand experience with these guys, but I've heard good things: http://chargify.com. It's free until the 50 customer mark, although you'll still have to mess with a merchant account.

About how long does it take to setup a merchant account at a reputable place? I assume they take a 3% cut or so?

Would you have any recommendations for merchant accounts, or are they all pretty much the same?

Start with website payments pro by paypal. It's the easiest to get setup and approved for and has reasonable rates. Later, once you have more paying customers, you can switch if you really think it will make a difference. And using something like Chargify or Spreedly allows you to change your merchant account without affecting the recurring billing. Paypal isn't always perfect and they certainly screw up, but for the handful of issues you hear about, there are millions of transactions that work out just fine.

My experience with WPP is exactly the opposite. Total clusterfuck. And Chargify doesn't support Paypal, last I heard, because Paypal was so unreliable. YMMV.

I've been using it for over a year with Spreedly without any problems at all. What sort of issues were you having?

Terrible customer support and a buggy sandbox.

We're using first data for the merchant account for http://inboxseo.com.

It generally takes about 30 days to set up an account with a merchant. you can negotiate with many merchant banks regarding the rate. there isn't one that i know of that's super 'startup friendly', but it's not really that important.

We use http://spreedly.com for recurring billing which is very similar to chargify.

The point of these type of 'middle men' is that they a) keep the CC data and keep you from having to deal with the risks and security concerns of doing so yourself, b) make dealing with recurring billing easier; ie we don't have any 'cron jobs' that run credit card batches every night; c) deal with all the subtleties of prorating the user for upgrading or downgrading a plan mid-month; offering free first month, etc.

Chargify is dead easy to get going. Merchant accounts are HARD. Someone else mentioned using PayPal Pro with Chargify. Chargify no longer support PayPal with new accounts until PayPal sort out their long list of problems.

We've been using Chargify for a couple of months now and it's great. Just a shame you have to have a Gateway and Merchant account as well!

A merchant account usually takes 7-10 days in my experience. Although merchant accounts are pretty much all the same, payment gateways are not. Charify is awesome and makes your payment gateway sort of irrelevant (at least as long as they keep supporting the one you have).

As for gateways, Braintree is head and shoulders above the rest when it comes to service and their API. 3% is about right, or a little high. For more info on the process and market prices check out Braintree's website. They are quite helpful, but a little on the pricey side.

PayPal is _ok_ but I don't feel like they're really pushing the innovation envelope (and haven't for a long time.)

You might consider Recurly http://recurly.com/ as an alternative.

I have used PayPal for about 10 years now, and process six figures with them per year. I also have merchant accounts and other 3rd party payment system integrations, but there's no reason to exclude PayPal based on fears of future problems. With over 90 million active accounts, the occasional problem you read about isn't unexpected or more extreme than you'd get processing anywhere else.

Regarding Recurly, my opinion of that company is much lower, but maybe I am one of the few with a bad experience: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1678143

Hi Dan,

We're sorry to hear you had a bad experience with Recurly - in that same post we had replied to you (which you can see at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1679599). If there's anything we can do to change your opinion of Recurly, I'd love to hear it!

Rachel - Recurly Support

eh, I am not sure that I want my payment processor to 'push the innovation envelope.' I want them to process my payments, with as little hassle as possible.

Well, I wouldn't mind if Paypal could improve certain organization features on their site, and also improve the search so it is no longer the slowest website in existence.

If there's even a chance this takes off do you want to be at the mercy of PayPal?

Man up and set it up properly from the start. It costs more but in the end you'll be happy you spent the time and money to do so.

Have you checked out http://beanstream.com/public/index.asp? Payment processing with great customer service - I'm pretty sure they can help you achieve what you want... but it would probably be better to look to a service like their's once you had a serious number of paying users. Still, look into them.

E-junkie is decent, and cheap ($5 for lowest plan). Not the best interface, but it's simple to set up and works well if you're not looking to do too much customization of the checkout pipeline.

Chargify. No additional cost to start, flexible back end options for you moving forward.

Can you tell us what your service is ?

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