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Comment by sachinag | Hacker News Reader

If you're concerned about credit card portability (as this blog author is), your only real options are Braintree's vault or Recurly. Chargify still stores the CC at the gateway level, so you have gateway lockin, which is no different than the PayPal/Amazon case the author bemoans.

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Authorize.net also has a vault product.

Chargify still stores the CC at the gateway level, so you have gateway lockin

I don't understand this. Gateways that provide a vault for storing credit card information give you a way to get it out in order to process the transaction. So if you can get the information out, couldn't you just transition to a new gateway if necessary. Only sites like Paypal and Amazon really have lockin.

The way most vaulting services work is, you pass through credit card details, and they store in their vault. They then send you back a token to reference for future transactions. In most cases, you won't have the ability to pull back the full vault entry (specifically the credit card number) from them. This is the lock in that's being referred to here. Most gateways who won't let you export the cc data yourselves, or to another provider will cite PCI compliance issues, but it's all smoke and mirrors. They just don't want you to leave.

And to be 100% clear, Chargify is not a gateway or anything like that, so they don't do any storage - they're a SaaS provider that has built their app to offer recurring billing on top of a bunch of other gateway's APIs.

Bingo.

We decided to go with Authorize.net, and I'm afraid we're locked in again. I willingly and knowingly put my nuts in the vice this time. I asked the sales rep about getting the CC info back, and she cited PCI compliance as their reason for not giving it up.

Still, I decided to go with the big dog, and my hope is that any services like Chargify that we decided to use will also work with Authorize.

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