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Comment by Terretta | Hacker News Reader

The intellectual property for minimizing charge backs, preventing fraud, and handling exceptions and edge cases--knowledge built up over handling millions of transactions--is generally not worth relearning. Then there's the outrageous business crushing liability if something with CC data goes wrong.

You're usually better off keeping your brainpower focused on your app's differentiators, and leaving the recurring billing part to someone whose brain has already been sucked down the black hole of gateways, processors, and PCI compliance.

Chargify, Spreedly, and CheddarGetter come to mind as SaaS billers discussed frequently here.

(If your pain tolerance is higher, PayFlow Pro has tremendous institutional knowledge under the hood from handling over $100 million USD daily, despite changing corporate owners several times. Also compare Authorize.NET.)

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"gateways, processors, and PCI compliance"

These are not that complex and should be well-understood by any would-be entrepreneur. We are writing our own recurring billing system right now for our startup www.wellhubstudios.com, using Auth.net CIM. Auth.net even offers recurring billing themselves. Another obvious issue with the services you mention such as Chargify et al is that they charge a higher rate for each transaction than most other Merchant Account providers, sometimes 1-2% more per transaction which, if your trying to run a viable business based on margins it is something to greatly consider. The Transaction fee we got was ridiculously low compared to what these "recurring billing" apps (which surely will reduce your headache) are offering. Off to make some money.....

To say the ins and outs of card processing should be "well-understood" by any would-be entrepreneur seems like saying biochemistry should be well understood by anyone who wants to wear a Got Milk? t-shirt.

How many stores write the software in their cash register? Who would argue that was useful instead of working on their product line?

The would-be entrepreneur really should be doing other things with his time, and if the card processing percentage difference matters to the business model, hopefully the model is micropayments or billing itself, because for anything larger, there should be room and the entrepreneur better watch out for the much larger expense of supporting billing.

Billing is rarely a differentiator, except when it goes wrong.

On the other hand, if you're selling billing itself as a service, as I see your site says you are, then sure. You're competing with Chargify, Spreedly, etc., for a more targeted vertical. So sure, billing is your product. In that case, agreed, it needs to be well-understood.

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