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Comment by dmpayton | Hacker News Reader

I really like the idea of Square, but...

One of the blockers to launching my side-startup is the financial investment required to form the business and setup a merchant account. Money is tight for me, and I'd like to keep my costs to a minimum until there is some positive cashflow.

If Square offered an API, I could launch and start accepting money now, holding off on the business formation beyond sole-proprietorship until paying customers have validated my idea. Hell, they can keep the extra $0.15 for that.

So what's stopping Square from doing that? Could they build that out, or are they blocked by, e.g., regulations? (I know nothing about operating a payment gateway)

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It's obvious that building an API is easier than 1) building and shipping physical devices that work well enough to qualify for card present transactions and 2) obviating the need for a merchant account (only PayPal really gets you there, although Amazon Payments and Google Checkout kinda sorta do).

Square decided to do the hard stuff first. And they pulled it off! That's what's so amazing about this company. I just hope that when they build their API that they do a PCI compliant vault that adheres to the Data Portability Standard. (Or, at the least, integrate with Recurly, who could handle the subscription logic and provide the PCI compliant vault.) And, of course, their chargeback management processes need to not suck.

If they do, there would be no reason to ever, ever pick anything other than Square for any side project all the way up to a fairly large (>$100K/month) web app.

Take a look at this short video: http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=2649

It looks like an API is on the way, as one of their roadmap items. It should be no surprise that they're going to do an API, given that their CEO is the creator of Twitter. Twitter is basically the textbook example of explosive growth due to API usage.

Awesome, thanks for posting that.

I'd really love to know what the ETA is on a webservice API, even if it's just a rough ballpark. I sent them an email asking about it, hopefully they'll be able to provide further details.

Couldn't you just use PayPal as a stop gap if you don't want to spend a lot of money?

Much of what I do at my day job involves development of our enterprise eCommerce platform. We've had our share of PayPal issues in the past, and I'm pretty set against using them at this point.

[Edit] If it came down to it, I might consider an approach like Lanyrd: launch with a donate button, and all donors get special perks and some extra free time when it's time to roll out a proper payment system.

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