Add recurring billing to your site. No coding, monthly fees, gateways. Code=HN

> Suggestion, you need a big fat section on your site that addresses why I should trust you.

I can't upvote this enough, as a guy who's been actively researching recurring billing solutions recently.

For the benefit of the OP, here are a few absolute dealbreakers that would make me not even consider you right now. Please take them as constructive criticism intended to be helpful:

1. You appear to be two guys with Linode, running a business that doesn't yet have a track record. IMHO, that means you need to be backed by either a large, established company or a provable insurance policy that means I'm still getting what's due to me if you go under. Remember, you are asking people to trust you with one of the most important parts of their business.

2. You ducked the PCI question, and apparently didn't even realise that you had. You have just lost all credibility, probably for good if anyone researching you ever finds this thread as it stands right now. I respectfully suggest that, as a minimum, you post a statement here that makes it clear that you do understand the implications of PCI and you know exactly where both you and your prospective clients fit into the scheme of things. (As an aside, I would be interested to know how you can possibly provide the service you seem to be offering while using a shared hosting service and still be PCI compliant.)

3. On a related note, you don't mention anything about getting my customer data out of your system if I ever want to move away. You need a robust, straightforward process to do this, again including a guarantee that there will be an opportunity for me to use it before you disappear to a tropical island/under a bus/into bankruptcy court.

4. Net 60? Ditto to what everyone else said. Additionally, saying it's for fraud protection loses you points: if I'm using a service like this rather than going straight to payment gateways and merchant accounts, using a service that can offer robust fraud protection schemes and fight chargebacks on my behalf is a major plus, which several of your competitors offer to a useful extent. If you think you need to keep all of my money for 60 days (or even 30) in case of chargebacks, I have to wonder how easy it is to game your system.

5. If you don't have a robust API/callback system, I suspect you don't have a product worth anything to most of your target market. Ditto if you can't export comprehensive reports in a format readily imported into common accounting software and/or provided to professional accountants.

6. Given that you're up against relatively well established small-scale opposition now and of course some Internet giants, your fees are uncompetitive. If you don't have the power and the established reputation they do, you need a lot more than a slightly lower rate to stand out.

7. In due course, if you want to handle international transactions for clients based in Europe, you'll need to be aware of the tax and data protection rules, and you'll need to be able to give absolute guarantees that everything you do will fall within those rules (for example, not transferring any personal customer data outside the EEA). Being US-only is a deal-breaker for now for many of us anyway, but you knew that.

I do wish you luck, as intermediary payment services have a lot of potential benefit and more competition is good for all of us. However, looking at the web site so far, my honest view is that you don't look ready for a public beta yet. If you are, I respectfully suggest that your FAQ needs to be a lot less chummy and a lot more to-the-point regarding the questions above so potential customers like me can see that.

+1 on handling free subscriptions

Excellent points. We will definitely consider these features going forward. Thanks!

My business partner and I were talking about a service like this the other day. If PintPay was to act as an OAuth provider, it might resolve the password issue.

Hi, yep, thanks for pointing out that link. Callback hooks are our top priority right now and will be done soon. We'll keep you posted if you signed up. Thanks!

For some reason I assumed that such an API or callback was available. The things I take for granted.

Agreed, this is a deal-breaker for me as well.

Yep, you're exactly right. We're working on that right now and it'll be up soon.

I also wondered how they were doing this. I tried to do something similar with donations for non-profits and got shot down.

Generally speaking every commercial business will stay alive as long as it has customers and it's profitable...

Yeah, that doesn't matter. Being an American Citizen or being a company in the US doesn't matter. As an American living abroad, I know the pain. It affects not only payment processing regulations, but also copyright as well. For example, despite being a Netflix subscriber, I cannot access Netflix while inside the US.

Good question. From the FAQ:

Do I need to worry about PCI Compliance?

Nope! By using PintPay, you never store credit card information on your servers. In fact, that information isn't stored on our servers either.

(Edited.)

Seriously?

Yup, me too. Google killed a ton of maple trees today too.

Looks very nice, I like being able to design your hosted payment page. Does the "thank you page" redirect pass along enough information to be able to associate the subscription with a user account? Also, do you plan to do some kind of URL postback for when a subscription's status changes?

I was a little bummed to see that your ToS doesn't allow adult, but I also have a dating site client who will be needing subscription billing soon. :)

Edit: Ah, yeah the net 60 is kind of rough.

Looks great, and it's a shame I can't sign up, since I'm in Canada. Is it just the need for a US bank account that's holding me back?

Thanks chopsueyar!

If you're just looking for "You give me money, I give you downloadable ebook", a quick plug for e-junkie. I've used them for several years at BCC (which used to be "you give me money, I give you license key" although that isn't relevant to most of my customers anymore), and they'll work for you very cheaply if you have a Paypal account.

If you're looking to self publish I'd just focus on Amazon, B&N (if in the US, otherwise publish there through Smashwords), and Smashwords. Sure it's 70/30 split, but you also get on their lists of also bought if you can manage enough sales. I haven't heard of any author making major money self pubbing through their own website, it's been primarily through the major ebook retailers.

It's what the big players like Hocking, Konrath, John Locke, and more do to make a living writing.

If you're not yet in Europe you should consider starting there. I'm in Europe and the only option I have for my SaaS service is PayPal, for some reason all the other processors require a US merchant account (which you can't get without presence in the US).

I agree with most of the criticism that has been said in this thread already, but if you can fix that your key selling point for me is "no merchant account required", you should target outside the US where that matters most.

The problem with using CNAME records in this way is that the resulting page would not be protected under SSL. Even if the resulting POST is, there are reasons to ensure that page 1 is also under SSL, such as verification that the page comes from who it says, that it wasn't altered during transmission, and simply as a matter of perception. With a CNAME record unless the domain holder provided you with an SSL certificate and you are able to do multi-homed SSL, then you're going to have to run in under normal HTTP, and with a payment system you really do need all of the pages under SSL.

Hi thanks for the feedback. Here's a quick price comparison:

https://pintpay.com/about/compare

But yeah, we hope to add a lot more value in the future than just handling billing.

Thanks a lot kmfrk! Also, Goodsie looks really cool, will have to check them out.

Great idea! The reason we didn't include this is because yearly automatic subscriptions causes chargebacks, due to people forgetting about an annual charge. Something we might implement is a renewal type annual feature, which will remind customers to renew.

Hi, the net 60 is just during the beta period and really there to combat fraud. I assure you it is not to help "bootstrap."

We intend to lower it later to 30 days. Edit: if you email us at feedback@pintpay.com we would consider lowering that number from 60 for approved/verified merchants.

I'm kind of torn here. On the one hand, as an SaaS developer, I want to get paid my money immediately if not sooner.

On the other hand, as a jaded shareware developer, I can tell you that Net 60 is a heck of a lot closer than Net 7 to the terms you will be offered by most outsourced payment processors. The DigitalRiver family of companies, which have a commanding presence in shareware payments, will get you your money on average about 45 days after the sale takes place. FastSpring, which is the most developer friendly processor I'm aware of, will average about 20 days from sale. (Other alternatives I'm intimately familiar with: Google Checkout will have the money in your bank account about 3 to 5 days from sale. Paypal can ACH to you within about 2 to 3 business days or, if you're using it for expenses, the time-to-spendibility is essentially zero since you can get a Paypal-branded debit card.)

Business reasons for not doing net 7: returns, chargebacks, and various other forms of abuse. (Not even necessarily abuse by the developer. Here's a fun fraud scenario: fraudster signs up for an affiliate account of your developer, buys their software 100 times with stolen cards, earning a few thousand bucks of affiliate payout which is essentially laundered away from the stolen cards. Six weeks later the first chargebacks start rolling in as people receive their bank statements and wonder why they're getting scammed by a payment processor they've never heard of. This is ridiculously common -- search for any of the big brands in processing and you'll find complaint threads of folks convinced that the processor or merchant is the fraudster trying to steal their money.)

Hi, the net 60 is just during the beta period and really there to combat fraud. I assure you it is not to help "bootstrap." We intend to lower it later to 30 days.

Edit: if you email us at feedback@pintpay.com we would consider lowering that number from 60 for approved/verified merchants.

I agree this abnormally high but this isn't an issue to me personally.

In practice, I'm using Paypal right now and I haven't withdrawn in at least two months. I suppose I should, mostly because I worry about random account freezing that Paypal tends to do. With a service that doesn't have that reputation, holding for 2 months isn't a deal breaker for me.

Downvote. I doubt they are using the funds for operating costs. Most likely to combat fraud.