Accel Puts $34 Million In Online Payments Platform Braintree | Hacker News Reader

Accel Puts $34 Million In Online Payments Platform Braintree

techcrunch.com

33 pointsdan_manges7 comments

Great news for Braintree. What's impressive here is the kind of companies Accel is backing. Companies that are highly profitable without any initial funding and are now raising capital to really hit it out of the ballpark. 99Designs ($35M Series A), Atlassian ($60M Series A), Rovio ($42M Series A), & SquareSpace ($38.5M Series A). These are all great companies who once they found a great model went on to decide to dominate the market. Congrats all around!

Just wanted to say that working with Braintree to implement our payments solution last year was a great experience. I can't recommend them highly enough. It is amazing to be able to ask very specific questions about the API or chargebacks/terms/legal matters and be able to get clear explanations from a real person so quickly.

This is the kind of company that's supposed to get a VC round. Profitable, growing, unquestionable business model, solving pain points, etc.

From a few months ago... Braintree: Bootstrapped, Profitable, & Proud "I think VC-funded companies are more inclined to throw money and people at opportunities and problems" http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2800-bootstrapped-profitable-...

Congrats to them - this is another great win for Chicago.

Based on the article it seems they did $4.5 mil in rev in 2010... curious to see how that led to such a high valuation, even given the growth numbers.

In terms of future growth, we've had Braintree customers switch to other processors using FeeFighters and were blown away by how much money they saved. Customers love their service but get angry when they realize how much they have overpaid on their merchant account. I wonder if it's sustainable from that perspective.

EDIT: In case it was not clear from what I said above, I work for FeeFighters.

Also - Bryan has posted a response about why they raised on Braintree's blog. Valid points. http://www.braintreepayments.com/inside-braintree/braintrees...

Is their service a lot better? We noticed the same thing when pricing them out (via feefighters of course), but figured there had to have been some reason for the higher cost.

I'm using Braintree for my new app (https://www.getcloak.com/) and am extremely happy. They have incredibly responsive customer support, both business and technical.

When I reported a unicode-related bug in their Python API, the technical team responded coherently within a few hours and released a new API revision within 48. Can't beat that...

On the API front there are some minor issues. For example, their subscription API is excellent except when dealing with upgrades/downgrades. Upgrades can be prorated and billed immediately; downgrades (sensibly) must wait until the next billing cycle. Unfortunately, the downgrade is _recorded_ immediately -- you don't have a notion of a pending plan. Hence a user can downgrade/upgrade repeatedly during a _single_ billing cycle and end up spending an arbitrarily large amount of money.

For a clear disclosure, you work for FeeFighters and as such your comments regarding our customers (I work for Braintree) may not be completely impartial.

Edit: thanks for the edit.

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