Comment by joshstrange | Hacker News Reader

Comment by joshstrange | Hacker News Reader

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I had never heard of Bolt before today that I can remember but since I'm woking on a project that needs CC processing (it has Stripe currently, I'm moving to another provider) I was interested. I looked at their website and immediately felt like it wasn't aimed at me. I don't care about 1-click anything, I want to know about how to use this, api calls, how to capture an auth, etc. I see the developer menu item and I click on "Get Started". Immediately I'm shown a list of plugins for CRM/e-commerce-type tools which, and maybe this is elitist, but that's turn off for me. Don't get me wrong I cut my chops on WP/Drupal and the like but it been a long time and I want docs with an API call to charge a card or similar. I see the "API" and "SDK" in the sidebar and check both out. API docs are swagger, that's fine, but it's not clear at all and the "workflow" to charge a card is. I go look at "SDK" and they only have an iOS SDK, is this a joke? Not to mention that it looks like you need to bring your own payment processor [0] and "The processor implementation timelines average 2-4 weeks.", at this point you are better off talking directly to someone like First Data. Let's not get started on the apparent "contact us for pricing".

Bottom line: Bolt is completely uninteresting to me as a developer and the creator sounds like sour grapes in his twitter tirade. I'm glad to be moving off Stripe for way cheaper processing but I love their docs, dashboard, etc and I'll miss it. Bolt would have been discarded as not a serious competitor almost immediately had I seen it back when I first integrated with Stripe. In fact, they seem to provide something 100% different to Stripe and even have Stripe as a payment processor.

[0] https://help.bolt.com/developers/guides/processor-guides/

"Contact us for pricing" means ridiculous pricing and i'll instantly disregard it

just curious - why are you moving away from stripe?

Pricing and pricing only. The flat fee is one of the biggest killers. $0.30/per makes it near impossible to offer certain features and 2.9% is decently high (and that's before you turn on any other services). Instead I'm able to get ~2% (varies by card, some are higher, some are lower, but I'm just paying the interchange fee + a small percent to the processor) and zero flat fee on the transaction.

EDIT: Just to expand on what I'm doing, it's software for food festivals where people pre-load their accounts with money and then spend it at the vendors. It means we only need in-person CC terminals in a few places and vendors can use their smart phones to charge someone's account. It also means all transactions go though our software and the festival can take it's cut. Without this vendors would provide.... creative records of how much they sold (festival takes X% so if the vendor can hide some sales it can keep 100% of those sales). Because of this there isn't a ton of room for more percentages/flat-fees to be taken out. If someone wants to buy something and needs 1 more dollar in their account then we give up over 30% to Stripe. Even on a $5 charge we give up close to 9%. If I can get rid of the flat fee we could do a number of things like just linking a card and charging it on the fly with every purchase instead of first loading money onto your account. I'd be killed with fees if I did that with Stripe since we are talking about $2/3/5 items (it's a food festival, the portions/prices are small so you can try a bunch of things). Also things like "auto-reload if your account dips below $X", with Stripe I'd need to make the reload amount minimum decently high to avoid taking a bath in fees.

Insightful. Would you mind talking about where you move your payment processing?

CardConnect [0] is what I'm going to use. They aren't as flashy as Stripe but they support everything I need:

* JS/Web tokenization (via iframe + postmessage)

* iOS/Android SDK to work with an array of in-person readers

* Apple and Google Pay support

* And then all the API endpoints to charge a card, create a customer, etc that you would expect

[0] https://cardconnect.com/

This is a weird coincidence, but it made me chuckle nonetheless.

(CardConnect) Bolt[0] is a thing, which seems to have launched in 2017[1].

[0]: https://cardconnect.com/bolt [1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20170406214956/https://cardconne...

Haha, when I first saw "Bolt" I thought "Hey that's a CardConnect thing!" because I've integrated with it before and will be using Card Connect's Bolt again for this project. I scoured the Card Connect website to make sure it wasn't some kind of partnership and it's not the same thing (not saying you said it was or thought it was, I thought it might be at first).

I can say that Bolt is pretty easy to work with from my experience. I have a wired Bolt reader (IPP320) sitting next to me as I type this (I've worked with it through my employer) and a wireless/BT VP3300 in my bag (which is what I'm going to use for my food festival stuff).

Nothing beats Stripe's docs and the community around it (both in info/SO-answers and in things like SDKs) but CardConnect and Bolt are easy enough. That said I wish their onboarding was streamlined. I had to be in 4-5 meetings with them before I got credentials to start coding and I'll have to be in a few more before I go live. I think you can use their UAT or similar without an account but I wanted to make sure they'd accept me before I started working on it. Super nice people, it just doesn't compare to a few clicks with Stripe and boom, you are off to the races.

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