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Comment by TedDoesntTalk | Hacker News Reader

Wish i'd known about this before signing up with Recurly and, later Stripe Subscriptions. Now existing subscriptions are locked in and I can't move to other vendors without losing those existing subscriptions.

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We manually migrated away over a period of time, letting new subscriptions and card updates happen on the new system, and letting Stripe slowly deplete. No bad experience for users and no loss on our end of revenue. In the end, whether it' s Stripe or not running the credit payments isn't so important. But they take so much of a cut for 'added value' that it made sense eventually for us to move away.

What did you migrate to? KillBill?

For anyone reading, do not get stuck in this situation. Use https://www.pci-proxy.com/ which will allow you to switch from Stripe to your own merchant account to any other service you want at any time. This has been a life saver to me when dealing with significant cardholder transactions. They handle all of the PCI-Compliance for you.

Does this integrate with KillBill? How do you manage subscriptions?

Yes this is a proxy tokenizer. This is from the KillBill FAQ: Don’t store sensitive data in Kill Bill. While most plugins have support for directly saving card or bank account numbers for instance, this should only be used for testing purposes or if you use a proxy tokenizer: if you don’t, use a third-party vault. Encrypt username and passwords in configuration files. https://killbill.io/faqs/

Stripe used to help you migrate away. Not sure if they still do.

Stripe indeed helped me migrate away to a vendor in a foreign country - they did a one-time encryption of all the raw credit card numbers for my new processor to import.

The trouble was finding a processor that actually knew what it meant to import the raw credit card numbers (because stripe wouldn't send it to me). But I found one and it all worked out.

> But I found one and it all worked out.

Who?

In Israel, sumit.co.il was able to cooperate with Stripe to import my tokens. (I had to pay for some developer time.)

I recommend Spreedly for things like this - having a card vault that's independent of your processor can massively de-risk operations and allow you to dynamically route specific transactions to different gateways to optimize profitability. While I haven't tried an import with them, they do support this workflow: https://docs.spreedly.com/guides/migrating/one-time/

I used to pay $15 per month for Spreedly. Then they raised the price to $500 per month (plus usage fees) and don't even have published pricing any more. Quite the change. I don't recommend.

If you worked out another system to do the subscription billing, you should be able to migrate the card tokens out to another payment processor. There are a few rules that the other processor needs to adhere to but I've migrated Stripe subscriptions out before.

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