Ask HN: What is a good alternative to PayPal? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What is a good alternative to PayPal?

77 pointsNadaAldahleh46 comments

Requirements: 1- has recurring payments 2- invisible to end user 3- accepts canadian companies 4- (nice to have) easy to set-up 5- (nice to have) does not require a merchant bank account.

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I've said this before (for which I've been roundly criticized), and I'll say it again.

The reason there is no good alternative to PayPal, and especially an alternative that works internationally, is the regulatory environment around money transmission in the United States. If startups expect to solve this problem, there needs to be a coordinated effort to change that environment just as there was a coordinated effort to combat SOPA.

Exhibit A - http://www.thinkcomputer.com/corporate/whitepapers/heldhosta...

Exhibit B - http://www.plainsite.org/flashlight/case.html?id=716056

Exhibit C - http://www.plainsite.org/issues/index.html?id=1

Exhibit D - http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/displaycode?section=fin...

To head off the most common objections: PayPal is grandfathered in at this point. You can only get away with breaking the law and hoping no one will notice for so long. The penalties for violation are criminal (federal felony), not civil. And yes, I'm biased as the head of a payments company affected by the law, but I'm not the only one, and I'm not wrong.

What happened to the Visa Personal Payments reply to this? It seemed like a pretty big deal.

Hi Aaron I'm interested in this space too, especially around the latter. The issue with money transfers U.S & regulatory practices hindering any innovative development on the international front. What have your experiences been with facecash in that area?

I'm going with "wait for Stripe to arrive" personally.

We're using Stripe - it's out already.

Also check out Dwolla - http://dwolla.com

Stripe looks good, but its not available for canadian companies. Dwolla doesn't seem to have a way to do invisible recurring payments.

Ditto. We're with PayPal now, but we'd like to change. The UI for tracking down payments is horrible, plus, it seems like they could just take our money at any point, and we'd need a million people on the Internet to cry out to get it back.

Wait for V.me by Visa to arrive.

Looks like the open beta is out for developers: https://developer.v.me/

Full service launch due in early 2012.

Yeah... I'm in Canada and am not-so-patiently waiting.

One of the best services out there is http://www.braintreepayments.com/ but you can also look at http://www.2checkout.com. Both of them have great solutions depending on what you need. We are migrating from PayPal to BrainTree this spring.

They don't seem to provide an all-in-one service for non-US customers.

Contact William Ready, he is the CEO of BrainTree and very accessible. There are many Global companies using their service so it might be worth dropping him a message just to clarify. http://www.linkedin.com/pub/william-ready/b/203/1b1

Why would you migrate to BrainTree instead of Stripe? The latter costs about the same and seems to have a much nicer API and use case.

2checkout does not have a great API (they do have an API), and their subscription reporting is lacking.

I like Saasy (http://saasy.com/). It's frictionless and supports international merchants but a little pricier than other options.

looks like it has all the requirements. I'll dig in deeper and see. thanks.

Using them right now - pretty easy to implement. Sadly, my product has not seen any purchases yet so I can't comment on the whole money part of it yet.

Possibly one of the Amazon payments solutions?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Payments

As a consumer I personally prefer Amazon Payments. They already have my information and their checkout is familiar.

I can't say if they support international payments though (but they're a good "for US customers" option!)

I'm in Ireland and pay through Amazon for JungleDisk.

Not available to non-US merchants.

I think WePay deserves mention here, though AFAIK they don't yet support Canadian businesses. They don't require a merchant account, support recurring payments, and can be made fairly though perhaps not completely invisible. I've found their API quite easy to use.

WePay is good for selling tickets or selling items through their web store, not for general ecommerce. Its not useful for developers.

Have you actually looked at their API? I'm using it for something quite different from that. (My site isn't live yet or I'd show you.)

Go with Beanstream as the payment gateway, and either Chargify or Recurly for the recurring payments. I've personally had no problem with this combination on many projects, and all of my clients are canadian companies.

It's not my clients are canadian, it's my company is canadian and Beanstream does not work with non-US. I'll take a look at chargify though :)

His clients are the ones accepting payments though, so they need Canadian merchant accounts. Beanstream accepts Canadian merchants. We just started the sign up process with them last week, from Victoria BC.

We're going with Beanstream + Chargify. You might want to take a look at this: http://expletiveinserted.com/2011/10/02/stripes-new-online-p...

Samurai from FeeFighters https://samurai.feefighters.com/. They seem to be beta-testing their service for Canadian companies.

their site and APIs say nothing about recurring payments. I don't think they support it.

During my search, I have found that Stripe is the best solution out there. There is even a post with cost comparison (http://expletiveinserted.com/2011/10/02/stripes-new-online-p...) that demosntrates that is also cheap.

Unfortunately, Stripe is for USA-only.

An alternative is, as some people already mentioned, http://saasy.com/, which is a FastSpring service.

Since you mention recurring payments as a priority, I'd recommend Chargify. They give a list of gateway options here: http://chargify.com/payment-gateways/

One of my businesses is an online retailer. We use PayPal Standard (but don't require a PP account) simply because the UI for generating postage and tracking shipments is very easy. USPS has an open API, but I've yet to find a payment processor that integrates shipping.

I second this, http://chargify.com has many more features than Braintree, Spreedly, and Recurly. Also, they work with international merchant accounts/gateways.

Stripe.com, although not sure about #3.

Wait for Stripe. It should be there soon. Just wait for it. It is hands down the best option out there.

How "invisible" is critical? If not really, then Plimus looks nice, share*it also has subscriptions. Both are quite easy to integrate (web callbacks).

I haven't used it, but BMT Micro seems to offer the same kind of service.

You won't find anything quite like PayPal but some nice options include Payfirma, Versapay and Intuit GoPayment.

Stripe is the best right now. Great user interface, great API, and awesome staff. Give it a try.

Do you consider PayPal to be invisible to the end user?

PayPal standard is not, but PayPal Pro is. With Pro, the user doesn't need a Paypal account, would never get redirected to paypal site, and their credit card doesn't show paypal.

6 (nice to have) handles invoicing automatically.

Dwollar

check it out

its actually called Dwolla https://www.dwolla.com/

Consider Bitcoin yet?

Bitcoin is the best!

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