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Comment by mhp | Hacker News Reader

I just discovered that FeeFighters got acquired due to this post. I'm so disappointed. This product does not belong at Groupon.

We've been emailing Sean recently to ask him about Samurai and I guess this explains the no response. I really loved what he was doing and sung the FeeFighters praises from the mountaintops whenever I could. I really wish that product had stuck around. All the info that they were producing on their blog was really just gold for businesses. The education they were giving on interchange plus pricing, etc, was really important (but I guess becoming less important now that places like Stripe are hiding all those complications behind their simple pricing).

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I had a great experience with Sean and FeeFighters before they were acquired. I can understand being in a crowded market and eyeing the exit. It could certainly be handled more gracefully. GroupOn should either support the product, or at the very least support people trying to migrate their data away. That's the really frustrating part of this. I lucked out to have this come to a head early on, with only 25 cards vaulted. If you have 250 or 2,500 ... :-(

I can understand it too, and I'm not sure the VC they had behind them were the enlightened kind (like USV, Spark, Andreesen, etc.) so there may have been some pressure from that end as well. But Groupon? That just says acqui-hire to me, and that sucks because they had really built an awesome product that I've used multiple times for multiple companies.

So, I'm with you on the GroupOn Fucker that ruined this. I hope Sean and the gang got handsomely rewarded for their years of work.

> I lucked out to have this come to a head early on, with only 25 cards vaulted. If you have 250 or 2,500 ... :-(

I'm stuck with a merchant account provider I detest, that's raised my rates just about every month for 3 years, because there's no way to get my customers' info back out of the payment gateway. It's either keep wasting money on rates nowhere near what I initially agreed to, with lousy support, or lose even more money by asking every customer to re-enter their billing info. Just a few percent deciding to ignore the mail and let their subscriptions lapse would be more costly than the fees.

These days, in the US at least, there's affordable options for both payment info vaults that can connect to multiple gateways, or gateways offered by merchant companies that will give you your data if you decide to leave them. A few years ago, that wasn't really the case.

Transfer away as many customers as you can.

To those who don't respond the first time, give them an offer for an X% discount for loyalty or something of the such. When they try to take advantage of it, then ask them to give you billing information once again.

You should hit 99.9% with that, and either take a loss on the custoemrs left over or more likely keep the legacy customers alive for years on to come.

:-(

Since users have to update their info when their cards expire, can you start vaulting cards in two places, and slowly migrate away?

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