Ask HN: Recurring billing solutions, summer 2012 edition | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Recurring billing solutions, summer 2012 edition

8 pointssperic6 comments

At this moment (July 2012), what are some of the better, more affordable recurring billing solutions available?

http://www.ChargeBee.com - we did a Show HN to ge feedback sometime back and got some very good feedback. Went back and improved on several things and continuing to do that.

We have a good roadmap of solutions to provide you everything you need to run business. Analytics and a few other useful integrations based on customer inputs is in the works. We are still in private beta working with a short list of customers whom we are working with closely (though we are unable to serve everyone immediately as some of the payment integrations are due to be completed by July / August).

We have integrations readily available with BraintreePayments (US), Samurai (not sure if they still do underwrite new accounts and we did this earlier), WorldPay (Singapore). Authorize.net will be ready in another week.

And we support multiple payment gateway integration. We do not have a vault to store card with us and we store in the respective payment gateway.

Here is the link to our API docs: https://apidocs.chargebee.com/

I am one of the founders and will be happy to help. :)

For Vidpresso.com, we use Stripe. It's so easy to set up, and has a really modern REST / Webhook-y api.

2.9% feels expensive, but when you realize you don't have to set up any subscriber / coupon code / plan configuration logic, each charge seems a lot less scary.

Thirding (sorry) Stripe. They're fantastic. You can have your account up and running in about 5 seconds. No merchant account, no gateway. You don't have to deal with PCI compliance even if you store customers cards (you don't actually store them, they have an awesome API for this).

The fees aren't bad at all in my opinion when you take into account everything else.

Not only is the API fantastic, but their support is amazing.

Another large plus is the fact you don't need a business bank account like some merchant accounts require, mine goes straight to my personal checking account (for now anyway, once I start actually making real money I'll reconsider this).

Seconding Stripe.

If the time of setting up payments takes away from other things, Stripe is the ideal payment processor IMO, as they are the most respectful of integration time of any payment processor I've seen. You can literally be up, running and billing actual customers with Stripe within an hour or so.

If your goal is to maximize revenue, or your entire product is built except for billing, then perhaps Stripe isn't the ideal processor, but it's still pretty darn good by most standards.

Spreedly.com's still going strong; used them when they were first getting started in 2007. They're still top in my book because they've done the best job of integrating with numerous payment gateways, and their Stripe-competitor, SpreedlyCore, is looking promising.

http://spreedly.com/ https://spreedlycore.com/

It's also nice that their pricing is all flat-fee per-transaction.

For us UK based devs I know this can be a huge pain point. I recently switched BugMuncher over to Fastspring Saasy from PayPal and I can't recommend them enough. Integration was much easier then paypals, and it works out cheaper in fees.

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