Spreedly. Funding, expanding our horizons, pivoting

Hi there. We mention in the post that subscription and recurring are critical requirements we hear and thus important. Just as say Stripe or Braintree have good basic recurring functionality for subscriptions we too think we'll get those requests with Spreedly. In particular, there are folks that don't get to chose the gateway they work with. (There are a lot of companies that have fantastic processing rates against older, bigger gateways) Those folks can/do use Spreedly as the front end and then just drop in those credentials for that gateway to process. So recurring is key there.

What will change is marketing subscriptions directly as a stand alone product/service. It'll be rolled into our overall messaging and be much more inline with how you might see a modern gateway answer that question vs a dedicated service like Chargify, ChargeBee, Fusebill etc. Btw more to come on this topic in length in a few weeks.

Hey there. I would say that if you were in a room where 100 people had actually heard of Spreedly 95 of them would have said "Oh yeah, the subscription management guys" If you heard about Spreedly and went to our website the messaging was around managing subscriptions. Core was in a different location. So it's a pivot in that now if you arrive at Spreedly.com all the messaging is around payments in general and not managing subscriptions in particular. But I agree if you've watched us a little more closely you've known Core (now just Spreedly) was where a lot of our attention had been.

It is tricky. Maybe we have more work to do. If you sign up for a single Stripe account you get a set of credentials. You drop those in to process against us. That's one payment gateway token. Say you you Stripe but also want to offer PayPal as a payment type. That's one for Stripe and 1 for PayPal (essentially two stand alone payment gateways) Ok, that's pretty vanilla. Ok, now you want to add Dwolla. That's a 3rd.

Second example. Say you are in the US and you do all your processing via Auth.Net. That's one token. Now you open a local office in Australia and want/need to process locally (say PIn Payments) That's a second token. Now you expand to the UK and use Sage Pay there (third token)

Final example. You're building the next Shopify or Freshbooks. Each of your customers will do their own processing and need their own merchant account. Each of those customers equates to one payment gateway token.

So a stand alone commmerce site with one gateway for credit cards and support for Dwolla and PayPal as a payment type = 3 tokens. The Uber model - where in each country you set up a new processor - probably equals 4 - 10 tokens. And then next Shopify = 100's to 1000's of tokens.

Today subscriptions and Spreedly (Core) are separate. We will merge it so that subscription customers can have the goodness of Spreedly. We also need to have recurring in the core product (now Spreedly) as we know we'll get requests. The timing is just hard to nail down.

Potentially - but there are some tough restrictions in India itself around vaulting cards and reusing them. So not sure how you'd manage that if you're an Indian based merchant.

The API has actually been in active use for almost two years, which means it is both battle tested and also showing its age. JSON support is actively planned for v2.