Ask HN: Merchant account and payment gateway for subscription-based web apps? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Merchant account and payment gateway for subscription-based web apps?

37 points_pius19 comments

I'd love to hear people's thoughts on merchant accounts and payment gateways like Authorize.net, Paypal, Braintree, etc.

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Feel free to look at any of the plethora of past threads about this.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=526517

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=200920

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=175186

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=344030

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=389692

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=198502

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=470128

Also, you might find the site http://searchyc.com/ useful for finding answers to these and other common questions.

Braintree has a very high monthly fee (200 a month min) and so does not seem good for startups (they seem to forget about the fact that startups grow).

I tried to negotiate with them... They came down to 100 min which was still more than double my other options. At this point when I said it was higher than I was comfortable with, the sales rep started asked me "what would you propose?"

I wasn't sure how to answer that, but when I finally answered "how about matching or nearly matching the minimum given by x" (which was around 40 a month minimum) and I'll sign up today. At that point, the salesperson sent me a miffed-sounding response saying they can't go below the 100 a month minimum (why ask what I propose, then?) and walked away from the negotiation. YMMV.

edit: checked my emails with them and edited for accuracy

Great info, thanks a bunch.

My recent experience with Braintree was the opposite. I received an excellent offer from CHASE Paymentech and presented this to Braintree. They were willing to waive the monthly minimum and sent me a schedule of straightforward low rates, however, they still weren't as low as CHASE Paymentech.

They even went so far as to say that I got a better deal with CHASE Paymentech and subtly suggested we use them until we felt we needed Braintree's value added services which seem to be the best in the industry.

Braintree seem like good people, I went to grad school with Brian and he is sharp and seems honest.

I am really curious about how you compared the CHASE paymentech deal with the Braintree deal. Were they interchange-plus rates? Or were they qualified / midqualified / nonqualified? Did you know how the categories compared to each other?

Disclaimer - I have a startup in the space (transfs) so this is market research for me. :)

Braintree may have a high minimum monthly fee - but I don't think you should skimp on quality when it comes to a merchant/gateway account.

Just try searching for competitors in Twitter - you'll quickly get a indication on the type of customer support they provide: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=authorize.net

So far I've found the people at Braintree to be friendly and extremely helpful.

Also, if you don't see your business rising above the minimum monthly fee then it's probably not really worth your while. After your first 20 customers or so, you'll be paying exactly the same as most of the other gateways.

It isn't a matter of not rising past the minimum monthly fee--it is a matter of the burn rate while ramping up when you're bootstrapping. Shortening the runway is a bad thing.

If their sales person hadn't blown me off, I might have settled on them after looking around. As it was, I decided to hold off opening the account until we were farther down the road with development.

Merchant Account with local bank + Authorize.net has been our choice

Also: Previous Thread http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=175186

Thanks a bunch for the info and the link to the older thread.

None of the above. Don't deal with all that hassle (and a major hassle it can be!) and use http://www.zuora.com instead - they are cheap for what they save you!

Interesting, thanks for the info. Is their pricing still as high as the other threads mention? (e.g. $1k/month)

We decided to forego the merchant account and instead have been using Amazon Simple Payments with success. They've been excellent at closing transactions.

looks like its new but very curious to see what kind of results this progresses with: http://transfs.com/

@brm: TransFS.com is my startup, and I seriously considered posting a response to this thread a couple of hours ago... but I didn't want to spam HN with self-promotion.

Indeed we are new, having launched in beta about 6 months ago. However, we have a number of aggressive processing bidders on our site... and I honestly believe that our marketplace offers some of the best pricing out there, especially for new merchants. We are always improving the product, and have plenty of work to do, but our customers have been very happy overall with the comparison shopping experience that we offer.

As my co-founder put it in an email to one of our potential customers today: "TransFS is the second startup for both the cofounders of our business (Sean and Josh) and we are radically passionate about helping business owners get a fair shake and reduce the way-too-high profits of the credit card processors."

Anyway, thanks for the mention!

TrustCommerce got some good recommendations on the 37 signals blog.

SecureTrading, in the UK, has second-to-none customer service.

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