

Online payment options for SaaS (includes those supported in UK) - radimm
http://blog.ontestpad.com/2011/12/online-payments-for-saas-billing.html

======
dirtyaura
If you need target Germany or Nordic countries, checkout Klarna
<https://klarna.com/en/business>

They have ok APIs, although they are e-commerce focused.

They also just got a whopping 155 million dollar investment from DST and
earlier investment round is from Sequoia. I'd expect them to open up in new
countries soon. [http://www.arcticstartup.com/2011/12/09/klarna-
receives-155-...](http://www.arcticstartup.com/2011/12/09/klarna-
receives-155-million-financing-from-dst-global-and-general-atlantic)

~~~
moe
_155 million dollar investment_

Hopefully they'll be able to afford a webdesigner.

Their site would neither tell me if they're available in my country nor could
I find _any_ pricing information whatsoever. Instead I was left with motion
sickness due to all the flickering and bouncing...

------
radimm
As the most discussions here on HN focus on moving away from PayPal, but don't
offer options for UK/EU based companies - this blog post provides good
overview what's available.

So it's basically:

* FastSpring

* Amazon FPS

* PayPal Payments (Pro)

\+ simplifiedecommerce

Did I miss something?

~~~
gizmo
Yes, the part where UK != EU.

Fastspring is available in all EU countries, I think, but Amazon FPS is
available only in the UK. Not in Germany, Belgium, Netherlands, France, I
think. Paypal Business Payments? UK Yes, rest of europe? Nope. Basically, for
the table to be useful to people from the EU it would have to have a column
for every EU country.

Also, the PCI compliance part is not very accurate. You can get PCI compliance
by simply paying some certification company and filling out a self-assessment
document. Techies always think that because PCI is about safety of credit card
data in order to qualify you have to prove that you act responsibly with
credit card data. This is not the case. It's strictly a legal matter. You're
properly PCI compliant if you meet the arbitrary legal requirements.

~~~
risratorn
Are there actually any modern payment gateways available worldwide that don't
suck? I've tried Paypal and Ogone and they both are a serious hassle. How i
would loooove stripe or wepay to become available worldwide!

~~~
gizmo
I don't think there are any. In what way was Ogone a serious hassle? Was it
difficult to get to the point where you could accept payments? Payments that
didn't get processed correctly? Downtime?

~~~
risratorn
Ogone works when you get over the draconic configuration and contact setup
with banking instances. From a technical point it works good but please don't
get me started on the user experience, that's just one big fail from start to
end.

------
highace
This is great, I was shortly going to be looking for a 'Stripe in the UK' and
this has saved me a lot of trouble, thanks.

Secondly, I think your product looks good, especially considering it appears
you're wore all the hats during it's production.

~~~
radimm
All thanks goes to ontestpad.com owners, I'm just re-posting the article which
popped in google search when I was thinking about writing such an overview.

------
noodle
5.9% plus $.95 or 8.9% flat per order with a minimum of $0.75 is pretty steep
pricing.

------
datadon
I'm curious as to why there was no inclusion of 2checkout?

I have used it recently for recurring payments (I'm in the UK, clients around
the world) and it seems to be going okay.

It's not the smoothest solution (redirect to their checkout process), but they
send a lot over postbacks to ease integration.

(Hopefully no one is going to come in with a showstopper!)

~~~
stefanbutlin
Didn't find them when I went looking, that's all. FWIW, FastSpring's checkout
is also a redirect, but they give you some pretty flexible control over the
markup and CSS so its quite simple to keep the branding consistent.

------
tomblomfield
If you're looking to take regular payments from UK customers, check out
gocardless.com. We're based on Direct Debit (bank-to-bank payments), so
charges are only 1% per transaction

We're still in closed trial, but happy to give out invitations to HN users

Email me - tom@gocardless.com

~~~
smiler
This is flawed from the start.

1\. Many people will only use a CC online for the additional protection it
allows.

2\. Many people put all their spending on CC for the various point / bonus
schemes they have

3\. This limits you to UK people only. Surely the purpose for most people
creating a web app is to reach a global audience

~~~
MattRob
As a heads up I'm from GC but as quick responses:

1) It's little known but the protection under DD are arguably stronger than
those under cc
([http://www.bacs.co.uk/bacs/businesses/directdebit/collecting...](http://www.bacs.co.uk/bacs/businesses/directdebit/collecting/pages/customersrights.aspx));
but your point still holds for as long as this remains little known ;)

2) Fair point, although this varies a lot by country (consider CC usage in
Germany) and is not the case for B2B transactions

3) No it doesn't. There's a pan-European ACH network (SEPA DD), also if you
look at PayPal they offer Bank transfer in US & Europe using ACH in a similar
way

------
chrisharis
Don't think any of the SaaS billing providers today really suite SMBs in cost
wise. Merchant account costs, transaction costs, billing provider costs could
easily add up to around 10-20% of each transaction.

~~~
stefanbutlin
It doesn't get that expensive.

FastSpring's price is ALL IN. It includes the merchant account, payment
gateway and subscription features, and no setup fees nor monthly charges; just
the per-transaction costs as noodle commented.

Plus, sign-up and testing is totally free and still gets awesome customer
support; you only start paying them anything when you start selling your
service. This struck me as ideal for an SMB in its first year.

~~~
chrisharis
Great to hear it worked for you. But in my case if I'm selling 3k per month
with $5-10 per user, one option would charge me around $270 and other around
$500. Not really good for micro payment based products.

And this isn't about SaaSy. It's same with all services out there.

------
hm2k
Brilliant, well done. I had no idea most of these existed and have been using
Google Checkout since Paypal locked us out.

------
suking
Just get a merchant account and program it yourself - it's super easy to do. I
don't even understand a need for 3rd party recurring billing companies -
programming something to charge someone $X amount every X days is pretty dang
easy...

~~~
patio11
You're right, but that isn't the problem.

\+ What if we change gateways?

\+ What happens when someone gets a card declined for an unspecified? Retries?
What if the error was fatal? Sends an email? Does it cut their service
immediately or after a grace period? If they pay on day 2 of the grace period,
do they get 30 days of service or 28?

\+ What happens if someone wants to upgrade from the $29 / mo account to the
$79 / mo account on the 4th of March if their anniversary date was the 25th of
February in a leap year?

\+ A bug screwed up Bob's data and we're offering him $125 of credit to say
we're-so-sorry. You built that feature, right?

\+ Our accountant wants to know "How much have we billed this year?", "How
much have we collected this year?", and "How much money have we collected that
have we not earned yet?" You built that, right?

\+ Foo Corp filed a chargeback against payment #123456. This means we got a
callback ping and did something consequential as a result of it, right?

\+ Why are you answering these questions when you could be writing code that
people _actually pay for_?

~~~
suking
1) auth.net is always safe

2) you set it to whatever you want

3) easy - you decide - probably pro-rate

4) credits are easy

5) select sum(amount) from charges where date='this year'... the other thing
is just accounting by dates, up to individual company... easy reporting by
date

6) chargeback you get a fax or letter - respond back and keep templates for
each case - EASY

7) b/c then you're not paying someone else for a trivial service.

~~~
redguava
Your time is worth money. There is always going to be a magic number that
makes it worthwhile to pay someone to do something than to do it yourself.
There is a good chance these recurring billing systems fall under that magic
number.

If you're not sure how to work out that magic number, just work out how much
it costs you to live for 2 weeks, if this is going to take you 2 weeks to
develop, there's your number.

