

Spreedly. Funding, expanding our horizons, pivoting - jusben1369
http://blog.spreedly.com/2013/03/04/spreedly-funding-expanding-our-horizons-pivoting/

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thetrumanshow
Spreedly (non-core) customer here. Curious what these changes mean for
existing customers. Your post is a good history lesson to bring everyone up to
speed, but it lacks details as to how you're handling existing accounts... is
Spreedly being deprecated?

Edit: Nvm, finally read the pricing page. Apparently, you're just switching to
a metered billing where one of the meters is a payment gateway token. Also
each plan-level now includes a limit to the number of cards on file.

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jusben1369
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.

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thetrumanshow
I want to take a minute here and say that, by far, Spreedly has been the best
SaaS provider I've ever worked with. Granted, it doesn't hurt that they hand
me fistfuls of subscription revenue from my products.

But, here I was having misgivings for a brief moment, and it was silly of me.
You know, these guys keep doing it right.

~~~
jusben1369
Many thanks Barry. Much appreciated.

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mgkimsal
Is this really a pivot? Maybe I'm not seeing it, or I may be blending what I
had known (or thought I'd known) was coming for a while anyway - focusing on
'core'. Is there something more I'm missing?

By no means a criticism - great job to hear about the funding, and continued
success to you guys!

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jusben1369
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.

~~~
mgkimsal
True. The messaging _has_ changed, and good for that. Nathaniel was telling me
last summer(?) that spreedly handled regular payments, not just recurring, and
I found it hard to find references to that on the site, and hard to find docs
at the time. It seems the opposite is true now - I'm not seeing any explicit
reference to recurring billing on the quickstart page:
<https://core.spreedly.com/manual/quickstart>

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mattberg
Can someone further explain the "gateway token" concept? From reading the site
I'm not 100% clear on the meaning.

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jusben1369
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.

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mattberg
Thanks for the explanation. Those are the use cases I was kind of thinking, it
just didn't seem 100% clear in the pricing page, especially when my use case
would probably just be one or two tokens.

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drewjoh
I was confused by this initially too. I think it's just "token" that throws me
off. I know what a gateway is, so maybe just saying "25 Gateways" or
"$10/Gateway" instead of "gateway token" might be better? Just my initial
thought.

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jusben1369
The problem we run into there is someone supports 8 gateways (for example) but
has 500 customers with 500 individual merchant accounts. They might come away
with the impression they just need to pay for 8 gateways. So those folks
understand this but we do end up seeming overly complicated for someone who
doesn't have that complex use case.

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soral
great to hear, I've been meaning to use Spreedly/core almost a year now, but
didn't take the payment step yet.

It would be interesting if subscriptions were also in Spreedly Core, but I
can't imagine how it would work, I guess spreedly core could ping the servers
of the customer if the CC failed or expired, but I guess it's unnecessary
since an effort is always required in that case, so building the subscription
logic on the code seems logical.

I haven't used spreedly core yet, but I really like the team, they always
answer emails and help around payment topics, can't wait to solve gateway
problems and start using spreedly

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jusben1369
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.

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kohlhofer
Nice work, great site, bright future!

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mamcx
This could work for latin america? Without need to incorporate in USA like
with stripe?

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boundlessdreamz
Do any of the gateways, accept Indian merchants and also support billing in
USD?

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jusben1369
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.

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boundlessdreamz
Those restrictions do not apply if the gateway is not Indian. I can vault my
card with Amazon/Google etc without any problems.

But mainly I want to bill non Indians. So the problem is finding a
gateway/merchant account which can be setup by Indians from India.

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jusben1369
In India we support HDFC and the MiGS gateway (which in turn is used by Indian
acquiring banks)

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boundlessdreamz
Yeah. I know. But AFAIK they do not support USD. Am I wrong? Also Indian
payment gateways sucks. I wanted to know if there are other gateways which
support Indian merchants

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btipling
Why only XML responses? :(

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ntalbott
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.

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drcongo
The first link in your article is broken.

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jusben1369
Fixed! Thanks.

