

Ask HN: Chargify, Recurly and others for a UK Startup - scsmith

I know this question has been asked before but I would like to know if anyone has any advice as to the best system for taking monthly recurring payments for a SaaS site. In particular though I'd like to know if there's anything specific to the UK market even though we still intend to charge in Dollars. Thanks!
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scottallison
So this is quite complex....

You need:

1\. Merchant Account 2\. Payment service provider 3\. Billing software (your
own or someone else)

Like you, we are UK based business, who wants to charge in dollars. Wanting
the flexibility of having our own merchant account, the better rates that
should give, and the portability of your customers (and their card details) I
first of all spoke to the banks. But some won't deal with startups without 2
years trading history (HSBC and LTSB for example). Some don't charge in
anything other than GBP yet (Clydesdale). And some, such as Barclays, although
they will charge in both USD and GBP want to charge exorbitant rates for USD
transactions. (2 or 3 times typical GBP rates).

You also need to make sure your merchant bank support recurring transactions;
not all do!

Setting up a merchant account can take weeks and a lot of paperwork and
hassle. In the end, for competitive multi currency rates and simplicity we
opened an account with PayPal Website Payments Pro. This took around 48 hours!

It also killed the requirement for a payment gateway, which reduces the cost
and complexity again. The downside with PayPal is, I believe, that if we
wanted to move in the future, our customers would have to re-key their payment
details with our new provider.

Regardless of whether you are with PayPal, or a bank+PSP the next step is the
recurring billing.

Putting together these three separate providers together can be a bit of a
nightmare. Although most banks support most payment gateways, most recurring
billing providers only support a minimal number of gateways.

If you are in the UK and want to use Chargify you have no choice but to use
DPS Payment Express (an Australian company) and they in turn only work with
HSBC or Barclays.

Recurly support (for the UK) Cybersource, SagePay and PayPal Website Payments
Pro.

Spreedly supports more, but for some reason that I now can't remember I
counted them out.

The thing about billing is that it quickly becomes pretty complex and the
smaller providers have all got limitations which could, depending on your
business model, cause problems. You can imagine that with however many
customers they all have, there will be a lot of requests to them along the
lines of "can you just add this... that would be great". It must be hard for
these guys to keep up with such requests.

When you look at the recurring billing providers you may also need to look at
whether they support multi currencies, and VAT.

That's all I can think of for now. Good luck!

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scsmith
Thanks Scott this is really useful. I also didn't realise that Chargify didn't
support UK Payments Pro.

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jjam6
We've been providing SaaS for about 5 years now and currently bill by invoice,
from the UK too. I've been looking at credit card billing for a few months now
and initially thought I'd use Chargify however now we've pretty much decided
on using Recurly.

Most likely for us we'll use Recurly + SagePay + Elavon. Will end up costing
about £60/mo in costs for our first few customers to pay by credit card but
then its all worthwhile.

Why Recurly and not Chargify? Recurly stores CC data so if we want to change
payment gateway we can. Recurly features VAT support and has a panel where
customers can log in. Yes it doesn't look good when customers log into
yourname.recurly.com. But what we plan to do is put this in an iframe, add an
SSL cert to our site and using the auto login token from the Recurly API so a
customer clicks on account and it looks like they're on our site. Custom CSS
is all thats needed to make it blend in.

I would be very interested to hear what billing solutions other UK companies
use that provide SaaS!

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lwalley
Quick note about us (Chargify): we now support <http://quickpay.net> as our
newest payment gateway. They are in Denmark and they support most UK & EU
merchants.

Thanks for considering us.

~~~
scottallison
You really need to put that on this page! <http://chargify.com/payment-
gateways/>

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simondfletcher
I think there's a business opportunity here. I too have been looking for a
recurring billing service for a SAAS application I'm working on. As a small,
Australian-based operation boot-strapping though, I'm really looking for a
one-stop shop - something that offers the convenience of setup and payment of
PayPal (no merchant account needed, reasonable rates, etc.) with the ease of
integration and flexibility of Spreedly or Recurly and the ability to keep the
customer on my site at all times.

Anyone know of one?

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scsmith
I should also highlight that I was referred to this site
<http://feefighters.com/> which looks pretty good but is for US customers
only.

