

Ask HN: Best way to accept weekly subscriptions? - vantran

Hello HNers, I need your help...<p>Trying to find the best way to accept weekly subscriptions on our site. Here's the use case. We want subscriptions to start on the same day for everyone, so when people first subscribe, we charge them a prorated amount for the first week, then a regular X dollars/week rate.<p>We're using PayPal right now. I've recently discovered that for people who sign up using their Paypal account instead of their credit card, we cannot change their subscriptions by more than 20% every 180 days. This is unacceptable for us as we'll need to cancel their current subscription and create a new one, instead of just edit their current subscription profile. I also don't like PayPal in general and want to move away from it asap.<p>We've checked out Braintree after a few people recommended it. However Braintree's recurring billing doesn't support anything less than 1 month billing period. So we'd have to manually run our subscription charge ourselves. We want to avoid that if possible, don't have too much spare time to monitor that stuffs.<p>Anyone else you would highly recommend? I haven't used Authorize.net, and am a bit scared of their confusing website...
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ambirex
You should be able to use Braintree or Authroize.net but you'll have to build
you're own reoccurring billing system.

They both offer a PCI compliant way to store the client's credit cards
(Braintree's Vault or Authorize.net's CIM) from there you can issue a command
to charge their credit cards on file for the amount for your subscription.

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mellinwood
Take a look at Recurly and at Zuora. Both have robust APIs and are designed to
help with these problems. They should have the infrastructure and the
flexibility to help. Braintree's recurring support is definitely not robust
enough for what you're describing--you'd have to build everything yourself
using their API.

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malyk
spreedly is another recurring billing option.

