

Ask HN: What's your favorite recurring payments service? - jdlshore

I'm implementing a subscription-based website. What are your experiences with subscription payment processing services? I'm aware of recur.ly and Stripe, and I'd love to hear about your experiences with those services as well as any others.<p>I'm in this for the long haul, but I also have a need to stop bleeding money and start accepting money, so I'm looking for that magic combination of "do everything for me now" combined with lots of flexibility to change things down the road. Price isn't a huge factor at this point, within reason--every week of delay costs me more than the likely price differences--but I'd like the flexibility to optimize my costs downward in the future. I'm in the US, but a significant percentage of my existing users (and thus, my potential customer-base) are international.<p>From what I've seen of Stripe and recur.ly, it looks like recur.ly will do more for me in terms of getting started quickly and taking care of necessities like dunning and invoice emails. On the other hand, Stripe gets rave reviews here on HN and I really liked its straightforward approach and developer documentation.<p>I don't want to restrict the conversation to just Stripe and recur.ly, or just my specific needs, either. So, HN--what recurring payment services have you used, and what have their strengths and weaknesses been?<p>Thanks!
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dangrossman
I don't like outsourcing subscription logic at all. It's not difficult to do
yourself, yet expensive to outsource. It also ties you very tightly to a
company which can raise prices on you at any time (as Recurly has in the past,
without grandfathering). The switching cost when that happens is huge.

I store customer billing info at SpreedlyCore, which also provides a provider-
agnostic API for making charges/refunds against the stored credit cards. Right
now my processors of choice are PayPal Pro and an "interchange-plus"-priced
merchant account with Authorize.net as the gateway.

With SpreedlyCore, I can change payment providers overnight (to Stripe or
Dwolla or whoever becomes flavor-of-the-month) without changing any code or
having customers re-enter payment details. There's also no vendor lock-in to
SC -- they'll hand off the stored billing info to you if you want to leave.

I'm also in the US, and most of my customer base is also international.

~~~
dmgrow
Recurly did grandfather their early customers (we were one). For the most
part, I'm a fan of Recurly and it helped improve our renewal rates. However,
the major outage they experienced earlier this year (including substantial
data loss) was a real blow.

Yes, it's possible to build. But if building is delaying you from doing it
immediately, then buy -- it's worth it.

~~~
dangrossman
I was a Recurly beta user. 2010 I think. Just after I finished integrating
them and pushing it live on a 50k user site, they upped the pricing (and
changed pricing models entirely) with no grandfathering. There was some big
hooplah on their blog over that which led to some kind of special offer for
existing users, but it still wasn't the same as when we signed up. You were
probably in during a later price change.

I wasn't cool with having the company I was about to entrust my income --
putting food on my table -- changing the rules on a whim like that, so I had
to roll everything back and do billing myself. I'll never trust 'em again.

~~~
skrish
Genuine question, as I want to learn from this (as I run similar service). If
you were to launch one such critical service, what would you do differently to
assure your customers that you really care & won't screw them behind their
back? Definitive answer is: first of all don't screw your customers. But how
do you make sure you convey, you won't?

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jdlshore
In case anybody runs across this in the future... after evaluating Spreedly,
Stripe, Braintree, Recurly, Segpay, Dwolla, and FeeFighters, I decided to go
with Recurly + Feefighters.

Recurly has a focus on recurring payments that I like and a strong emphasis on
reducing failed charges that the others lacked (or didn't document well
enough). Their API seems reasonable and modern, and it looks like I can scale
from a "get it up right now" hosted payment page to a more-custom solution in
the future.

Fees look like they might be a bit high--$69/month, plus 1.25% + 10¢ per
transaction, PLUS merchant account fees--but having somebody else do a good
job of handling my dunning and invoicing emails well should be worth the cost.

Recurly will set you up with a merchant account (or so it seems) but I'm going
to augment that with a FeeFighters search. FeeFighters provides competitive
bids from merchant accounts provider. They're paid by the provider, so it
won't cost me anything to give them a shot and compare what they find to what
Recurly offers.

My second choice was Spreedly, for its abstraction over multiple services,
which would give me more flexibility in the future. Unfortunately, their
service came across as a bit immature and I had trouble finding webhook
information I was looking for in their documentation. Also, they didn't look
like they had the sophisticated dunning that Recurly offers, which was
Recurly's main draw for me.

