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Poll: How do you bill recurring payments?

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31–40 of 96 posts

Re: Poll: How do you bill recurring payments?

#31

We're using Spreedly on top of Ogone and Atos Worldline. The notable thing about our setup is that we're based in the Netherlands and it took us 6 months of painstaking research and headaches to figure out the combination of services that would allow us to accept subscription payments. I wrote a blog post about the ordeal last week; I recommend it to anyone in a similar situation (eg. non-UK Europe): http://blog.qupl…

I plan to use exactly Spreedly on top of Ogone (I bought a Spreedly kit a while back and I'm in France).

Thanks for your blog post!

Re: Poll: How do you bill recurring payments?

#33
Switched from Amazon FPS to Amazon SimplePay to Chargify. Although very pricey, Chargify is much, much nicer. I really cringe when I see the bill, but I cringe more when I think about how much things sucked before we made the switch.

I talk more about it here: http://peachshake.com/2010/06/15/saas-subscription-billing-o...

Re: Poll: How do you bill recurring payments?

#35
post #4

I use Paypal's recurring billing API directly. It's not an ideal solution, but being based in the UK without a merchant account it's the only one I have available. I use ActiveMerchant and some extensions to talk to the Paypal API but I've had to write the logic to handle recurring billing myself. I'm trying to extract that logic into a gem and make it more robust. I'd like to eventually release it and possibly save…

We have also dealt with this manually. We'd love to see a more robust API out there that would integrate better with our existing payments solution as we do a mix of subs and license sales. Please post to HN if you get anything of the ground!

Re: Poll: How do you bill recurring payments?

#37

We use Braintree's vault, and we use ActiveMerchant to access it. We wrote all of the recurring/billing/invoicing logic ourselves. Beyond the initial implementation, we've done one sweeping overhaul of the logic to make some improvements and simplify things after learning a lot from the first pass. We built it in late 2008, and either the companies that handled recurring stuff didn't exist when we were building it, o…

I did the same thing a while back; you might want to look into the actual braintree gem itself, it's pretty solid. AM is now (for BrainTree, anyway) a pretty simple wrapper on top of it: https://github.com/Shopify/active_merchant/blob/master/lib/a...

Re: Poll: How do you bill recurring payments?

#38

We use Braintree's "Vault" for card storage and have a custom-built set of methods for handling the rebilling. Like jpallen, I'd like to release our logic as a gem, as it took us longer than it should to hack it together. They offer a rebilling service, but I really want to know how my billing system is working, so that if it breaks somehow, I know what's going on with it.

> I'd like to release our logic as a gem,

Good! Do it! It's really easy: http://timeless.judofyr.net/making-ruby-gems

Is your stuff built on top of braintree's gem, or did you re-implement all of the actual calls to the API? You might want to check that out, it could simplify your code...

Re: Poll: How do you bill recurring payments?

#40
post #22
post #20

Any comment from Australian devs as Im about to go through this myself. PayPal is the anti christ, not an option for me.

Anti-christ because of things done in the past that you are generally afraid will affect your startup or because of a general sentiment of them being "evil"? If the latter, then not evaluating them because of it sounds like bad business mojo to me...

We are trying to go through NAB now for a US billing merchant account and honestly they are the Antichrist. It's been three and a half months and we are still not there yet. Painful is an understatement.
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