Since many web applications using a recurring billing model, it would be interesting to see which services people use and why.
Please feel free to explain your choice in the comments.
Poll: How do you bill recurring payments?
1–10 of 96 posts
Re: Poll: How do you bill recurring payments?
#2Spreedly provides the logic, Paypal the gateway. It works, it took vanishingly little time to get working eight (a few hours, total), it is fairly inexpensive, and it didn't require a real merchant account, which would be difficult to get for my business. ("You live where? I see. And your business does what exactly? I see. And you have five figures in yearly sales? I see. Thanks, we'll pass.")
Re: Poll: How do you bill recurring payments?
#3I use the basic version of PayPal for subscriptions, but I've had issues with canceling customers' subscriptions without their explicit request, and the PayPal support is horrendous.
The fees are a little higher than some of the other services, but it integrates fine, so if you're okay with a clunky but easy to set up service, you might find it useful as well.
Re: Poll: How do you bill recurring payments?
#4I 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 some headaches amoung small developers who just want to get up and running quickly.
Re: Poll: How do you bill recurring payments?
#5I use freeSide; not sure I'd recommend it, but hey, open source and it handles things like service credits much better than most of the webapps I've tried. I use paypal and/or checks for actual billing
I'm considering switching to one of the webapps you kids seem to like, but most of them seem more like payment processors than billing systems, really, and if I have to maintain my own separate billing system, what's the point?
I am very interested in what other people's experiences have been with the webapps, though.
Re: Poll: How do you bill recurring payments?
#6We 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.
Re: Poll: How do you bill recurring payments?
#7We use PayPal Adaptive Payments. It's far from perfect: all paying customers must have a PayPal account and (in Europe) payments can be set up only for a year in advance. The term "preapproval" is also likely to frighten some customers.
Adaptive Payments was chosen as the standard recurring billing API doesn't allow us to automatically manage subscriptions, which becomes an issue if you have multiple plans. However, we had to implement billing scheduling ourselves. PayPal was for us the only option which didn't require us to store CC information on our servers.
Re: Poll: How do you bill recurring payments?
#8I've used Netbilling's recurring payment API before (patched support into ActiveMerchant a while back), but now I'm using Recurly with a PayPal gateway.
Re: Poll: How do you bill recurring payments?
#9Spreedly provides the logic, Paypal the gateway. It works, it took vanishingly little time to get working eight (a few hours, total), it is fairly inexpensive, and it didn't require a real merchant account, which would be difficult to get for my business. ("You live where? I see. And your business does what exactly? I see. And you have five figures in yearly sales? I see. Thanks, we'll pass.")
The spreedly FAQ implies that you need a merchant account.
"How does Spreedly pay me?
Spreedly never touches your customers' money - it goes straight into your merchant account."
Re: Poll: How do you bill recurring payments?
#10We keep the credit card numbers on file (yes, fully complying with PCI) and handle the recurring billing ourselves.