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It's interesting that the author didn't mention a third option– you can build your own subscription management and dunning code, and then foist the high-risk cr
by texel 16y ago
It's interesting that the author didn't mention a third option– you can build your own subscription management and dunning code, and then foist the high-risk credit card related stuff onto a third party. I'm not sure I'd necessarily suggest doing this over going with a provider like Chargify or Spreedly (both look like cool services), but that's what we've done at Onehub, and while it was painful, it's worked extremely well. We just store tokens and let our payment gateway, Braintree, deal with the actual card data and charging.
Additionally, if you are going to write any of your own billing code, I sure hope it's not buggy and poorly tested. If it is, you should probably test and debug it before unleashing it to your customers :)
- MicahWedemeyer 16y agoI did mention that option, and basically said it was a bad idea. I think that most SaaS apps are better served by offloading as much as possible onto third parties. Just like I wouldn't encourage someone to write their own web server, I wouldn't encourage them to write a subscription billing service. It's a pain. Pay someone else to handle that and focus on your core competency, whatever that is.
- texel 16y agoRight, having written a billing system, I'd agree with you wholeheartedly. I just got the impression that the article conflated rolling your own billing system with actual handing of the payments and credit card storage. Perhaps I was mistaken.