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Ask HN: European startup looking for a service for recurring billing
We love Stripe, Samurai, Braintree and services like that. Unfortunately, they're not available for companies outside of the US.
Most people say that we need to use Paypal. But we prefer to work with Stripe for example, because it really looks like a great service and a service with a refreshing way of working with payments.
Does anyone know or have experience with using a recurring service that is accessible for European companies?
- horatiumocian 15y agoWhat about Avangate (www.avangate.com)? I don't know too much about them, so I am not sure if they are what you're looking for.
- soitgoes 15y agoI've used Avangate. Pretty straightforward to setup; no prerequisites for a gateway or merchant account.
- jonnotie 15y agoWe need this!
- jamesmoss 15y agoI'd also like to know this. PayPal as a primary payment gateway should not be an option for any startup. What laws stop companies like Stripe, Recurly etc from easily launching in the EU?
- jonnotie 15y agoI think the problem is that the companies in Europe have individual rules. America is just one country.
- joshcrowder 15y agoWe have and are in a similar situation. Our setup at the moment is. HSBC Merchant Account, SagePay Gateway and Recurly for recurring billing. Its a lot of middle men and really isn't that great of a solution. I'm just about to setup Barclays EPDQ. It looks good. 3% charge and £10 per month for the privileged.
- rlivsey 15y agoWe were using Spreedly to abstract out the payment gateway side of things for our subscriptions. However, to use them you need to be able to disable CVV checking using PayPal's "advanced fraud management filters". The same applies for Recurly and other similar services AFAIK. Unfortunately PayPal wouldn't let us do this as we don't have enough trading history etc... so until we get a merchant account we're having to use PayPal's own recurring billing APIs. We'd love for there to be a viable alternative to PayPal, Stripe's API looks gorgeous in comparison.
- davidvanleeuwen 15y agoIt's hard to find out what other startups (from Europe) use for billing. Can anyone give any examples? I understand that the rules are different and that most of the banks here are probably old-fashion, but isn't there a way to work around al those problems?
- petercooper 15y agoA slightly unconventional, but doable, approach for businesses aiming at the US market (or otherwise working primarily in US $) is to incorporate a subsidiary in the US and handle billing there.
- davidvanleeuwen 15y agoIs it actually possible to start a subsidiary as an European citizen?
- mhd 15y agoYou don't have to be a resident to incorporate, although (as always) the laws often are quite arcane. If I remember correctly, taxation differs massively depending on whether your European company owns the US corporation/LLC or whether individual persons do. You have to register with a state, and Delaware seems to be the preferred one, as they're basically a tax haven. The Liechtenstein of the US…
- davidroetzel 15y agoI am also looking for something like this. The best I could come up with so far is fastspring.com. They offer their services to european customers and even handle european VAT. I have not had a chance to try them out, though. Maybe someone has some experience to share?
- BSousa 15y agoI already mentioned in the other thread: http://www.saasy.com http://www.saasy.com No direct experience with the service but same guys that offer Fastpring (non recurring) which I recommend!
- moomerman 15y agoI'm working on https://subsify.com/ https://subsify.com/ to try and fill the gap in recurring payments for UK and EU businesses. At the moment we're only partnered with SagePay as a Payment Gateway so if that sounds good to you get in touch.
- martinkallstrom 15y agoYou need to work on your presentation. Replacing "try", "working on", and "if that sounds good to you" would go a long way. Like this: "I have developed https://subsify.com/ https://subsify.com/ which is a service filling the gap in recurring payemnts for UK and EU business. We currently support SagePay as Payment Gateway, which will fulfill the needs of most people. I would encourage anyone struggling with recurring payments in the UK to get in touch, we will probably be able to help you out."
- gizmo 15y agoWho has experience with Ogone (in combination with Atos, EMS or Paysquare) or Chronopay?
- jamesmoss 15y agoI looked into Chronopay, it seems a bit shady. Their co-founder was arrested recently too http://krebsonsecurity.com/2011/06/chronopay-co-founder-arrested/ http://krebsonsecurity.com/2011/06/chronopay-co-founder-arre...
- mahcode 15y agoWould it be possible for you to open a US account with an online bank and have all online payments go there? Or would this be a big no no?
- davidvanleeuwen 15y agoI'm not an US citizen. I guess that you need a social security number and be an American citizen to open a bank account in the US.
- marquis 15y agoIt's near impossible to open an bank account in many countries (specifically developed countries) without residency. I would also expect that if a US bank account was being used the IRS might question about taxes, as payment is occurring in the US, as far as they are concerned?
- beggi 15y agoYou can open up a bank account in the US without US residency - but it's more of a hassle than just using a service that supports your country because of tax issues and such.
- jot 15y agoWe use Chargify with Payment Express hooked up to Barclaycard and American Express merchant services. It works great. We lost $750 of sales (50%) in our first month because we didn't think Amex was important. It turns out that Amex is the card of choice for US businesses.
- jonnotie 15y agoThat's some good advice right there.
- chrisfarms 15y agoSame setup as Jot here (Hi jot)... Had zero trouble with Payment Express (known as Direct Payment Solutions to the UK banks). Only thing that is maybe not ideal is the time difference, Payex. are in New Zealand and so email-threads can take several days if you don't ask questions at 1am.
- frankrrr 15y agoWe use Adyen's recurring payments: http://www.adyen.com/ http://www.adyen.com/ Works OK for us, but could be better if you see Stripe for example.
- mise 15y agoWe use 2checkout.com for recurring subscriptions.
- kristofferR 15y agoI let my customers chose between PayPal Subscriptions and 2Checkout. Both work okay, but I would absolutely prefer a method that didn't involve redirecting my customers to unknown domains and interfaces like Paypal.com and 2Checkout.com.
- pconf 15y agoAnother problem with Paypal.com and 2Checkout.com is the amount of data they require to charge my card. There's no way they need to know my home address, phone number, email address, etc. I feel sorry for those who will post PII to some sub-merchant website because the seller's devs were too lazy to write something user and privacy -friendly.
- dangrossman 15y agoIt's not about laziness, it's about fraud. The less you know about your customer the more likely the person on the other end is not who they claim to be, and doesn't have permission to use the credit card they're using. For some sites that's fine, for others taking only a CC#, CVV2 code and zip code (the minimum necessary info to pay a decent transaction rate ) and you'll be out of business in a few months from the chargeback rate. Once you lose a merchant account for CB rate (consistently above 1%), you'll never get another again, since all banks/MSPs check the TMF and MATCH file and will see you've been terminated in the past. Both your business information and the social security numbers of all principals of the business will be blacklisted for life. You might be interested in the book "Founders at Work: Stories of Startups Early Days". PayPal is one of the founding stories covered. The only reason PayPal is here, where so many other payment services came and went during the dot-com boom, is that they tackled the fraud problem. There were times when PayPal was bleeding over $10 million a month to fraudulent activity. They are, in effect, the largest payment fraud management company in the world.
- dangrossman 15y agoIt's a bit of a stretch to call them "unknown domains" in 2011. PayPal has 232 million accounts in over 190 markets, and anyone that's ever bought something on eBay knows them. People on all my websites have a choice between using a credit card right on the site or checking out through PayPal, and on every one of those sites, they choose PayPal more than 50% of the time.
- peeplaja 15y agoWe're also using Adyen, and it gets the job done. Downside: it keeps like 10% of your revenue as a deposit.
- ez77 15y agoFor how long?
- pitdesi 15y agoWe are trying to get Samurai (http://samurai.feefighters.com http://samurai.feefighters.com) into Europe. We don't have a firm timetable just yet though. If you'd like to be notified when it happens, please enter your email address here: https://docs.google.com/a/transfs.com/spreadsheet/viewform?hl=en_US&formkey=dDZrMVI1YVVGT0NhSmpQbl80Q0o5Z2c6MQ&ifq https://docs.google.com/a/transfs.com/spreadsheet/viewform?h...
- davidvanleeuwen 15y agoBut what is so difficult to make it available in Europe? I don't really grasp what the problems are. And is there any way we Europeans can help, besides saying that we want to use your service.
- runako 15y agoEvery time there's a post on HN about a new business that's the new hotness but which is not available outside the US, there are a bunch of posts asking why. Here are some possible answers: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3027066 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3027066 Another way of looking at it is that by creating the [insert country here] clone of [insert cool service here], you could probably start a niche business pretty quickly by serving the need unmet by the service you're cloning. This worked great for LoveFilm in the UK, who cloned Netflix.
- rmoriz 15y agoRules of Business: If there is a market in Europe, some european copy cat will fill the gap if the US based company is too slow.
- danmaz74 15y agoAddendum: And then very likely the most successful European copycats will get acquired by a the same US company when it really wants to expand abroad...
- patrickgzill 15y agoI have been usinng WHMCS.com's billing system for a few months. It has modules to handle many payment systems, and handles recurring billing. You still have to have a merchant account; but, you have the potential to save 2-3% of each sale, since you will be dealing with the payment processor directly.
- rmoriz 15y agoUse http://recurly.com http://recurly.com with http://WireCard.com/ http://WireCard.com/ as Gateway. Works fine in the EU! (WireCard AG is a German based credit card gateway owning a "full" bank license. It's also a public traded company regulated by strict German banking regulations)
- ashleyw 15y agoWhat's WireCard like price-wise? Doesn't seem to say on their website.
- rmoriz 15y agosetup 149,00 EUR (seems to be negotiable) monthly 19,00 EUR per transaction 0,25 EUR + 3,45% (Visa, MC) that was pricing in 2010, may have changed for new customers. just ask their customer support and tell them, that you will use recurly.com which means less technical trouble for all people involved (PCI compliance etc).
- mendable 15y agoIf you are in the UK with a UK bank account, you are going to need a UK gateway and merchant account - unless you relocate. It's just part of the "know your customer" anti-money-laundering deal that all western countries have between their governments and their banks that make it difficult to set up abroad. It might be possible, but it's just extra headache. I would suggest looking at Recurly as your integration endpoint for a few reasons: 1) Multi-currency. Some people claim it's "expensive" as as $200/mo add-on, but the extra conversions from geo-targetting visitors with their native currency make this a no-brainer, especially for UK companies. 2) Data portability. You can leave Recurly in 5 years if you want to write your own recurring billing app or switch to somewhere else and they will give you your data. 3) Not having your customer's CC details held at the gateway (Recurly are best described as a value-add intermediary) means you should be able to easily switch out gateways later on. This is a key architectural choice that I don't think people pay enough attention to, and Recurly really don't promote it enough. Chargify etc do not do this, instead they store your customer's details at the gateway and have no power to retrieve them ever again. 4) Supports VAT. The down side to Recurly is their API is a bit messy. Their hosted payment pages and "transparent API" appear to be next to useless if you want to also record extra information (e.g, username) as part of the signup process in a seemless way. With regards to payment gateway, pick any payment gateway from here: http://recurly.com/features/payment-gateway-support http://recurly.com/features/payment-gateway-support The truth is, it really doesn't matter. As long as it is working, and your bank/merchant account doesn't put a hold or delay on your income. Don't stress about the transaction fees. People get too hung up on a percentage point, with the frame of reference that "when we've got $10m in revenue, that 1% is worth $100,000)", but honestly, when you get to that point, you will have enough business savvy to re-negotiate or look for a better deal then. When you don't have any customers, it really doesn't matter.
- sborsje 15y agoWe're also using Adyen. The support is pretty good, the API/website/documentation/customization options are all terrible. But it's one of the few PSPs that provides support for lots and lots of payment methods (like: VISA, Amex, MC, PayPal, but also a lot of local stuff like iDeal, Mr. Cash, etc.) Supporting a local payment method (iDeal in our case) is a pretty big deal in our case, since it accounts for +50% of our total revenue. Don't underestimate this if you're planning to launch a European SaaS business!
- rickmb 15y agoSame story here, I can pretty much confirm this word for word. Especially the broad support of payment methods is crucial, and pretty much makes up for all of Adyen's shortcomings in the implementation department.
- will_lam 15y agoHmm.. I believe http://Zuora.com http://Zuora.com might be able to help as they have a European office as well.
- heman 15y agoI would recommend Zuora. They have muliple customers in EMEA. Tata Communications, Reeb Business, etc. They also have service and sales reps located around europe. www.zuora.com
- colin8chSE 15y agoI'm the founder of Simplified Ecommerce and we support international Merchants from almost everywhere. There's a lot of really great companies in the space, I think we offer something unique. (www.simplifiedecommerce.com) Get to market fast - Get started within a day, without long complicated merchant account applications. - Copy & Paste integrations with "Buy Now" links - Instant security and PCI Compliance - Merchants never touch sensitive data - Easy recurring subscription billing and one-time payments - Customizable hosted payment pages that match your website and branding, with no CSS knowledge required. - Simple straight forward pricing that includes everything in the payments stack. Grow without limits - Built in Affiliate Marketing - Portable data from day 1(all customer data is stored in our level 1 PCI compliant tokenized vault) - Add your own merchant account any time - we're a gateway, certified and integrated with most US and some international processor networks - Switch merchant accounts seamlessly - all your data, reporting, integrations, custom payment pages, affiliate relationships... remain intact. We have a history of over 10 years in the payments space, contact me anytime if you have any questions- colin at SimplifiedEcommerce.com
- Kliment 15y agoSo how come you can do this and the others can't? How do you deal with the problems listed elsewhere in the thread?
- primigenus 15y agoHave a look at this series of posts we wrote on our blog: http://blog.handcraft.com/2011/01/looking-back-on-the-quest-for-payments/ http://blog.handcraft.com/2011/01/looking-back-on-the-quest-... - we looked at Fastspring, Chargify and Spreedly and ultimately settled on Spreedly and Ogone (and a merchant account with AmEx). Spreedly is the processor most like Stripe of the above list. We're in the Netherlands (like you?). Hit me up on twitter or our blog if you need any more info.