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If you're doing it in Rails, I'd recommend the ActiveMerchant plugin and a gateway/merchant account from Braintree. That's what we use on our main Rails app (a

If you're doing it in Rails, I'd recommend the ActiveMerchant plugin and a gateway/merchant account from Braintree. That's what we use on our main Rails app (as opposed to PayPal on our other main subscription-based offering). It works great. The only hangup has been accepting international currencies (we're having to work with a different company for that). The transaction fees are low, too–which actually makes a difference when you start getting a lot of subscribers. http://www.braintreepaymentsolutions.com/ http://www.braintreepaymentsolutions.com/ http://www.activemerchant.org/ http://www.activemerchant.org/ https://peepcode.com/products/activemerchant-pdf https://peepcode.com/products/activemerchant-pdf

wmwong 18y ago
For Braintree, what are the fees like? I can't seem to find them posted anywhere. It would be nice to know to help the shopping before diving into a particular company.
- markessien 18y ago
  They used to charge an arm and leg, but with the economy being depressed and all, they offer a discount where you pay an arm and a foot.
- callmeed 18y ago
  I believe they resell some of the services. In our case, they had to set us up with a different merchant because we are a payment aggregator (we take payments on behalf of our customers and charge a transaction fee). I believe our merchant fees are $0.20 + 2.34% per transaction. That's still lower than PayPal unless you're doing over $10K a month. I believe they charge a monthly fee for the gateway/online services too (I don't know what it is because my biz partner handles that stuff). All in all, I would choose this over PayPal regardless of the fees. The user experience is far superior.
bradgessler 18y ago
Braintree actually doesn't work very well for recurring payments since you end up writing your own biller. They offer some sort of a subscription billing system, but since their API only works 1-day (Data-in, no data-out) so its damn near impossible to keep your system in synch with theirs. Also, be careful with that peep-code PDF; their design isn't really the best so keep that in mind when reading through it and take their content merely as a suggestion. They couple their Orders with Transactions in a funky way. Another thing, when dealing with BrainTree, be sure to pester them about how much the SecureVault costs. They came to us 6 months after we started using them and demanded that we pay $0.10-$0.15 anytime we touched a customer in the SecureVault. After a few back-and-forth's via email, they finally waived these fee's because they neglected to bring it up when we negotiated our rates. In technical terms of payment gateway APIs, I liked Google Checkout's the best. They had a nice asynch RESTful XML API that made a lot of sense; although I didn't really like that fact that we had to send users through the Google Checkout screens. We had to move away from GCO because they didn't support recurring billing. Has anybody used the Amazon Flexible Payment System?
- callmeed 18y ago
  I should have mentioned that we're also using a modified version of the saas rails kit for our recurring billing. Works well for us (we've got over 300 subscribers last time I checked, adding about 2 a day). http://railskits.com/ http://railskits.com/
- Braintree_Jamie 18y ago
  I'd like to clarify a couple of the topics discussed here regarding our (Braintree's) services. The recurring option within our gateway is designed for straightforward recurring billing needs. It's simple, reliable and a good tool. Merchants that need greater flexibility and/or prefer to manage the billing logic on their end, find our API's and processing quite accommodating and straightforward. All transaction data (including all custom information passed to us) is easily accessible using our Query API. Merchants can use it to pull data back into their applications, create custom reporting and manage reconciliation. Regarding Brad's comments about our pricing, we've discussed this directly with him and agree that the specific communcation with him could have been done better. At the same time, we've expressed to him that we didnt' think the tone of his statement was fair or accurate. We always offer complete transparency in our pricing and do not use bait and switch tactics that are so commonly used in the industry. @callmeed - thank you for your comments. You guys have been great to work with.
  - bradgessler 18y ago
    I would like to add that BrainTree our Vault situation well; they did honor they said on their website. Another great thing about these guys is that you can actually email or call them and a person will pick up the phone. Good luck doing that with GCO, PayPal, or AFPS. Also, as Jamie said, they offer an API to query payment data; while this isn't an asynch API like what Google offers, it at least opens up the possibility of writing a batch process that reconciles data between your application and Braintree. Overall BT has been very responsive to our needs and, as a result, I have recommended them to many of the YC Summer '08 companies, along with many other companies I've talked to outside of YC.
perezd 18y ago
I've heard of this library, but does it provide a front-end admin type system? For doing things like reports and dashboards? Or is that something we have to build internally. If we have to build it internally, that is what we are trying to avoid.
- callmeed 18y ago
  What kind of reports do you need? ActiveMerchant just connects your app to a gateway for cc approval and processing. Braintree has very nice reports on transactions and it's very easy to refund a payment. Beyond that, you are dealing with Rails after all–it's pretty easy to scaffold out some reports from your subscriber base.

wmwong 18y ago

For Braintree, what are the fees like? I can't seem to find them posted anywhere. It would be nice to know to help the shopping before diving into a particular company.

markessien 18y ago
They used to charge an arm and leg, but with the economy being depressed and all, they offer a discount where you pay an arm and a foot.
callmeed 18y ago
I believe they resell some of the services. In our case, they had to set us up with a different merchant because we are a payment aggregator (we take payments on behalf of our customers and charge a transaction fee). I believe our merchant fees are $0.20 + 2.34% per transaction. That's still lower than PayPal unless you're doing over $10K a month. I believe they charge a monthly fee for the gateway/online services too (I don't know what it is because my biz partner handles that stuff). All in all, I would choose this over PayPal regardless of the fees. The user experience is far superior.

bradgessler 18y ago

Braintree actually doesn't work very well for recurring payments since you end up writing your own biller. They offer some sort of a subscription billing system, but since their API only works 1-day (Data-in, no data-out) so its damn near impossible to keep your system in synch with theirs. Also, be careful with that peep-code PDF; their design isn't really the best so keep that in mind when reading through it and take their content merely as a suggestion. They couple their Orders with Transactions in a funky way. Another thing, when dealing with BrainTree, be sure to pester them about how much the SecureVault costs. They came to us 6 months after we started using them and demanded that we pay $0.10-$0.15 anytime we touched a customer in the SecureVault. After a few back-and-forth's via email, they finally waived these fee's because they neglected to bring it up when we negotiated our rates. In technical terms of payment gateway APIs, I liked Google Checkout's the best. They had a nice asynch RESTful XML API that made a lot of sense; although I didn't really like that fact that we had to send users through the Google Checkout screens. We had to move away from GCO because they didn't support recurring billing. Has anybody used the Amazon Flexible Payment System?

callmeed 18y ago
I should have mentioned that we're also using a modified version of the saas rails kit for our recurring billing. Works well for us (we've got over 300 subscribers last time I checked, adding about 2 a day). http://railskits.com/ http://railskits.com/
Braintree_Jamie 18y ago
I'd like to clarify a couple of the topics discussed here regarding our (Braintree's) services. The recurring option within our gateway is designed for straightforward recurring billing needs. It's simple, reliable and a good tool. Merchants that need greater flexibility and/or prefer to manage the billing logic on their end, find our API's and processing quite accommodating and straightforward. All transaction data (including all custom information passed to us) is easily accessible using our Query API. Merchants can use it to pull data back into their applications, create custom reporting and manage reconciliation. Regarding Brad's comments about our pricing, we've discussed this directly with him and agree that the specific communcation with him could have been done better. At the same time, we've expressed to him that we didnt' think the tone of his statement was fair or accurate. We always offer complete transparency in our pricing and do not use bait and switch tactics that are so commonly used in the industry. @callmeed - thank you for your comments. You guys have been great to work with.
- bradgessler 18y ago
  I would like to add that BrainTree our Vault situation well; they did honor they said on their website. Another great thing about these guys is that you can actually email or call them and a person will pick up the phone. Good luck doing that with GCO, PayPal, or AFPS. Also, as Jamie said, they offer an API to query payment data; while this isn't an asynch API like what Google offers, it at least opens up the possibility of writing a batch process that reconciles data between your application and Braintree. Overall BT has been very responsive to our needs and, as a result, I have recommended them to many of the YC Summer '08 companies, along with many other companies I've talked to outside of YC.

perezd 18y ago

I've heard of this library, but does it provide a front-end admin type system? For doing things like reports and dashboards? Or is that something we have to build internally. If we have to build it internally, that is what we are trying to avoid.

callmeed 18y ago
What kind of reports do you need? ActiveMerchant just connects your app to a gateway for cc approval and processing. Braintree has very nice reports on transactions and it's very easy to refund a payment. Beyond that, you are dealing with Rails after all–it's pretty easy to scaffold out some reports from your subscriber base.