3 ms·

Spreedly. Funding, expanding our horizons, pivoting

40 points by jusben1369 14y ago

btipling 14y ago
Why only XML responses? :(
- ntalbott 14y ago
  The API has actually been in active use for almost two years, which means it is both battle tested and also showing its age. JSON support is actively planned for v2.
  - drcongo 14y ago
    The first link in your article is broken.
    - jusben1369 14y ago
      Fixed! Thanks.
mgkimsal 14y ago
Is this really a pivot? Maybe I'm not seeing it, or I may be blending what I had known (or thought I'd known) was coming for a while anyway - focusing on 'core'. Is there something more I'm missing? By no means a criticism - great job to hear about the funding, and continued success to you guys!
- jusben1369 14y ago
  Hey there. I would say that if you were in a room where 100 people had actually heard of Spreedly 95 of them would have said "Oh yeah, the subscription management guys" If you heard about Spreedly and went to our website the messaging was around managing subscriptions. Core was in a different location. So it's a pivot in that now if you arrive at Spreedly.com all the messaging is around payments in general and not managing subscriptions in particular. But I agree if you've watched us a little more closely you've known Core (now just Spreedly) was where a lot of our attention had been.
  - mgkimsal 14y ago
    True. The messaging has changed, and good for that. Nathaniel was telling me last summer(?) that spreedly handled regular payments, not just recurring, and I found it hard to find references to that on the site, and hard to find docs at the time. It seems the opposite is true now - I'm not seeing any explicit reference to recurring billing on the quickstart page: https://core.spreedly.com/manual/quickstart https://core.spreedly.com/manual/quickstart
boundlessdreamz 14y ago
Do any of the gateways, accept Indian merchants and also support billing in USD?
- jusben1369 14y ago
  Potentially - but there are some tough restrictions in India itself around vaulting cards and reusing them. So not sure how you'd manage that if you're an Indian based merchant.
  - boundlessdreamz 14y ago
    Those restrictions do not apply if the gateway is not Indian. I can vault my card with Amazon/Google etc without any problems. But mainly I want to bill non Indians. So the problem is finding a gateway/merchant account which can be setup by Indians from India.
    - jusben1369 14y ago
      In India we support HDFC and the MiGS gateway (which in turn is used by Indian acquiring banks)
      - boundlessdreamz 14y ago
        Yeah. I know. But AFAIK they do not support USD. Am I wrong? Also Indian payment gateways sucks. I wanted to know if there are other gateways which support Indian merchants
thetrumanshow 14y ago
Spreedly (non-core) customer here. Curious what these changes mean for existing customers. Your post is a good history lesson to bring everyone up to speed, but it lacks details as to how you're handling existing accounts... is Spreedly being deprecated? Edit: Nvm, finally read the pricing page. Apparently, you're just switching to a metered billing where one of the meters is a payment gateway token. Also each plan-level now includes a limit to the number of cards on file.
- jusben1369 14y ago
  Hi there. We mention in the post that subscription and recurring are critical requirements we hear and thus important. Just as say Stripe or Braintree have good basic recurring functionality for subscriptions we too think we'll get those requests with Spreedly. In particular, there are folks that don't get to chose the gateway they work with. (There are a lot of companies that have fantastic processing rates against older, bigger gateways) Those folks can/do use Spreedly as the front end and then just drop in those credentials for that gateway to process. So recurring is key there. What will change is marketing subscriptions directly as a stand alone product/service. It'll be rolled into our overall messaging and be much more inline with how you might see a modern gateway answer that question vs a dedicated service like Chargify, ChargeBee, Fusebill etc. Btw more to come on this topic in length in a few weeks.
  - thetrumanshow 14y ago
    I want to take a minute here and say that, by far, Spreedly has been the best SaaS provider I've ever worked with. Granted, it doesn't hurt that they hand me fistfuls of subscription revenue from my products. But, here I was having misgivings for a brief moment, and it was silly of me. You know, these guys keep doing it right.
    - jusben1369 14y ago
      Many thanks Barry. Much appreciated.
kohlhofer 14y ago
Nice work, great site, bright future!
mattberg 14y ago
Can someone further explain the "gateway token" concept? From reading the site I'm not 100% clear on the meaning.
- jusben1369 14y ago
  It is tricky. Maybe we have more work to do. If you sign up for a single Stripe account you get a set of credentials. You drop those in to process against us. That's one payment gateway token. Say you you Stripe but also want to offer PayPal as a payment type. That's one for Stripe and 1 for PayPal (essentially two stand alone payment gateways) Ok, that's pretty vanilla. Ok, now you want to add Dwolla. That's a 3rd. Second example. Say you are in the US and you do all your processing via Auth.Net. That's one token. Now you open a local office in Australia and want/need to process locally (say PIn Payments) That's a second token. Now you expand to the UK and use Sage Pay there (third token) Final example. You're building the next Shopify or Freshbooks. Each of your customers will do their own processing and need their own merchant account. Each of those customers equates to one payment gateway token. So a stand alone commmerce site with one gateway for credit cards and support for Dwolla and PayPal as a payment type = 3 tokens. The Uber model - where in each country you set up a new processor - probably equals 4 - 10 tokens. And then next Shopify = 100's to 1000's of tokens.
  - mattberg 14y ago
    Thanks for the explanation. Those are the use cases I was kind of thinking, it just didn't seem 100% clear in the pricing page, especially when my use case would probably just be one or two tokens.
    - drewjoh 14y ago
      I was confused by this initially too. I think it's just "token" that throws me off. I know what a gateway is, so maybe just saying "25 Gateways" or "$10/Gateway" instead of "gateway token" might be better? Just my initial thought.
      - 14y ago
soral 14y ago
great to hear, I've been meaning to use Spreedly/core almost a year now, but didn't take the payment step yet. It would be interesting if subscriptions were also in Spreedly Core, but I can't imagine how it would work, I guess spreedly core could ping the servers of the customer if the CC failed or expired, but I guess it's unnecessary since an effort is always required in that case, so building the subscription logic on the code seems logical. I haven't used spreedly core yet, but I really like the team, they always answer emails and help around payment topics, can't wait to solve gateway problems and start using spreedly
- jusben1369 14y ago
  Today subscriptions and Spreedly (Core) are separate. We will merge it so that subscription customers can have the goodness of Spreedly. We also need to have recurring in the core product (now Spreedly) as we know we'll get requests. The timing is just hard to nail down.
mamcx 14y ago
This could work for latin america? Without need to incorporate in USA like with stripe?

40 points by jusben1369 14y ago

btipling 14y ago

Why only XML responses? :(

ntalbott 14y ago
The API has actually been in active use for almost two years, which means it is both battle tested and also showing its age. JSON support is actively planned for v2.
- drcongo 14y ago
  The first link in your article is broken.
  - jusben1369 14y ago
    Fixed! Thanks.

mgkimsal 14y ago

Is this really a pivot? Maybe I'm not seeing it, or I may be blending what I had known (or thought I'd known) was coming for a while anyway - focusing on 'core'. Is there something more I'm missing? By no means a criticism - great job to hear about the funding, and continued success to you guys!

jusben1369 14y ago
Hey there. I would say that if you were in a room where 100 people had actually heard of Spreedly 95 of them would have said "Oh yeah, the subscription management guys" If you heard about Spreedly and went to our website the messaging was around managing subscriptions. Core was in a different location. So it's a pivot in that now if you arrive at Spreedly.com all the messaging is around payments in general and not managing subscriptions in particular. But I agree if you've watched us a little more closely you've known Core (now just Spreedly) was where a lot of our attention had been.
- mgkimsal 14y ago
  True. The messaging has changed, and good for that. Nathaniel was telling me last summer(?) that spreedly handled regular payments, not just recurring, and I found it hard to find references to that on the site, and hard to find docs at the time. It seems the opposite is true now - I'm not seeing any explicit reference to recurring billing on the quickstart page: https://core.spreedly.com/manual/quickstart https://core.spreedly.com/manual/quickstart

boundlessdreamz 14y ago

Do any of the gateways, accept Indian merchants and also support billing in USD?

jusben1369 14y ago
Potentially - but there are some tough restrictions in India itself around vaulting cards and reusing them. So not sure how you'd manage that if you're an Indian based merchant.
- boundlessdreamz 14y ago
  Those restrictions do not apply if the gateway is not Indian. I can vault my card with Amazon/Google etc without any problems. But mainly I want to bill non Indians. So the problem is finding a gateway/merchant account which can be setup by Indians from India.
  - jusben1369 14y ago
    In India we support HDFC and the MiGS gateway (which in turn is used by Indian acquiring banks)
    - boundlessdreamz 14y ago
      Yeah. I know. But AFAIK they do not support USD. Am I wrong? Also Indian payment gateways sucks. I wanted to know if there are other gateways which support Indian merchants

thetrumanshow 14y ago

Spreedly (non-core) customer here. Curious what these changes mean for existing customers. Your post is a good history lesson to bring everyone up to speed, but it lacks details as to how you're handling existing accounts... is Spreedly being deprecated? Edit: Nvm, finally read the pricing page. Apparently, you're just switching to a metered billing where one of the meters is a payment gateway token. Also each plan-level now includes a limit to the number of cards on file.

jusben1369 14y ago
Hi there. We mention in the post that subscription and recurring are critical requirements we hear and thus important. Just as say Stripe or Braintree have good basic recurring functionality for subscriptions we too think we'll get those requests with Spreedly. In particular, there are folks that don't get to chose the gateway they work with. (There are a lot of companies that have fantastic processing rates against older, bigger gateways) Those folks can/do use Spreedly as the front end and then just drop in those credentials for that gateway to process. So recurring is key there. What will change is marketing subscriptions directly as a stand alone product/service. It'll be rolled into our overall messaging and be much more inline with how you might see a modern gateway answer that question vs a dedicated service like Chargify, ChargeBee, Fusebill etc. Btw more to come on this topic in length in a few weeks.
- thetrumanshow 14y ago
  I want to take a minute here and say that, by far, Spreedly has been the best SaaS provider I've ever worked with. Granted, it doesn't hurt that they hand me fistfuls of subscription revenue from my products. But, here I was having misgivings for a brief moment, and it was silly of me. You know, these guys keep doing it right.
  - jusben1369 14y ago
    Many thanks Barry. Much appreciated.

kohlhofer 14y ago

Nice work, great site, bright future!

mattberg 14y ago

Can someone further explain the "gateway token" concept? From reading the site I'm not 100% clear on the meaning.

jusben1369 14y ago
It is tricky. Maybe we have more work to do. If you sign up for a single Stripe account you get a set of credentials. You drop those in to process against us. That's one payment gateway token. Say you you Stripe but also want to offer PayPal as a payment type. That's one for Stripe and 1 for PayPal (essentially two stand alone payment gateways) Ok, that's pretty vanilla. Ok, now you want to add Dwolla. That's a 3rd. Second example. Say you are in the US and you do all your processing via Auth.Net. That's one token. Now you open a local office in Australia and want/need to process locally (say PIn Payments) That's a second token. Now you expand to the UK and use Sage Pay there (third token) Final example. You're building the next Shopify or Freshbooks. Each of your customers will do their own processing and need their own merchant account. Each of those customers equates to one payment gateway token. So a stand alone commmerce site with one gateway for credit cards and support for Dwolla and PayPal as a payment type = 3 tokens. The Uber model - where in each country you set up a new processor - probably equals 4 - 10 tokens. And then next Shopify = 100's to 1000's of tokens.
- mattberg 14y ago
  Thanks for the explanation. Those are the use cases I was kind of thinking, it just didn't seem 100% clear in the pricing page, especially when my use case would probably just be one or two tokens.
  - drewjoh 14y ago
    I was confused by this initially too. I think it's just "token" that throws me off. I know what a gateway is, so maybe just saying "25 Gateways" or "$10/Gateway" instead of "gateway token" might be better? Just my initial thought.
    - 14y ago

soral 14y ago

great to hear, I've been meaning to use Spreedly/core almost a year now, but didn't take the payment step yet. It would be interesting if subscriptions were also in Spreedly Core, but I can't imagine how it would work, I guess spreedly core could ping the servers of the customer if the CC failed or expired, but I guess it's unnecessary since an effort is always required in that case, so building the subscription logic on the code seems logical. I haven't used spreedly core yet, but I really like the team, they always answer emails and help around payment topics, can't wait to solve gateway problems and start using spreedly

jusben1369 14y ago
Today subscriptions and Spreedly (Core) are separate. We will merge it so that subscription customers can have the goodness of Spreedly. We also need to have recurring in the core product (now Spreedly) as we know we'll get requests. The timing is just hard to nail down.

mamcx 14y ago

This could work for latin america? Without need to incorporate in USA like with stripe?