ntalbott

10 ms·

61.
by ntalbott 16y ago
Quoting myself: "Capital infusion causes market distortion. Not saying that's a bad thing, but it's worth recognizing." If this comes off as an attack on Grasshopper Group - my apologies. I think what ya'll have done is pretty impressive, a
62.
by ntalbott 16y ago
Perhaps - I have no internal knowledge of Chargify's numbers beyond what they've posted publicly. Even if they have 30000 global accounts, though, and it's 0.9% out of that - makes me think twice about freemium.
63.
by ntalbott 16y ago
So lets do some math: From http://chargify.com/blog/why-we-changed-our-pricing/ : "Grasshopper Group has been supporting Chargify for 15 months, and Chargify is now supporting 3,000 merchants - again, the large majority of whom are paying
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by ntalbott 16y ago
Spreedly is PCI Level 2 compliant, which while not cheap, is significantly lower cost than Level 1 compliance. There's not additional liability involved by us being Level 2 vs Level 1 - while Level 1 is certainly a nice marketing strategy,
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by ntalbott 16y ago
At Spreedly we rarely do any phone pre-sales or support, and that's a very intentional choice. As noted above, good phone support is expensive to provide, and one of the ways we've decided to keep costs down (at least for now) is by stickin
66.
by ntalbott 16y ago
On the one hand, I agree with you - Spreedly's not as feature rich as some of the competition. On the other hand, we have a lot of very happy customers, so that doesn't mean we're not a good fit for a significant set of startups.
67.
by ntalbott 16y ago
> Bait-and-switch by accident or by design makes no difference to your customers. Not trying to justify, just inform. > Do you guys do segregated merchant accounts (one merchant account per customer)? We don't do merchant accounts a
68.
by ntalbott 16y ago
Full disclosure: I run Spreedly, an earlier to market but much less funded competitor to Chargify. Here's the dirty little secret that Spreedly discovered about 18 months ago, and that I'm sure Chargify - like Recurly before them - has now
69.
by ntalbott 17y ago
It's in process - goal is to have certification by year's end. We know it's important!
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by ntalbott 17y ago
Hey, Spreedly guy here - we're definitely a full-featured solution, and we're already servicing dozens of businesses (we've sold 30 Kickstarts [ http://spreedly.com/info/kickstart ] in less than two weeks, so we must be doing something ri
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by ntalbott 17y ago
I'd strongly echo this - it's the reason I grabbed some co-founders and started Spreedly. After spending weeks building a billing system for a client and not being at all pleased with the result (bad API, insufficient budget, etc.) I knew t
72.
by ntalbott 17y ago
I'm biased, but I'd strongly recommend taking a look at Spreedly ( http://spreedly.com ). We can't help with the provisioning, but we can make the billing drop-dead simple so you can focus on getting your infrastructure right. The best part
73.
by ntalbott 17y ago
A quick note on the purpose of the Kickstart, as it's actually twofold. The first purpose is to raise some capital so the Spreedly team can spend more time working on Spreedly. We think that raising money from clients is the best kind of ca
74.
by ntalbott 17y ago
Thanks for the feedback - we're hearing this from others as well. I think as we're growing we're outstripping our prior explanations, and we definitely need to do something about that. I know what my morning's going to be spent on!
75.
by ntalbott 18y ago
By one-time subscription payment we mean a user paying for time-based access to a service where their subscription does not auto-renew. Weewar launched with this model on Spreedly and ran successfully on it for quite a while. As to non-subs
76.
by ntalbott 18y ago
Spreedly is talking to multiple businesses currently using PayPal's recurring service that want to switch to Spreedly (and we're working with them to make that happen). In short, PayPal's recurring API is awful, especially as you want to do
77.
by ntalbott 18y ago
One of the Spreedly cofounders is a PCI expert, and we're building the application with PCI compliance in mind. Security's a big deal for us, and for now we're focused on the practicalities of being secure rather than the (expensive, time-c
78.
by ntalbott 18y ago
Hey HN, just wanted ya'll to know that we're psyched about getting on the home page (the HN audience has a lot of overlap with our target market) and we'd love to answer any questions you have, either here, at http://getsatisfaction.com/sp
79.
by ntalbott 18y ago
Welcome to the state of TOS in the payment services industry. I agree, it's pretty yucky, but every single upstream provider that Spreedly uses (PayPal, Authorize.net, etc.) has similar terms that are as or even more non-committal. Because
80.
by ntalbott 18y ago
Could be. We're OK with that, for now at least. Pricing is tricky and you have to start somewhere, and so far our current price point is working great for us.
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by ntalbott 18y ago
Yup, that is correct. One nice thing, though, is that you have gateway portability, so you can do some hard negotiation with your gateway and/or merchant account once your volume grows to cut down on the fees. And, of course, as your volume