Comment by Silhouette | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Silhouette | Hacker News Reader

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Interesting observations, thanks. We've been wondering about a similar thing for a small business we run that uses Stripe and sometimes gets requests from potential customers about PayPal.

My biggest concern with the latter is that if you want a vault+token system to avoid the serious PCI DSS hassles, PayPal seems to keep changing its mind about what the different options are: every time I've looked for quite a few years now, it seems like there are always several different things that each do (a different) 50-75% of what we're looking for, without any way to get the degree of control you have with some of the other services.

It's not like we have weird, exotic requirements, but we do want the flexibility to do things like moving a customer from one plan to another if they upgrade/downgrade, or reducing their payments temporarily or permanently as a result of a promotional offer, without them having to effectively sign up again with the payment service every time. Do you have any related issues with your startup, and if so, would you mind saying a bit about how you handled them with the different payment services you use?

I think the best thing to do with PayPal if you're doing an ongoing subscription with different plan levels or addons, is to use Pre-Approved Payments. This basically allows you to get a PayPal token which you can use like a Stripe token -- that is, you can tell PayPal "here's this token, I need to charge it $4.99" and they will do so anytime you ask.

As you might expect, they watch companies using this type of API very closely so obviously don't use abuse it. But we've been using it from around a year now with Roll20 an d have had great success with it. It allows our customers to link their PayPal account to their Roll20 account one time, and then buy subscriptions or digital one-off content without needing to log into PayPal again or anything like that, just as if they had a stored credit card on file with our Stripe integration.

The benefit from the consumer side is that you can log into your PayPal account at any time, and see exactly when and how much you've been charged over the life of the relationship, plus end the relationship on the PayPal side with one click. So it's really a win-win I think.

Note that we also do offer using a regular PayPal checkout flow for one-off content if you're not a subscriber, but as soon as someone wants to get on a subscription plan we have them do the pre-approved payments agreement with us.

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