Subscriptions: Braintree vs. Chargify/Recurly, etc.

The US-based internet company I co-founded is getting ready to expand to a more typical SaaS setup and include paid monthly/yearly, tiered account plans. We plan to include automated recurring billing. Currently we do our basic banking through Wells Fargo, and do not have a Merchant Account (or payment gateway) established.

While doing research on the best options for this whole process I read a lot of articles on HN and elsewhere. What I found is that there does not appear to be a concrete consensus on the best options. The only thing people seem to agree upon is that it is best not to create your own account plan and recurring billing management setup. I couldn't agree more due to the complications, security issues, and overall time investment.

Currently, two main options are leading our discussions:

1. Braintree (http://braintreepaymentsolutions.com/) for our payment gateway, merchant account, and recurring billing. The features described for their recurring billing fit our needs (and more) and the overall prices of using Braintree for everything, while correctly described as "Premium" by others here on HN, appear competitive with Authorize.net + WF merchant account + Chargify/Recurly for recurring billing. We like Braintree's in-depth and extensive support, docs, and dev resources. And we "think" we like the fact that everything (payment gateway, merchant account, and recurring billing) are tied into one system so we don't have to try to work with three separate entities to work out issues.

2. Third party payment gateway, third party merchant account, and Chargify/Recurly for recurring billing. This option has the proposed benefits of potentially reducing overall costs and separating the components, which may make future changes to individual components of the overall setup easier. For a third party payment gateway we're considering Authorize.net. Third party merchant accounts are a little bit of a tougher decision, but we've considered simply going in house with Wells Fargo to reduce complications or another organization such as SVB.com.

At the moment we're leaning towards Braintree. One reason for this is its benefits (ease of setup going through a single company, extensive dev resources, competitive cost, quality customer support) outweigh the benefits we can come up with for the other option(s).

Does anyone have experience in this field and suggestions on the matter? Does it make sense to use Braintree for everything, or are there other benefits of going with separate entities for the payment gateway, merchant account, and recurring billing that we are overlooking?