Comment by jread | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jread | Hacker News Reader

I'm having the same dilemma with a SaaS startup. Up until now we've been using Quickbooks online's gateway and recurring payments capabilities, but the process of setting up new payments is manual and tedious and we want to go with more of a self serve model.

We are considering Braintree and Authorize.net's ARB. Another option is PayPal's Website Payments Pro gateway service. Here is a comparison of the two:

PayPal Website Payments Pro w/Recurring Payments: Discount Rate: 2.9% $0-3k; 2.5% $3k-10k; 2.2% 10k+ Transaction Fee: $0.30 Monthly Fee: $30/mo Recurring Billing Fee: $30/mo Monthly Minimum: $0

Braintree: Discount Rate: 2.29% qualified; 2.89% non-qualified Transaction Fee: $0.30 Monthly Fee: $35/mo Recurring Billing Fee: $0.10/transaction + $20/mo and $0.01/card for the Vault service Monthly Minimum: $75 (does not include monthly fee)

I think the more important questions to compare are the level of service, API development and status, available feature sets, and other such factors like whether you can easily transfer your account information elsewhere if you ever decide to change services. Everything I have read and heard, both in passing and first hand accounts, suggests to me that PayPal is not the route to go for handling payments and recurring billing for established startups. It is, however, a potentially viable option for those interested in simply setting something up quickly without much concern for long term growth and expansion of their own company.

I agree. Too much time worrying about fractions of a point. Get your business running to the point that the 1/2 a percent makes a recognizable difference.

We use Paypal and Chargify and they work well together. It saved us the time and additional expenses of setting up multiple payment accounts.

One observation, AMEX really doesn't play well with Paypal. We've had $25K payments and the next nothing from a $17K day. Amex is spotty in what they'll accept from PP.

If you have heavy AMEX usage then go with something else. The fees are also high for PP acceptance of AMEX (3.5%).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com