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Comment by pitdesi | Hacker News Reader

Another question is on recurring billing: At this point, we've we are making a conscious decision that recurring billing logic should be outside of the gateway... none of the gateways handle it particularly well and it is actually kind of a tricky problem. We are working on getting samurai connected to recurly, spreedly and chargify, all of which are good for that.

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Honest question: If Recurly/Spreedly/Chargify/CheddarGetter is satisfactory for my recurring billing, why would I need Samarai? I'd likely just bring a merchant that has its own gateway to one of those services.

I'm currently looking at places like BrainTree which do it all (merchant, gateway, recurring) as they look far more enticing than gluing together a bunch of companies.

I suppose I'm new at this, but it's all very confusing. Why should I choose you + some merchant + some recurring billing service over BrainTree?

I can't speak to BrainTree, but I have been with Chargify + Authorize.net for a while and I'm very pleased with Chargify in particular. I'm not super thrilled with A.net, as I'm completely vendor-locked with their card vault. Plus, their web interface is pretty crappy.

Samurai's costs and their (i think?) support for data portability are a big plus.

If I could get Samurai + Chargify and port over all my existing A.net customers, I think I probably would. Unfortunately, that's kind of academic at this point, as A.net is a black hole AFAIK.

Chargify is partially to "blame" here, too. They push the vault stuff off to the gateway, which leads to your vendor lock-in. Recurly, on the other hand, works fine with Authorize.net and has no such lock-in. I'm in the position of supporting both right now as I migrate away from Chargify.

That is a completely fair question.

If you use Recurly/Spreedly/Chargify/CheddarGetter, you still need a gateway and merchant account. Samurai is both.

Braintree does recurring billing, but doesn't do a great job at it. It also could turn out to be cheaper than it would at Braintree. Braintree charges $20 extra per month for the vault plus $0.01 per card PER MONTH. https://samurai.feefighters.com/pricing

"Braintree does recurring billing, but doesn't do a great job at it."

Would you care to elaborate?

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