Hacker News Reader

Comment by GICodeWarrior | Hacker News Reader

I am in the process of integrating Recurly into my existing business, and I have to say, those graphs misleading regarding Recurly.

The Recurly gateway is already included with the normal Recurly costs.

Zero out the gateway numbers in the calculator there and you will see the difference. http://expletiveinserted.com/recurring-payment-cost-calculat...

Granted, Stripe avoids the paperwork and business requirements for getting a merchant account. However, I already had most of those requirements ticked (you need them anyways if you intend to operate aboveboard), and I want all the subscription management features Recurly provides.

Further, the Recurly gateway includes credit card portability (Braintree is the only other company I know of that supports this). http://www.portabilitystandard.org/

EDIT: Removed incorrect merchant account fees.

View on HN

We looked at Recurly too... You are wrong that you can just zero out the gateway numbers in the calculators. Recurly charges 1.25% + 10 cents (http://recurly.com/pricing). 1.25% is a CRAPLOAD. Using a merchant account from FeeFighters would for us end up costing something like 2.1% + 20cents for the merchant account but then we'd have to pay an additional 1.25% + 10cents to Recurly, making it a total of 3.35% + 30 cents, far more than Stripe. Plus there's a $69 minimum fee, which sucks when you are starting out

Chargify (http://chargify.com) or Spreedly (http://spreedly.com) + Samurai (http://samurai.feefighters.com) is going to be significantly cheaper in our case (we expect to ramp to $30k/sales/mo). I'll pretty-up and share the google spreadsheet I used shortly. Stripe is still the best option if you have low transaction size and low volume (I think it was <$6k/mo). Other than that it was either chargify+samurai or spreedly+samurai (depending on the number of transactions because of chargify's tricky pricing)

The Recurly costs are inherent in the calculation being made there. The Gateway costs were being added on top.

Portability is very important and often overlooked. Braintree created the Credit Card Data Portability Standard a couple years back, and I think there are may be a few additional companies supporting it now. http://www.braintreepayments.com/blog/data-portability

OP here. That was the Recurly pricing at the time. I have updated now to their latest pricing, and if you use their gateway they are indeed the lowest cost option of that bunch.

Also, Stripe claims to support data portability.

> a good merchant account will have rates under $0.20/transaction

That's impossible. Visa and MasterCard's interchange rates are 1.15% - 2.7% + $0.10 per transaction, that's the floor at which a merchant account could start its pricing.

Sorry, you are right, I was only quoting the merchant account rates on top of the interchange.

The 1.94%/transaction on that page is competitive. With that and my other numbers, the Recurly are still competitive with Stripe.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com