Comment by itsprofitbaron | Hacker News Reader

Comment by itsprofitbaron | Hacker News Reader

Personally, I'd use PayPal. However, if you're going to create a SaaS and are using PayPal, I highly recommend that you create a new account for the business (You are allowed 1 Personal and 1 Business account separately with PayPal[1]). The reason I say this is because, if you ever decide to sell your SaaS you cannot transfer the user subscriptions with the email to the buyer as, they are linked to the PayPal account - so you either have to give them the PayPal account or they're going to lose a lot of existing buyers (People sign up for these types of service and forget they're paying).

[1] https://cms.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/marketingweb?cmd=_render-c....

Thanks for highlighting this. Would you say that the paypal api is overly complex and a bit of a headache with what im trying to achieve?

I wouldn't bother with the PayPal API because you can simply create a PayPal subscription button within PayPal and integrate PayPal's Instant Payment Notification (IPN) into your database - this is simpler than using PayPal's APIs IMO.

There's actually a useful tutorial/script here: http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/php/using-paypals-instant-...

True but this doesnt make it easy or rather possible for a user to upgrade or downgrade themselves

You can actually create a button to "modify" subscriptions (allowing them to upgrade/downgrade packages).

There are more details here: https://www.x.com/developers/paypal/documentation-tools/payp...

Thanks for this but again, it's not the most convenient method as it waits till the end of the billing period and it doesnt appear to send an IPN update straight away, I've also read that it has a 20% price change limit somewhere else as well?

PayPal's billing changes take place at the end of the billing period. However, the 20% limit is wrong as PayPal’s own example highlights this further down the page on that link above.

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