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Comment by dangrossman | Hacker News Reader

A bit tangential: If you have a problem with losing customers to expired credit cards and already have a good dunning process, talk to the guys at Spreedly about their "Card on File Updater". They're a payment gateway agnostic credit card vault, but one of the services they're trialing (you have to ask to join the beta right now) is automatic updating of expired credit card numbers. They have access to the bank systems that do this automatically, so your charges continue going through without your customers having to update their numbers themselves.

https://spreedly.com/

Spreedly works with Stripe and 70+ other payment providers.

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This has been in the works for a number of years now, but keep in mind that you are breaking an 'unwritten contract' with your customer that assumes that they get the option to renew the agreement when their card expires.

People in general do not like to be charged for a service after the card expires and they have not explicitly authorized further payment. So better make sure this is written into your terms and conditions and that your merchant agreement actually allows you to do this.

Most businesses don't know about this possibility and very very few end users do. Technically you can basically fantasize any expiry date as long as it is in the future the charge will (likely) go through but to do this unauthorized is not smart. (Adding 3 or 5 years to the previous expiry is likely going to be on the money.)

In dispute situations you will possibly also have less recourse.

I wholeheartedly agree. I would never expect this unless it was explicitly disclosed up front, and I got an email around expiry time.

I think this is a really interesting topic where merchants and card users see it quite differently. For example, you usually sign up for an agreement to use a service. No where in there does it say that "you can cancel at anytime by just letting your card expire or having it stolen and replaced" The merchants really don't see any correlation between your need to pay and the current state of your card. And often they want you to actively cancel a service so as to remove any confusion around responsibilities owed.

Then you have some services where you can go either month to month or commit to a year long agreement and get a different price. Lastly, who enjoys losing a card and having to restart auto billing at their 10 favorite/required services?

I agree a lot of people by default think that if their card expires they're off to hook for paying for services and would be surprised that their service provider got an updated card from networks vs you. I'm just not sure it holds up though under closer thought/examination.

Honestly, reading about how detailed ChurnBuster gets (they have an actual real live human doing white-labeled calls on their clients behalf) I feel like if anything Spreedly should hire them to handle things on behalf of their clients.

Spreedly here. That's not a bad idea although in reality the better idea might be for ChurnBuster to build on top of Spreedly and solve this problem across 70 gateways? That way too if Stripe ever rolled out something similar all your eggs aren't in one basket.

So, just want to make sure it's clear to folks reading (because it's been a source of confusion for prospective customers in the past) that "card account updaters" and a service like Churn Buster are not mutually exclusive. For example, we have customers who utilize "card account updaters" like what you're talking about, and they still have a substantial number of customers failing payments even after that process has run it's course. That's where Churn Buster comes in.

Normally you'd expect Churn Buster to implement this background behind-the-scenes card account updating itself, but the reason we don't is that the trend and expectation in the industry is, or is becoming, that the actual payment gateway themselves provide this service, because they're by far in the best position to do it at scale. For example, Braintree already does this and I think you'll see more and more payment providers doing it down the road, including Stripe. (I could be wrong, but I don't think so.)

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