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Comment by jfoster | Hacker News Reader

Interesting. Google Wallet for Digital Goods shut down last week. It was a service whereby a business might have subscribers on a monthly subscription. Google offered no migration path; businesses had to inconvenience all subscribers by getting them to re-subscribe. It's fascinating that a startup which is going out of business acts in a more responsible manner than a huge tech company.

Kudos to Balanced for doing the right thing.

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Not only did Google have no migration path, they emailed all our customers saying their subscription was cancelled with no explanation why, leading to panic.

Additionally, prior to the retirement they had advised that they wouldn't be communicating it to subscribers.

The retirement was so poorly handled that it's changed the way I think about services that I allow my business to depend on. Aside from a slight bias against anything with a "Google" label, I now consider it a lot more important that a service I'm using is the core business of the company providing it.

Really, I hadn't seen them specifically say that they wouldn't email everyone (although if anyone had thought about it they'd realize it was a bad idea).

Yeah, we went with GWDG at the time primarily because it was one of the few good options for a NZ-based company, but it was always a bit strange and I always thought given the lack of maintenance it was likely to get killed. Switched to Stripe and much happier, although I do miss the awesome microtransaction pricing they had...

Very similar situation. AU-based, went with Stripe after, very happy with Stripe but also missing the micro transaction pricing.

This is what they said about notifying users:

Google Wallet buyers will not be proactively notified. Keep in mind that if you do not remove your integration before March 2, 2015, your buyers will get 404 errors upon checking out with Google Wallet for digital goods API. To preserve your user experience, we highly recommend removing your integration and migrating to another payment processing solution as soon as possible.

(from https://support.google.com/wallet/business/answer/6107573)

So I guess they didn't specifically say they wouldn't email them when the subscription was cancelled but they sure did suggest it! :)

I'd like to be as optimistic as you are about this act by balanced, but I can't help but suspect there was some kind of deal between the two companies. After all, this will bring new business to stripe...

Even if so, is Google above handing off their customers to a service that is similar?

Sure. At a minimum, the people running Balanced are preserving their personal reputation by doing this.

I like to take the pragmatic view about such things. Motivations aside, at the end of the day & in similar situations, Google decided to screw customers whilst Balanced decided to offer a smoother migration path. Even if Balanced's customers don't like Stripe, Stripe has a free data portability clause that will allow them to continue on to the payment processor of their choosing. (https://support.stripe.com/questions/what-if-i-decide-to-lea...)

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