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Comment by moey | Hacker News Reader

The issue I see with Spreedly is it would be a good thing to use from the beginning of the project, but it's not affordable when your first starting out.

Maybe a free package with the ability to store 20 cards? I don't want to pay $99 a month to basically hook up to your API and test it with my first few customers.

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Yep. It's awesome that Dan mentions us and has a very valid use case with Spreedly. That said the use case we primarily solve for is marketplaces and platforms working across multiple gateways or third party API's (Expedia, StubHub etc) simultaneously. So I can see why you'd feel $99 was too high in your case. (Spreedly CEO)

Do you think there's enough interest to do a "low usage" (i.e. cheaper/free) option where you aren't hopping gateways and just want to use Spreedly as a processor abstraction layer? I'd love to investigate this for some little side projects that aren't tied to a processor, but $99/mo would be prohibitive.

Hey vcarl when we launched 2 years ago we actually had a $10 per month plan for the first 90 - 100 days after launch specifically to address this type of market. It didn't take. And honestly it wasn't really needed with Stripe and Braintree now in the market. Worse we had some perception problems from larger prospects around a service that was just $10 per month. So we moved up market to a higher price point to service marketplaces and platforms where our story really did resonate.

That makes sense, thanks for elaborating!

Agreed that it's too steep for people who want to use it as a hedge against negative payment processor action. We're Balanced customers and working on moving to Stripe now in time for the June 11 deadline, and I considered Spreedly to make it more cost-effective next time we have to switch, but it's just too pricey as a middleman for the small-ish volume we have. Most cart systems already make it somewhat easy to switch to a different payment processor.

Thanks cookiecaper. I would not disagree with you in general but I would say that in our experience most cart systems don't make it easy to switch payment processors _unless_ you don't care about storing or retaining cards for additional purchases or subscriptions. Most carts, for PCI reasons, pass your cards directly into the gateway so you're still stuck looking at export/import if you want to move.

It looks like they'd work with a startup. I'm not sure on what as I can only see what they've got on their site. From their Pricing page:

"We're an early stage startup wanting to support multiple gateway types out of the gate. Can you help?

Contact [sales addr] to discuss our startup package which is focused on pre-funded startups needing to work with multiple payment gateways."

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