brockf

Hahaha Chris is ridiculous. My favourite part is when he goes off on the massive tangent about his love of "systems" and just wants a "natural" flow. What is he even saying?

He wants to make money and is scared to GPL. Fair enough.

However, Matt and WordPress can sue him and they should. Stop these goofy debates and making Chris squirm awkwardly. Though it is kind of funny...

Yes, you do need to get certified if you are performing 20,000+ transactions or $1million per year in credit card revenue. Otherwise, you can do a self-check as you're a Stage 4 merchant.

True. It's not free and open-source. And, until Braintree's Credit Card Data Portability movement takes a foothold, it's impossible for OpenGateway to transfer CIM data to another payment gateway (though we'll be the first on that train when it comes).

However, the "open" part of this solution is, to me, that:

1) You choose which gateway you want to use based on its price, service, etc. - not because there's some free PHP class available for it or the API makes slightly more sense than the others.

2) You can run your own billing engine and open up the API, so to speak.

3) You aren't gaining billing engine power by giving up more transaction % fees or relying on a 3rd party service provider's closed system.

ActiveMerchant is a payment/shipping library for Ruby. This is more of an independent billing engine that also gives an API for payment gateways but also handles customer records, automatic customizable emails for billing events (purchases, subscriptions, renewals, cancellations, etc.), handles auto-recurring billing across all gateways, and allows you to distribute API keys with separate API and control panel clients.

Absolutely. Braintree, NetBilling, FirstData, PayPal Standard, and more gateways are being added soon.

Exactly. Not tied to a payment gateway's integration code or a 3rd party service provider like Recurly or Spreedly. No transaction fees or external dependencies.