ntalbott

A quick note on the purpose of the Kickstart, as it's actually twofold.

The first purpose is to raise some capital so the Spreedly team can spend more time working on Spreedly. We think that raising money from clients is the best kind of capital to have, especially in the early days of a business.

The second purpose is perhaps more subtle: we think that this has the potential to help a bunch of businesses to actually release and start cashflowing. Our experience is that actually spending money towards your goals - and having a service you've paid for just waiting to make money for you - is critical motivation to keep cranking.

So not only do you get to help us make Spreedly better (which is better for you!) but you also get to buy some hope and motivation for your own venture. We think it's a chocolate and peanut butter combination :-)

Thanks for the feedback - we're hearing this from others as well. I think as we're growing we're outstripping our prior explanations, and we definitely need to do something about that. I know what my morning's going to be spent on!

By one-time subscription payment we mean a user paying for time-based access to a service where their subscription does not auto-renew. Weewar launched with this model on Spreedly and ran successfully on it for quite a while.

As to non-subscription payments, we don't support them in the general case, but we're currently in the process of adding support for adding one-time fees to a subscriber's subscription. So for instance if you charge for hosting and want to charge customers for bandwidth overage, you'll be able to do that soon.

Spreedly is talking to multiple businesses currently using PayPal's recurring service that want to switch to Spreedly (and we're working with them to make that happen). In short, PayPal's recurring API is awful, especially as you want to do more complex things like, say, allow a subscriber to change their subscription term or plan. Also, have you seen PayPal's admin UI? It's awful for any sort of ongoing use, especially for subscriptions where you have an ongoing relationship with your customers.

In short, Spreedly grew out of using PayPal's recurring API on a client project and realizing that there had to be a better way.

One of the Spreedly cofounders is a PCI expert, and we're building the application with PCI compliance in mind. Security's a big deal for us, and for now we're focused on the practicalities of being secure rather than the (expensive, time-consuming) trappings of being certified as secure. We'll definitely get our gold sticker eventually, but not quite yet. In the meantime, we have a constant focus on security and spend regular time looking at the platform through that lens.

Hey HN, just wanted ya'll to know that we're psyched about getting on the home page (the HN audience has a lot of overlap with our target market) and we'd love to answer any questions you have, either here, at http://getsatisfaction.com/spreedly, or via email (support@spreedly.com).

Spreedly is small, but we're feisty, and we're excited about helping a lot of hackers by taking care of the billing while they "build something people want". Thanks for checking us out!

Welcome to the state of TOS in the payment services industry. I agree, it's pretty yucky, but every single upstream provider that Spreedly uses (PayPal, Authorize.net, etc.) has similar terms that are as or even more non-committal. Because of that, and because we're not in a position (yet?) to buck the trend, we've stuck with the party line for now. Even Shopify (http://shopify.com), who is perhaps even more critical to the businesses on their platform, has basically the same set of terms.

Now, while legally there's not much we can do, on a practical level we're a support-centric organization that totally understands that our clients are building their businesses on us and that we have to be reliable. Our income is directly tied to our clients income, so we have all kinds of incentive to make sure that the service is always up and ready to collect payment. Also, because of the way Spreedly works, you can quickly build a layer of simple caching in to your application that will ensure that even if we were down for some reason your site would still be up and serving existing clients.

I hope this helps explain. I know it's not the most satisfactory answer ever, but it's an honest one based on where we (and the industry) are at this point.

Could be. We're OK with that, for now at least. Pricing is tricky and you have to start somewhere, and so far our current price point is working great for us.

Yup, that is correct. One nice thing, though, is that you have gateway portability, so you can do some hard negotiation with your gateway and/or merchant account once your volume grows to cut down on the fees. And, of course, as your volume grows, you'll be getting charged 1-2% for most transaction. 3% is only for the first 50 every month.