stympy

Don't forget the SaaS Rails Kit at http://railskits.com/saas/ if you're writing a Rails app. :)

I recently added affiliate tracking to the SaaS Rails Kit as a starting point for tracking payments to affiliates, etc. It's not a full, automated solution of course, but at least you can track it.

Generally you can't get that stored card data back out of the gateway. You basically have three options for this: 1. Just stick with the one you pick for the life of the app. This is the easiest. :) 2. When you switch keep track of which gateway has the info, maintaining two gateway accounts. 3. Ask users to re-enter their billing info when you switch.

I'll plug myself here... :) If you are using Rails, take a look at http://railskits.com/saas/ -- a great starting point for your Rails apps to not only do the recurring billing (with Auth.net, Braintree, etc.) but also do account management, upgrades/downgrades, etc.

It has a lot of the work done for you, so you just plug it in and go.

If you can point me at a non-US-friendly vendor that does stored transactions like Braintree's Vault, I'd be happy to work in support for that vendor.

I have to agree with this. I used to recommend TrustCommerce to everyone, but now I recommend BrainTree to everyone, primarily because of their responsiveness. Of course the payment gateway works -- you'd hope that would be a given, regardless of the provider -- but their excellent service really sets BrainTree apart.

Uh, I guess so... if you implement it. :)

Kidding aside, you can do whatever you want on top of the base application -- it's a standard Rails app, after all. But what you get "out of the archive" is a bog-standard customer pays $x/mo for access to the app which has some limits based on the value of x, and the limits are up to you to implement (aside from the included one, which limits the number of users that can be associated with a customer's account).

I just updated the site with more details about the implementation. If you are using restful_authentication, it may be as easy as just making 3 one-line changes to your current user code (lib/authenticated_system.rb and app/models/user.rb), depending on how my notion of an Account lines up with how you're managing your customers.

I think you'll find that the code is very easy to get into and bend to whatever you want to do.

I'll toss more details up on the site, soon, though, so hopefully that will help give you a better feel for it.

You can see some of the UI parts in action by creating a free Catch the Best account, since this code was extracted from that project. Feel free to upgrade to a paying plan to see that functionality, too. :)

http://catchthebest.com/

I'll be throwing up some more info on the site over the next couple of days, too, so thanks for the ideas on what you'd like to see.

Yup, it's a one-time payment for use for one application. If you want to build more than one application using the same codebase as a starting point, it's a one-time payment of $999.