What do you use for recurring payments in a Rails Application?

Question

I'm fairly new to rails so I'm definitely not up to speed on the community's best practices, tools, etc. So I figure this may be the best place to ask.

What do you use for recurring billing in a rails app?

From what I can tell, there are a number of options including rolling my own with ActiveMerchant or using one of the SaaS out there. As far as the SaaS recurring billing systems, I've only stumbled upon one thus far (chedder getter) and I'm hoping there are alternatives (if, for nothing else, so I can compare). Additionally, I've seen a few invoice systems but they either do not handle the payment portion, do not seem to fit well with the intention, or are extremely outdated.

Thanks in advance!

Composition of research and answers/comments

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I'll try to keep this updated and provide more information as I do my own internal research.

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Merchant Bank Accounts

• www.transfs.com

Articles

• Chargify: Rails Powered Recurring Billing Service With An ActiveResource API
• Charify vs Spreedly vs CheddarGetter

DIY

ActiveMerchant

Would probably be the starting point for rolling your own. Seems to be the most widely accepted payment platform out there for Ruby on Rails.

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SaaS Rails Kit

SaaS Kit appears to handle most, if not all of the work necessary for recurring billing. However, the price tag is certainly something to consider. This could be a viable alternative after building up clients, if you have decent startup capital, if you plan on having multiple billing, or if you do both client work and your own.

Pricing

• Single Site: $249
• Multisite : $999

SaaS

All SaaS services require a payment gateway and are thus additional fees on top of your normal gateway pricing. However, I believe this is by far the easiest way to go to get your project up and running and in the wild.

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CehddarGetter

Gems

• MouseTrap
• CheddarGetter Api

Pricing No transaction fees.

• Free: 0-20 customers
• $39.00/mo up to 1000 customers, $0.19/mo per additional customer
• $169/mo up to 10,000 customers, $0.06/mo per additional customer
• $549/mo up to 50,000 customers, $0.02/mo per additional customer

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Spreedly

Notes There are several gems for spreedly which could significantly speed up development. It also appears to be the oldest and most mature out of all of them.

Gems

• spreedly-gem

Pricing

• $19 per month + 20¢ per payment transaction or 2% per payment transaction, whichever is less.
• Bulk pricing for 5000+ transactions a month.

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Charify

Pricing

• Free for up to 50 customers
• $49 up to 500 customers
• $249 for 5000 customers
• $749 for 15000 customers
• $2449 for unlimited
• All features included, no setup fees, no transaction fees.
• Each tier comes with 1000 "free" users (non billed) and $10/mo for each 1000 after that.

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Recurly

Appears to be the newest to enter into the game. Pricing is in flux at the moment as they have promotional pricing until July 1st.

Answer 1

I guess it depends on what gateway you're using; that's pretty important since some of them aren't supported or are only supported by a couple of gems/plugins.

Personally I've been using ActiveMerchant for a while now. It's great once you find a good example of how to do what you want. I'm with PayPal UK and it offered me good support for that.

Answer 2

Other hosted options include Chargify, Recurly, and Spreedly.

Don't forget my product, the SaaS Rails Kit. :) Many people have said it's a great learning tool.

Answer 3

You face the usual issues of in-source or out-source. Payments, per se, are not hard to do but remember there are also the issues of invoicing, cards that expire/fail, integration with accounting, etc.

If you decide to go the saas route (hiring a company to do the charges for you), look for a company that builds its success on your success. Eg chargify doesn't charge you until you're above 50 customers. There are others which have huge upfront costs.

I suggest that you get your own merchant bank account, paypal always says "e-bay-style amateur" to me. Getting your own merchant account is quite easy these days.

Main issue is to never ever store credit card/exp date or cvv numbers on your system. Instead, use the "Customer Information Manager" from authorize.net or similar.

A good source for low-cost merchant bank accounts is www.transfs.com

One last issue: If you're in the US, there are now a number of states that require saas companies to charge sales tax. This includes NY State. So if you have physical presence in such a state then you need to charge sales tax to any of your customers who are also in your state.