Subscription Management with Merchant Account via API

Question

I'm researching gateways/vendors that provide the ability to create subscription based transitions for merchant accounts. In other words, I want to allow customers to signup for a subscription for a website service that charges once a month.

Authorize.Net has an ARB (Automated Recurring Billing) Module. The cost is cheap, $10 a month for the service, with unlimited subscriptions, and they have an API that allows XML or SOAP access to create, update and cancel. The LARGE negative of the service is that it doesn't have elegant way to obtain the current status of a subscription. They can send a daily email with an attached CSV file, or someone can login into the site and review statuses – neither is an enterprise solution.

The parent company "CyberSource" has a "Recurring Billing Service" which implies a more robust solution, including API access to subscription information. I’m currently waiting for a sales call back on costs related to the service.

I also looked at PayPal's Recurring Billing Service, but that appears to require that users are redirected to the PayPal site to signup for the subscription -- again, not an an elegant solution.

Does anyone know of any other vendors/gateways that offer subscription service, that meet the following criteria:

• Vendor/Gateway must host the credit card number and be PCI compliant
• Have an API that accessible via a Web Service, Post over HTTPS or SOAP
• Have an API that allows querying the status of subscriptions and/or the ability to query for activity since a certain date.

Thanks in advance for your suggestions.

Answer 1

You could use the Authorize.net CIM API for storing/retrieving the payment profiles, then manage the subscription end of it yourself.

Note that the $10/month for ARB or $20/month for CIM is in addition to the standard Authorize.net gateway and merchant account fees.

Answer 2

Braintree is a level 1 PCI compliant service provider, has a credit card vault to store cards, has managed recurring billing with queryable status, and provides client libraries in Ruby, PHP, Python, Java, and .NET for API integration. Disclosure: I work for Braintree.

Answer 3

Check out ViaSubscription I have recently integrated this for a client and they really are loving it. I believe it will integrate with most of the normal gateways. Please note that I don't work for ViaSubscription, but I have found that they are very easy to deal with.

Answer 4

Take a loook at this article

I compare three solutions.

I started trying CheddarGetter. Looks ok so far