What payment gateways did you use when you first launched your project?
Morning Indie Hackers!
I want to start by thank you all for being a constant source of motivation and inspiration in my life!
Otherwise, I was wondering what kind of payment gateways are you all using, especially those of you who don’t live in the US?
Thank you!
We incorporated in the US, moved to Europe, and used Authorize.net – those were the bad, bad old days. Now we use Stripe. These days if I was outside the US, I would look into Stripe's Atlas program.
Gumroad is run with a skeleton crew and I would not trust my business to it in any way, shape or form. PayPal is fine in a lot of ways, but they do have that "sometimes they just lock your account with all your money in it for no reason and you have no way to appeal" thing going on... plus their API is literally the worst (worse than Authorize, which is saying something). We tried to use Fastspring, and I can tell you for a fact it's abominably horrific. Braintree used to have stiff requirements for co. size before they'd take you on, but I believe they relaxed those over the years. Their API still is nowhere as good as Stripe.
The problem with using a service like Cheddar or whatever is popular these days (being an old schooler, I don't follow them) is that if you ever try to switch away from them, for a more "grown up" experience (with lower fees), you will have to convince your customer base to re-enter all their CC details, which will probably cause a large chunk of churn right away.
It's a tough decision. Good luck.
Thank you for the thorough feedback @amyhoy !
... edit ... yeah, actually https://stripe.com/docs/subscriptions/quickstart looks pretty comprehensive. It's just VAT that annoys me, really (I already do GST in Australia so it's more of the same, really) but https://stripe.com/works-with/categories/tax-calculation has some answers. I've always liked the look of Quaderno.
It's been long enough that I don't remember the details about Fastspring, but a general aura of deep, deep horror. Their docs were lies… there was a lot of XML… their support told me to go fuck myself… this much I remember, but not what the core problem was.
Can you elaborate on your issues with Gumroad? I've always used Stripe myself and love it, but I've only ever heard good things from people that use Gumroad.
I didn't have an issue with Gumroad, til they fired all their staff but 2-3. That is not enough to run a major ecommerce platform. Now I hear from people who are still on it that they have endless issues, failing support, etc., and if you search for Gumroad on Twitter and whatnot, you will see many cries of frustration.
As someone who has used Gumroad for well over a year, I have very mixed feelings. On one hand, they allowed me to ship way faster and accept a few different payment providers right away. On the other hand, the "skeleton crew" comment rings VERY true to me.
For example, I once emailed support because most of their site appears to work on mobile, but I wasn't able to create a discount code on mobile. The form showed up, the buttons were all there, but when I hit "submit" it didn't work for some reason. When I emailed support the response I got was "Our site isn’t meant to be used on mobile – I suggest using a laptop or desktop to edit your products." No offer to create it for me, no empathy, no real help at all. This was pretty frustrating for me, as I was out of the country without a laptop at the time so the discount code had to wait a few days.
If this had just happened once I would forgotten about it, but over the year I've had maybe 4-5 interactions with support and all of them have felt rushed, uncaring, and offer the bare level of support possible without doing nothing.
I'll likely continue using Gumroad for a while because it works, but long term I strongly suspect I'll be integrating Stripe and figuring out something else for customers in countries not supported by Stripe.
I had the exact same problem with creating a discount code on mobile. Everything worked except the Save button. I emailed support and got basically the same reply:
Notice the 2016. This was August of 2016. Pretty sure it's still not fixed :(
Indie Hacker and Cheddar employee here.
Thanks for the mention of Cheddar, Amy. I just wanted to chime in and clarify a few things:
Cheddar is fantastic tool for managing recurring and usage based billing logic, but it isn't itself a payment processor and doesn't store full card data for your customers.
Any customer data that is stored by Cheddar can be easily exported at any time and is always free of charge. :)
You're right—deciding on a gateway is a tough decision. We strongly encourage people to do their research into their gateway's data portability. If your gateway provider can do a direct export of the card data to another PCI compliant provider, you won't have to collect your customers card information again which minimizes the risk of churn during migration. We're happy to help our customers make this process as friction-less as possible when they want to migrate.
On the fees note, Cheddar is reasonably priced compared to other billing platforms like Chargebee, Chargify, Recurly, etc. If you exclude the payment processor, we charge $99/month. We do have our own payment processor, CheddarPay, and it costs the same as Stripe—2.9% + $0.30/transaction. If you want to use you're own payment processor, we charge $0.30/transaction.
If you're reading this and unfamiliar with Cheddar, check it out below. Again, for full disclosure—I work here!
https://gtchdr.com/2FQ1Rp1
My apologies for mixing it up with the other platforms!
All good!
Our business is based in France.
We have been using Paddle.com for over a year, and are quite happy with them. We had some minor issues with their support at first, but it has improved a lot over the last few months — I guess the money they raised recently helped.
It's kind of fun for an app dedicated to Stripe not to bill through Stripe, but we have some good reasons to keep using Paddle for now:
On another side-project, we use Plasso.com:
Plasso checks all those boxes. This is not a silver-bullet, but considering the "no development" part, it has proved very useful.
In any case, if you expect a meteoric growth and think you'll need to optimize your costs by switching of payment processor, choose carefully: it is very, very, very difficult, if not impossible, to move your customers' CC details to another service. And then, as @amyhoy said: churn 😱.
OMG, yes, that is the best emoji for churn. Whenever we type the word "churn" here on IH, the 😱 should come with haha.
😱Churn😱
For all Eastern Europe (Russia, Ukraine, etc.) https://www.interkassa.com/ cant find eng version of website, but I think there should be. All local popular payment methods and API. Easy to setup.
I've tried liqpay which worked fine and never heard of this one. Also, hard to trust a website that does not have English version.
Liqpay is Private Bank service, and works mostly for Ukraine.
No English version yes, this is issue actually.
Interesting, will check it as an alternative, thanks!
Did anyone try https://gumroad.com , their service seems to be okay as well !
I've used Gumroad, and I absolutely loved it. If you want to sell digital downloads, it's probably the most convenient option.
The downfall of Gumroad is they don't have a developer API. If you have a product that's a digital download, or a subscription service like Patreon, then it's great. But there's no way to integrate the authentication into an app that you can dynamically change whether the person is paying or not.
Not that I tried, but the "get subscribers" API at https://gumroad.com/api#subscribers sounds like you can do it, though you need your own backend for end-user auth and connecting it with the subscribers list.
Hi! I've been using https://paddle.com for the past year on https://snapwidget.com and it's been working great. Easy to implement and they handle sales tax and some of the basic user accounting support as well.
They are a bit more expensive than Stripe though.
Thank you @hschutte !
I think I'll be giving them a try soon ;)
Hi @moaalabou,
welcome aboard
If you're planning to run your business from Morocco/Africa, @elazzabi_ had made an awesome documentation for supported payment gateways.
Take a look at: https://www.indiehackers.com/@elazzabi/what-it-feels-like-to-launch-an-online-business-from-africa-4682dd5de6
Hey Mehdi ! Glad to see some familiar faces in here ;)
@moaalabou For my Shopify store, I use PayPal to handle PayPay (captain obvious) + credit card payments and Mollie to handle local (the Netherlands) card type payments.
PayPal is good that way since they can also handle other card types (Visa etc.).
Let me know if you need more specific info 👍
Braintree. Still using it after 4 years.
I have a feeling I would look at Stripe today.
Hey Mathias,
Stripe is certainly interesting, but using it would require incorporating in the US, which is something that I'm trying to avoid especially when I'm just testing the business!
Stripe definitely doesn’t require incorporating in the US: https://stripe.com/global.
uh, I'm a sole-trader in Australia & have collected >$100k through Stripe so, nope - it's definitely not US only. Also, Stripe Atlas.
Wait, what? You have to incorporate in the USA? I'm from the UK, would be surprised if this were true!
It's definitely not!
Guys/Gals, thanks for all the tips/info in the comments. I've learnt so much. Question from me:-
My co-founder and I are planning to soft-launch our v1. We also want to test if people are willing to actually pay for the product, so we were thinking of charging say, a one-time fee of $10 for the first 100 sign-ups. But we don't intend to incorporate a company and get a merchant bank account and incur all the related costs for it just yet. Not for this v1.
For all the aforementioned payment processors, do they allow customer payments into personal accounts (ie: my co-founder's or mine)?
We've considered Paypal, but it is not ideal as the payee name displayed would be the individual's name. It's not great experience and 'secure' for the users, as they are expecting to be paying to <product name> but instead the payee name displayed would be something else. Would be ideal if it would show my product name.
Any thoughts?
We are looking for a good solution in India. Kind of Stripe. Any suggestions?
Gumroad worked really well for me and direct sales. Had it up and running in under 1 hour.
I've also done some manual PayPal processing before investing too much time in a sophisticated system. For example, a button that sends user to PayPal, they pay me, then a message to tell them they'll be upgraded in under 24hrs. At that point I manually do the upgrade and reach out to them directly.
Nobody mentioned paddle.com. It is extremely easy to set up for recurring payments.
I am still building my first SaaS product and I was initially planning to use Braintree (Stripe is not available in my country) but I have recently became aware of Adyen and from what I have read they seem like a great choice for European Indie Hackers.
A few other useful links (regarding fraud protection):
http://www.fraudlabspro.com/developer/tutorials/stripe-integration
https://www.maxmind.com/en/minfraud-services
https://www.signifyd.com/
The original blog post which tells a story about Stripe`s handling of frauds is https://kinsta.com/blog/startups-avoid-stripe/ (I do not know if it is still relevant)
Paypal.
Zoho Subscriptions also really helped us out in the beginning.
This comment was deleted 5 years ago