[sachinag]

Ha, looks like Bryan owes you a beer for this ringing endorsement. :)

There are a number of reasons why it can be that complicated - doesn't always have to be, but I think you are the exception rather than the rule.

First, most people just don't have a basic understanding of how it all works. The idea that a merchant account isn't a bank account at all is non-obvious to everyone I've walked through payments hell with. Recurring billing, in particular, is a huge pain in the ass, especially with upgrades and downgrades that users do as they try to optimize their freemium subscriptions. (There wouldn't be at least four companies doing just this if it wasn't a total PITA.) If you're not built in Ruby, and you can't use ActiveMerchant, you really have to evaluate the documentation for each of the various gateways - and good luck finding out the names of all of them - before you can even begin. AmEx, in particular, is a whole 'nother circle of hell, although OnePoint solves a lot of these issues (but, of course, for a price).

Honest to God, I'm going to try to learn Ruby this summer purely because ActiveMerchant exists. My existing startup is coded in PHP with a dash of Perl and Python, but online billing is so complex and so tedious that I'm learning a language that's not useful to my existing startup because payments are so hellacious.

[enjo]

Well, he may be the exception but it lines up with my experience (also Braintree). I think I've spent a grand total of 1 day on our billing system. We do threshold billing, monthly subscription, and one time payments. We use the Braintree vault and everything just sort of works.

I've done some work with various authorize.net resellers in the past with similar results. Really, understanding the magic that is interchange rates is the most difficult piece of the whole equation:)