[BrianAnderson]

I would also be interested in hearing what services people use to handle monthly billing as well as plusses and minuses.

For example, is it true with pay pal that on their credit card statement it will say something like Paypal <company name>

I am also about to launch a service with a recurring billing component.

[matt1]

Paypal lets you specify the name you want to appear on credit card statements. You get to specify an 11 character and a 19 character name for the charge:

https://www.paypal-community.com/t5/PayPal-for-your-business...

[dangrossman]

PayPal and Authorize.net's CIM (in front of a merchant account). CIM (Customer Information Manager) lets you store customers' payment information on Authorizenet's servers, and charge it by reference at any time. A daily cron job checks which accounts have not been billed in over 30 days and issues the charges through the CIM API. It's not terribly complicated, and a lot easier than the type of setup you need to store credit card numbers yourself while complying with PCIDSS.

If you ever look at the "subscription management as a service" companies, avoid Recurly. Chargify and Spreedly seem alright, but having implemented recurring billing with CIM and PayPal a few times already, they don't save me anything worth paying for.

[percept]

Also see:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1430135

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1677830

[warp]

Anything I pay for with paypal appears as PAYPAL <company name> <some account number> <3 letter country code>.