| HN Mirror

> Suggestion, you need a big fat section on your site that addresses why I should trust you.

I can't upvote this enough, as a guy who's been actively researching recurring billing solutions recently.

For the benefit of the OP, here are a few absolute dealbreakers that would make me not even consider you right now. Please take them as constructive criticism intended to be helpful:

1. You appear to be two guys with Linode, running a business that doesn't yet have a track record. IMHO, that means you need to be backed by either a large, established company or a provable insurance policy that means I'm still getting what's due to me if you go under. Remember, you are asking people to trust you with one of the most important parts of their business.

2. You ducked the PCI question, and apparently didn't even realise that you had. You have just lost all credibility, probably for good if anyone researching you ever finds this thread as it stands right now. I respectfully suggest that, as a minimum, you post a statement here that makes it clear that you do understand the implications of PCI and you know exactly where both you and your prospective clients fit into the scheme of things. (As an aside, I would be interested to know how you can possibly provide the service you seem to be offering while using a shared hosting service and still be PCI compliant.)

3. On a related note, you don't mention anything about getting my customer data out of your system if I ever want to move away. You need a robust, straightforward process to do this, again including a guarantee that there will be an opportunity for me to use it before you disappear to a tropical island/under a bus/into bankruptcy court.

4. Net 60? Ditto to what everyone else said. Additionally, saying it's for fraud protection loses you points: if I'm using a service like this rather than going straight to payment gateways and merchant accounts, using a service that can offer robust fraud protection schemes and fight chargebacks on my behalf is a major plus, which several of your competitors offer to a useful extent. If you think you need to keep all of my money for 60 days (or even 30) in case of chargebacks, I have to wonder how easy it is to game your system.

5. If you don't have a robust API/callback system, I suspect you don't have a product worth anything to most of your target market. Ditto if you can't export comprehensive reports in a format readily imported into common accounting software and/or provided to professional accountants.

6. Given that you're up against relatively well established small-scale opposition now and of course some Internet giants, your fees are uncompetitive. If you don't have the power and the established reputation they do, you need a lot more than a slightly lower rate to stand out.

7. In due course, if you want to handle international transactions for clients based in Europe, you'll need to be aware of the tax and data protection rules, and you'll need to be able to give absolute guarantees that everything you do will fall within those rules (for example, not transferring any personal customer data outside the EEA). Being US-only is a deal-breaker for now for many of us anyway, but you knew that.

I do wish you luck, as intermediary payment services have a lot of potential benefit and more competition is good for all of us. However, looking at the web site so far, my honest view is that you don't look ready for a public beta yet. If you are, I respectfully suggest that your FAQ needs to be a lot less chummy and a lot more to-the-point regarding the questions above so potential customers like me can see that.