[stephanos2k]

I evaluated payment provider for my Germany-based SaaS and came to a similar conclusion. Paymill is great to get started, but Braintree wins in the long run (just do the math).

Obviously when your product is growing you don't have time to just rewrite the payment processing and migrate all data to a different provider.

I guess this is where something like "Spreedly" comes in. It is an additional abstraction that allows you to switch payment providers easily. At least so I read. Does anyone have experiences with that?

[marcusbrown]

We chose Spreedly for our startup and it was really easy to integrate. I like the idea of having the customer's credit cards details saved independently from the Payment Gateway and Merchant account, so that you're free to switch any time you want if you find a better deal in just 5 minutes via the control panel.

Beside this though we found 2 main problems along the path:

1) Setting up a merchant account for multi currency (we charge in USD and get paid in EUR) is a nightmare and it takes a lot of time (in the end it took more than 3 months!). Things get much more complicated and costs can rise quickly. Also, you have to register with American Express separately and you have to do it for 2 separate accounts (one for euros and one for dollars). So you end up with lots of different accounts (one for Spreedly, one for the payment gateway, one for the Visa+Mastercard merchant account, one for American Express) and this makes things much more complicated to manage.

2) Spreedly decided in the last months to focus just on the Spreedly Core (vaulting the credit card data in a secure place) and sold the subscription part to Pin Payments http://blog.spreedly.com/2013/07/15/pin-payments-purchases-s... So this means that the developing of new features was dropped and their minimal control panel stayed the same over the last couple of years. Not sure if this is going to change in the future with Pin Payments, but it's always a big question mark for the future. Support and maintenance is still covered, but I wouldn't expect any new stuff for the future...

So I guess that in the end if I were in your place I would stick with Braintree or Paymill, and we would probably have chosen Braintree if at that time they would have offered the payment gateway and merchant account as well (they started only since last year I think).

I'm looking forward to see Stripe coming in Europe and hopefully cover all the states very soon.

[itengelhardt]

I think it is a prudent move for a bootstrapped startup. You just don't blow out 1,200 EUR / year, when you don't have any revenue incoming. Solve the problem at hand (i.e. accept payments) in a way that is best RIGHT NOW.

There are so many ways to mitigate this decision later on. I know at least two companies who changed their payment processor in the course of their lifetime.

[ThomasTesselaar]

I just did the math real quick as well, and i really don't understand their choice for Paymill. Braintree's rates are so much better, they are loosing so much money in the long run!

Posted a chart in the comments at the blog.

[ned]

In the long run yes, when they have revenue. But they mention:

But then, one day when I came back to their website, I saw that they had added a minimum fee of €100 to their plan, and that unfortunately tipped the scale for us, as we pay everything on our own, and we have zero revenue coming in.

So the problem is for the first few months during which you pay everything out of your own pocket. It probably all depends on how confident you are that you'll get revenue.

How simple/hard is it to migrate from system to another?