[dangrossman]

There's no commitment if you code against Spreedly instead of against Braintree's API. Then, once you save your $1450, you can switch processors if you're so inclined by changing just one token in your code.

Spreedly is a unified API for 58 payment gateways, a gateway-agnostic billing info vault so your customer info isn't trapped in whatever processor you chose at the time they signed up, and can alleviate much of the PCIDSS compliance burden if you choose to point your payment forms to them instead of your own server.

https://spreedly.com

I've been using them for a few years now. If you have a lot of recurring billing, knowing that you own that customer data instead of your processor, and your processor cutting you off without notice (which ALL of them can and have done to customers) won't interrupt your business, is peace of mind Spreedly sells very cheaply.

[patio11]

I'm also a happy user of Spreedly (via their subscriptions product which is now owned by Pin Payments, IIRC) and can verify that Dan's exactly right about how easy swapping out a gateway was. When I moved from Paypal (their I-can't-believe-it-isn't-a-gateway product) to Stripe it was literally 30 seconds of data entry in their admin screen and zero lines of code changed.

[Tohhou]

Have you ever had to change gateways? They charge 2 cents on top of gateway fees - would it be substantial for you if you went direct to the gateway? I imagine less sales at higher prices it's worth it. Many lower price sales it would be worth it to gateway hop manually cost wise.

[dangrossman]

> Have you ever had to change gateways?

Several times. And have lost customers in the process, since any customer info stored at the gateway is lost and getting hundreds of people to re-type their billing info in is a big undertaking and a big pain.

The cost of "hopping gateways" for any SaaS has little to do with the cost of the gateway or the cost of development. It's all about customer retention.

When I left one merchant account provider which had ratcheted up its rates every month for years to the point that continuing with them was absurd, the gateway refused to provide my customer info to me or transfer it to a new provider. It simply wasn't mine to have, in their view. That will never happen again; even if I leave Spreedly, they will give me the info to take with me.

> They charge 2 cents on top of gateway fees

Whether it's a $29/month customer or a $2000/month customer, 2 pennies just doesn't register. Let's say I have 500 customers that get charged each month. That's $10/month in transaction fees from Spreedly. That would buy me... 2 more ad clicks from Google. Or the peace of mind that my business's billing info and cash flow can't disappear overnight.

[lbarrow]

You wouldn't lose customer data if you left Braintree:

https://www.braintreepayments.com/landing/data-portability-p...

[btown]

What are some examples of qualified providers that will accept this type of data?

[dangrossman]

It says they'll accept a public key from the merchant, which is you; you don't need to find a provider that'll work with the data in whatever format it's in.

The "attestation of PCI compliance from a qualified provider" line refers to companies like these: https://www.pcisecuritystandards.org/approved_companies_prov...

Anyone with a merchant account to accept credit cards online already has a relationship with at least a QSA, and is already getting a quarterly attestation of compliance after completing a questionnaire and security scan of their server environment; it's required by PCIDSS and merchant account providers enforce it, typically providing an account with a QSA for a non-optional annual fee and imposing another fee if you fail to remain compliant.

It's just a formality having them forward that attestation to Braintree before they hand you the data dump.

[mtamizi]

Balanced will and has.

[Tohhou]

I was talking more about large volumes of lower amount purchases. I understand that if your prices are high even with high volume it's worth it.

Thank you for the details. Spreedly looks great.

[nonchalance]

The monthly fee makes it unappealing for small volume customers, and the per-transaction fee makes it unappealing for large volume customers. I'm guessing there's some intermediate range, when you are negotiating the final deal, where it's comforting to have that "flexibility".

[jusben1369]

Justin from Spreedly here. Dan, thanks for the kind mention! Dan's use case is one of the main driver's we see. We also see most interest from businesses/services that need their own vault as they work across multiple payment gateways. Either a SaaS billing/booking platform or someone working with 3 or 4 different gateway's globally. Single API/Single Vault/No PCI headache. Many of our customers are weighing up PCI L1 for card storage and/or integration to multiple gateways or Spreedly.

In terms of Dan's scenario we had a customer whose primary gateway was unresponsive early Sunday morning which happened to be their biggest day of the week. They brought a Stripe account up in around 5 - 10 minutes and processed 6 figures that day. Not sure how you ROI that against our fees but they were happy!