[LRUG] Recurring Payments and subscriptions

[Marcus Roberts]

On 2 Sep 2010, at 23:28, Neil Middleton wrote:

> Hi all,
> 
> We're looking at building an application that uses the regular subscriptions model a la Basecamp or similar (I'm sure you all know the model I mean).  Question is, what approach has people taken in the past?
> 

We use SagePay and their Direct product so that we take card numbers on our site and then pass them over.  You need to get a merchant account with someone like Barclaycard, and you need to get one with continuous authority, which lets you take repeated payments.   We found it very difficult to get a merchant account  for charging for "virtual services" and had to leverage a good relationship with a bank manager to get it.  It does give us complete flexibility in terms of repeat payments though.

We then used the Rails saas kit (http://railskits.com/saas/) as the basis for our billing, with some heavy modifications to suit our needs.   I  had to make some changes to ActiveMerchant to get repeated SagePay payments integrated.

Marcus