[LRUG] Recurring Payments and subscriptions

[Matthew Willson]

> 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?

I've taken the "roll your own" approach on request for a project a few years ago (a beta service with a small customer base). I wouldn't recommend it unless:

- You do have a small customer base and don't expect fast growth
- You don't try to get too clever in how much you automate - since you're not going to catch all the corner cases - just make yourself some basic tools to assist you in manually managing people's subscriptions, and automate the most tedious aspects of this as and when the time saved genuinely outweighs the complexity cost
- You have a plan for handing billing over to the professionals before it gets into a serious growth phase

Actually, to be honest I'm not sure I'd recommend it at all, especially now there's a wider selection of recurring billing partners in the marketplace with relatively lightweight APIs.

Right now I'm involved in integrating with a certain enterprise billing engine (unnamed to protect the guilty), which is a whole world of pain. Chargify, Recurly et al seem much, much less painful if you're a startup with relatively modest billing needs, but unfortunately our requirements go beyond what they can do.

That and, as others seem to have experienced too, territory availability, gateway compatibility, EU safe harbour / data protection compliance and other commercial issues did also seem to rule out a lot of the choices available to us. If only one could choose purely based on who has the cleanest API...

-Matt