Recently there’s been a lot of controversy and talk about the way merchant banks provide merchant accounts. You might have seen the article TechCrunch posted about Fabulis and the fallout from Citigroup suspending their account for “nonexistent objectionable content”.

This highlights one of the major surprises that a lot of online businesses find out- merchant accounts are _not_ like personal bank accounts. As my co-founder Isaac has mentioned “I think of merchant accounts as special checking accounts because they really are special.  Special as in time consuming to open and full of headaches.” These headaches usually involve the major differences between online purchases and offline purchases.

Online transactions typically are services that do not include a physical exchange of good. As they are somewhat intangible, many merchant banks put these type of transactions as high risk and often request several years of payment history to prove you are a valid business (obviously if you’re a new startup, this is an issue).

What can you do?

The most important part is to choose a merchant account provider that understands online billing. Many of our Recurly users and colleagues have had great success with Braintree as they’re focused specifically on online business. We also have had good luck with Silicon Valley Bank. We’ve gotten a lot of poisitive feedback from our EU users about Wirecard. Regardless of the merchant account, be sure to ask these questions:

• How much are you paying above interchange rates? (Interchange rates are the standard fees to run a credit card)
• What are the monthly minimums? Are there invoicing or statement fees?
• When do we have access to our funds? This can be a real issue when collection yearly subscriptions. Other times it matters if they require a minimum amount in your account (revenue equal to the past 30 days of transactions).

Please also see our post on how to choose a merchant account. If you have any questions we can help with, feel free to leave a comment or send us an email at hello@recurly.com

At Recurly, we’re all about making developers lives easier. We’ve gotten some great feedback on the Ruby client library, but we thought a simple rails application would make things even easier.

I’m happy to announce an open source Ruby on Rails client application available now up on github. The client application demonstrates the REST API calls you’ll use in order to get your rails application processing subscriptions and one time payments with Recurly.

The client application depends on Recurly’s Ruby client library, which is available as a Ruby gem (via gemcutter.org) or plugin.  Please see the Ruby client documentation for installation instructions.

If you run into any problems using the app, drop us a line over in our support forums.

Cheers,
-james

Wow! January has been an incredibly busy month for Recurly, and we’re just halfway through! We’ve been hard at work integrating the feedback from our beta users into Recurly, and we’ve got a lot of great progress to show. Last night, we phased in a number of updates to Recurly that ranged from cosmetic (a shiny new look and feel) to enhanced features (greater international gateway support).

These updates make deploying subscription billing and interacting with your subscribers even easier. Our expanded international payment gateway support means even more choice and flexibility in the ways you transact your business.

Here are some of the top new items we’ve added:

• Enhanced UI look and feel
• Even greater International Payment Gateway Support
  - New gateways supported for US, UK, EU, Australia and Asia
• Improved Subscription Management Features
• Enhanced Subscriber Invoicing
• Streamlined Recurly signup process
• Additional subscriber retention features
  - Enhanced declined/cancelled card handling
  - Additional customizable and automated email options

All of these features are fully functional and live today in the beta. If you’re an international or US based company, there’s never been a better time to get started with Recurly. For access to our private-beta, email us at hello@recurly.com. Thanks and we look forward to helping you take the pain out of recurring billing!

Recurly was born from the changing needs of web services. With the industry’s movement away from ad-based revenue models to Freemium and SaaS subscription models, the need for subscription billing has exploded.  We’ve had experience with some of the larger swiss-army-knife billing systems as well as building systems from scratch. Neither option was close to ideal. Both take an incredibly long time to set up correctly and more time to maintain. Both weigh heaving on engineering resources that could be better spent on building features. The exiting billing solutions also and an extra sting to the time needed to integrate billing- they were prohibitively expensive.

With so many startups wrestling with the challenge of subscription billing, we felt it was time to offer some help. This is why we created Recurly.

As fellow developers ourselves, we’re looking forward to helping get you up and running quickly, and taking the pain out of subscriptions. Let us show you how. Thanks and we’re looking forward to what the future holds!