Recurring Payments (aka Subscriptions)

[mjallday]

• Could Balanced support recurring payments?
• Is anyone interested in this feature?
• Would it be useful to have these for credits as well as debits?

[dsog]

I am interested in recurring payments, but I don't know if that should be something handled by the BalancedPayments API or should it be done on the client side. I was planning on maintaining it on my side as I would probably have a little bit more control over the transaction, conditions, and so forth.

[mahmoudimus]

@khussein one possibility is that we open source a recurring payments module that you can just host on your own w/o needing Balanced or we could offer a hosted solution at a cost.

Very similar to how Chef or Puppet work.

[taylorbrooks]

I like the idea of Balanced allowing developers to create a plan objects where you could choose the amount, the funding source (ACH/credit card), and the interval (bi-weekly, monthly, annually).

Ideally, I'd like Webhooks to know when a buyer changes or cancels their plan. Or if their funding source fails for some reason (card expires, etc.)

[matin]

There are no current plans to provide this functionality, but it can be revisited later.

[mahmoudimus]

+1 - I think recurring billing should work, but it depends on solid event notifications first.

[taylorbrooks]

I saw this was tagged with "willnotdo" does that mean it's completely off the table?

[matin]

I saw this was tagged with "willnotdo" does that mean it's completely off the table?

@taylorbrooks I had ruled it out for now, but @mahmoudimus and @mjallday have convinced me otherwise. @mjallday is right though. This is dependent on Balanced implementing events and webhooks

[mahmoudimus]

In terms of team focus, this is a feature we're not focused on at this very moment, so rather than have everyone's hopes up, @matin marked it as will not do and moved on to the more pressing issues -- feel free to correct me, @matin, if I'm wrong. However, I would think that this is a very useful feature and the more +1s for us, the more it makes sense for us to address it.

so, keep pressing us, we're listening :)

[matin]

In terms of team focus, this is a feature we're not focused on at this very moment, so rather than have everyone's hopes up, @matin marked it as will not do and moved on to the more pressing issues -- feel free to correct me, @matin, if I'm wrong. However, I would think that this is a very useful feature and the more +1s for us, the more it makes sense for us to address it.

Yup, but that's properly the wrong approach to communicate the status of an issue. Otherwise, there's a few others where I should have taken the same approach.

To be clear, Balanced will implement a way to perform recurring billing. It's purely a matter for prioritization against other issues defined on GitHub.

[jordanmessina]

+1 Forge

[jrus]

One way to do recurring payments is to use ChargeBee, which can use Balanced as a back-end payment processor, see https://apidocs.chargebee.com/docs/api/subscriptions

I believe they charge a monthly fee based on the number of users to invoice, and then also pass along fees from their payment processor (e.g. 2.9% + 30¢ for Balanced). For some of you listening here this may be an acceptable fee to avoid having to set up the logic for handling recurring payments yourselves.

I think it would still be nice for Balanced to provide some built-in way of handling recurring payments, but this seems like a good stop-gap.

[rrhyne]

+1 for subscription features. Thanks!

[kyleboddy]

Really need subscriptions for my business. Thanks!

[taylorbrooks]

Curious, is this on the docket as a possible feature?

I know there was some discussion of possibly creating an open source library for recurring payments.

Webhooks was a huge win for making something like this happen.

[nighthawk117]

+1, nice to have - for now we will just re-create feature on our end using api

[Chadh13]

+1 for subscription / recurring payments support!

[matin]

Recurring billing and other scheduled tasks will be supported through a separate service (maintained by Balanced) called Billy. @mahmoudimus has started the spec.

It's possible that the functionality of Billy will be integrated directly into the core Balanced API.

[chaudhariganesha]

Any one knows about the recurring payment using balance payment

[briansea]

I'm interested in this feature!

[JonHMChan]

+1 for subscriptions and recurring billing

[saman325]

+1 for subscriptions and recurring billing!

[rralston]

+1 for subscriptions and recurring billing 👍

[digvan]

+1

Sent from my iPhone

On Feb 24, 2014, at 12:35 PM, Rupert Ralston notifications@github.com wrote:

+1 for subscriptions and recurring billing

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Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub.

[TrevorHinesley]

+1

[jasewilson]

+1

[josemarluedke]

+1

[vially]

👍 for subscriptions and recurring billing

[jgadelange]

+1

[jonez734]

+1

[hhalim]

+1 need recurring engine

[aarongodert]

+1 some competitors have this

[milanmalkani]

+1

[EdgeCaseBerg]

👍 this would be a great addition to balanced

[riyadc]

I need subscription and recurring billing. Please add this feature.

[bmwertman]

I also need subscription and recurring billing.

[pthor]

+1

[kingdango]

If you're planning on taking credit card information for later billing (ie. the next day or a few weeks later) you MUST MUST MUST "claim" the credit card (token) you created immediately after creating it. To claim it you can simply do a GET for the card url (but any API-authenticated call will do). If you don't do this you'll find that the next day (or a few weeks later) the token is NOT FOUND because it was removed as unclaimed. Found this out the hard way...

[chadwtaylor]

+1 Any lead on this?

[eadonj]

+1

[taylorbrooks]

@mazhar5012 I think it's pretty safe to say this is not going to happen. :)