We are building a software service that will be paid for based on a monthly subscription model. We are not really interested in reinventing any wheels and writing a billing system, and are interested in what you all are doing for your applications.<p>Do you create bridges to other third party billing system? If so, which ones do you recommend to integrate with (we are a ruby on rails application).<p>If you think its a bad idea to use a pre-existing billing system, could you give reasons why you feel that way?<p>Thanks for the advice!
If you're doing it in Rails, I'd recommend the ActiveMerchant plugin and a gateway/merchant account from Braintree.<p>That's what we use on our main Rails app (as opposed to PayPal on our other main subscription-based offering). It works great. The only hangup has been accepting international currencies (we're having to work with a different company for that).<p>The transaction fees are low, too–which actually makes a difference when you start getting a lot of subscribers.<p><a href="http://www.braintreepaymentsolutions.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.braintreepaymentsolutions.com/</a>
<a href="http://www.activemerchant.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.activemerchant.org/</a>
<a href="https://peepcode.com/products/activemerchant-pdf" rel="nofollow">https://peepcode.com/products/activemerchant-pdf</a>
i use Simple Invoices - <a href="http://www.simpleinvoices.org" rel="nofollow">http://www.simpleinvoices.org</a> to bill my clients for freelance work<p>cheers<p>justin