I am planning to do some contract work to supplement my income and was wondering who has had experience with Paypal, Google Checkout and Authorize.net with regards to accepting online payments for contracting work. I plan to use Freshbooks to track and bill my time, and am looking to see which option I should use to accept client payments.
I would save my money and just cash checks. The cost is not worth the convenience. But this is my experience with gateways/processors:<p>Paypal is a nightmare to deal with if you ever need to call them. Their development stuff is awkward and buggy. I would not recommend them.<p>Auth.net works, but that's about all I can say for them. Support, UI, and API are all lackluster. Chargify (which is great) mitigates most of this, if you go that route, but it's probably overkill for client billing.<p>Braintree is awesome - great support, great API, great everything. Except price. They're significantly more expensive at low volumes and haven't been very flexible (probably because they don't have to be) on price.
> which option I should use to accept client payments<p>whichever is easiest for your clients, most likely. you saving 0.5% won't likely be worth making clients angry over paying a bill.