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0 pointsmjlawson6y ago0 comments

Easier said than done. Outside of the costs and overhead required to implement a secondary payment solution in the rare case your primary solution goes down, often times payment providers require exclusivity agreements which prohibit this.

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6 comments · 1 top-level

polysaturate6y ago· 5 in thread

Never said it was easy, but if it's bad enough to make a post about how "painful" it is and "losing revenue" it should be a consideration? Yeah?

When P(payment provider outage) x (expected lost revenue in case of outage) > (costs of implementing and maintaining an independent alternative payment processor and automatic failover), then hoping for the best and writing a comment about pain in case of outage is still the best strategy.

motivated_gear6y ago

Lets say it takes 2 engineers 3 months to build an another payment processor + failover, at $120k salary + 40k in benefits and taxes a year a piece.

stipes SLA was 99.980% uptime for the last 90 days

0.02% * revLoss > 160k * 2 * .25/year

OP's app would have to be earning 400mm a year. Not likely but possible.

MichaelApproved6y ago

Most likely it's worth taking the revenue loss rather than building a redundant payment provider. That doesn't mean taking the revenue loss doesn't hurt.

Exactly. If it starts happening frequently, maybe it's worth looking into. But I think there's a middle ground between 'worthy of complaining on hacker news' and 'need to implement and support a redundant backup payment system.'

KATG listener since 2006. Awesome to see you on here.

You’re right, you would never believe the amount of effort required to make an HN post. I’ve often not only implemented backup payment provider solutions instead, but also tertiary ones. In fact, in lieu of this comment I was 90% of the way to starting my own payment network.

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