That's money right there. And noted for the future of my business. People will pay for you to take away the pain of their bad experiences with an inferior service/product.
Pain is not built-in though, but close.
The fantastic API literally saved hundreds of hours of integration and build time, as the recurring billing, discounts and everything is completely programmatic and just works.
I just signed up within the last few weeks and throughout the whole process I could tell they built it up with developers in mind, not as an afterthought.
V/MC Non-Qualified: 2.89% + $.30
Cybersource+WFB clocks in at roughly half that for V/MC( although Amex rates are around that level ), with per-transaction at 10 cents or less.
Our (Braintree) pricing is actually very competitive. It may look higher because we disclose all our fees. Nearly every provider we know obscures fees both during the sales process and in the monthly reporting statements so merchants never really understand what they're paying. Here's an example of pricing trickery http://www.braintreepaymentsolutions.com/blog/Costco-your-ma...
The wholesale rates for credit card processing (called interchange rates) are available online at visa and mastercard's websites (search for "visa interchange rates"). Without getting into details, all card-not-present transactions, regardless of card type, are more than 1.45%.
Braintree's pricing is not the lowest, but I bet if you looked carefully at your statement from Wells you would find that it is worse than Braintree - some of the worst processing deals I have ever seen are from Wells Fargo.
If you want to make sure that your processor is not pulling funny business with downgrades, insist on Interchange Plus pricing (http://feefighters.com/blog/interchange-plus/). Or just a completely flat rate with no downgrades.
And then monitor it closely, this is one of the most crooked industries on the planet.
About a year ago I actually managed to get someone from Braintree talking with someone from Chase Paymentech Canada (since Braintree supports Chase Paymentech). Unfortunately, BT is integrated with CP Salem whereas CP Canada only processes through CP Tampa.
If anyone has tried to do this in the last year and succeeded, please comment.
If you're doing that with a Canadian based merchant account, please send your account rep's info at CP or BT.
Every company I've worked at has strictly forbidden this kind of thing via a noncompete agreement. Essentially, it's in the name: "Noncompete Agreement"
Be careful what you sign, and be mindful of what you have signed in that past!
The banks and the regulations make all real credit card processing a major PITA, and while Braintree eases the process, they are not an exception as far as I can tell. They still have to underwrite and they still have to vet accounts for underwriting. If you have bad credit or anything else that would prevent you from getting a loan, you're not going to be able to process cards without PayPal, which means it's difficult to bootstrap yourself out of a bad situation.
One of the main reasons I think Bitcoin is cool is because it's a great experimental platform for this kind of stuff.
We do have one funny story about them from Getaround... one night, early in the morning, we got a call directly from their CEO. Apparently we had written some bad code that was just hammering their servers—basically, we were accidentally DoSing Braintree.
Got it fixed up quickly, and have loved them and used them ever since!
Their API & API Documentation are fantastic.
