The only gap is, that Recurly and Spreedly were not able to tell the EU founders that their service is available and working perfectly fine with European payment gateways.
VAT is a tricky area with a lot of special rules - this is why most recurring billing providers don't take it on.
After hearing additional requirements from dmarinoc and a few other merchants located in Spain, we have since implemented a solution for merchants using VAT.
Diego - I'll follow up with you directly about the changes :)
Ouch, that's a big minus from the point of view of an European company - not having to look for another app to generate invoices or futz around with generating your own was nice.
The specific issue with Recurly that we had is that they silently changed their platform to perform VIES validation on all VAT numbers. While this makes sense for transactions with entities from outside of the merchant's country, validating VAT numbers for German-to-German or Spanish-to-Spanish transactions is silly. Not only do such transactions always get charged VAT, but it's possible that a given string is a valid VAT number and yet is not present in VIES. Since you will pay (and therefore charge the customer) VAT for same-country transactions anyway, you don't care if the number that the customer provided is valid according to VIES.
This change has cost us a little wave of support tickets and an ugly workaround, in preparation for moving off Recurly.
I firmly believe that a company that gets online recurring payments right in Europe will become a money-printing machine in no time.
Those are special cases for Germany and Spain (I implemented that stuff for a german webshop that has to make the same exception). I'd guess it's the same for Spain.
German customers who buy in a german webshop have to pay VAT and then claim it back later in their tax return, because the german tax authorities don't allow that exemption beforehand.
You want a local, independent gateway and acquirer anyway (same jurisdiction, language, support…) which both Spreedly.com and Recurly.com support with http://www.WireCard.com/
In bad circumstances you don't want to lose all your payment infrastructure e.g. if paymill or stripe go out of business/have issues. That's why dealing with 2 parties may look odd but in the end it is worth the effort.
If you have problems paying the 50-100$ monthly fee, then your business is the problem. Not your payment partner.
(WireCard is a profitable, public credit-card processing bank, the chances that they go out of business is much lower than VC driven payment startups. See http://www.wirecard.com/investor-relations/ for details. They do CC-payments for Deutsche Telekom and Lufthansa. >11 Billion Euro/year)
Seconded. I run an ecommerce site that has more than 100k in sales per year but only 10 to 20% go through credit cards. I sure will not file endless paperwork and do long integration just to move away from paypal. But I signed up for paymill in a second because it will provide what I really need (a nicer payment process) and spare me a lot of hassle. The processing fees on 20k is 580 for Paymill so it would even be cheaper. If the shop grows tenfold then sure lets integrate with the XML over fax machine API of a real bank.
If Stripe were to go out of business, it wouldn't really impact your use of Spreedly. They just charge the gateway, not store information there, so it's not a big deal.
