I have no experience with and have heard nothing regarding using FreshBooks for recurring billing. It is my understanding, however, the FreshBooks primary focus is handling invoicing (physical and digital). This would lead me to believe that additional feature sets, such as recurring billing, would be, by default, prioritized lower for the company and therefore have a lower level of future support/expansion. Mind you this is all guess-work, but unless you're already using FreshBooks and/or interested in their invoicing solutions, they don't provide much of a draw from Braintree for recurring billing purposes in my mind.
I think the more important questions to compare are the level of service, API development and status, available feature sets, and other such factors like whether you can easily transfer your account information elsewhere if you ever decide to change services. Everything I have read and heard, both in passing and first hand accounts, suggests to me that PayPal is not the route to go for handling payments and recurring billing for established startups. It is, however, a potentially viable option for those interested in simply setting something up quickly without much concern for long term growth and expansion of their own company.
I agree. Too much time worrying about fractions of a point. Get your business running to the point that the 1/2 a percent makes a recognizable difference.
We use Paypal and Chargify and they work well together. It saved us the time and additional expenses of setting up multiple payment accounts.
One observation, AMEX really doesn't play well with Paypal. We've had $25K payments and the next nothing from a $17K day. Amex is spotty in what they'll accept from PP.
If you have heavy AMEX usage then go with something else. The fees are also high for PP acceptance of AMEX (3.5%).
As I've continued my research, talked to representatives and users of all the initially mentioned services, I definitely agree with both of your comments ABrandt and damoncali. Braintree and Chargify seem to be leading the pack. Chargify has a more feature-rich, and developed recurring billing platform than Braintree, but Braintree has a lot of other benefits and seem to be quickly expanding their recurring billing quickly.
If we already had a merchant account or payment gateway Chargify would definitely be the right fit, but I too am apprehensive about their longevity. It remains a tough call, though, since the field still feels in infancy with no clear winners. At the moment it feels as if we're leaning towards Braintree, which appears to be more secure in the long term, professionally managed, and offers a nice set of quickly growing features to their already rock-solid service. Next step will be to start playing around with both platforms and see if either one stands out in practicality.
As a result of how Chargify handled their price and policy changes (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1780348) we are no longer considering them as a viable option. Regardless of whether they're cheaper, have better features, etc., the fact that they would make this change without any real warning to their existing customers is beyond sketchy. I'm pretty much amazed that they did this without at least emailing their existing customers a few weeks in advance to prepare and warn them before making the public and official switch. If they are the type of company that would do this, what else would they do? Not worth the risk in my opinion.
