July 8

Why we don’t support every gateway

There’s a belief amongst many subscription payment systems that you need to support every gateway in order to be successful. We think this is no way to serve our customers, but rather it perpetuates the same problems they already face: difficult gateway interactions and high prices. We’ve come up with an actual solution, not just a patch: The CheddarGateway.

Difficult Gateway Interactions

Every time a gateway changes their methodology of doing something, whether it’s dealing with someone on the phone or how they interact with an API or anything in between it becomes a major headache for everyone involved. Usually it results in system downtime and someone (usually an entrepreneur) taking valuable time out of their day to focus on billing rather than their actual company. We built Cheddar because we had faced real problems with this and we know how much of a distraction this can be.

High Prices

Gateways are expensive. Stupidly expensive for what they do, actually. Also, the more gateways a company supports the more overhead the company needs, resulting in higher prices for everyone. I know some people will try to argue with this, but it’s a simple rule of software- the more stuff that you integrate, especially with outside sources the more can and WILL go wrong, thus the more time you spend on fixing that than actually creating new valuable features that help your customers make more money.

The Solution: CheddarGateway

We spent a lot of time figuring out what we thought would be a solution that would remove the ongoing headache with a number of the gateways out there and we came up with our own solution: The CheddarGateway. We support it from end to end — from application to approval through full integration and ongoing support. I know what you’re thinking — a fully supported gateway where the company deals with all the hassle for me — that’s going to be expensive, right? Nope. $20/month, $0.15/transaction and that INCLUDES a customer vault so you can take your customers with you to a new merchant account if you want to change accounts (if you don’t have one of those we can get you going there too). Also, you might be asking if it’s supported in your country. Almost without exception the CheddarGateway is supported everywhere in the world.

In the coming days we’ll have the full details of the CheddarGateway up on getcheddar.com, but we were so excited we couldn’t wait to tell you.