Sorry for the delay, but the holidays can make it hard to keep a regular schedule!

I spent Wednesday and Friday working on the subscription and payment infrastructure. I’ll give you the short version since I can hardly remember the long version. The short of it is, processing payments online is very complicated. You have to navigate not only the various costs associated with processing credit cards and eChecks, but also the different programming interfaces and industry regulations. You need a processing gateway, a merchant account, and all the software to back it up. Furthermore, regulations are such that the last thing you want to do is have any credit card information stored in your system, because then you have to implement some really tight controls.

As the 37signals guys often say, I decided “judo” the problem. I threw out a bunch of code that keeps track of subscriptions and receives credit card payments and instead went with Spreedly. Spreedly does all of the hard work for you of managing subscription-based payments and exposes a nice programming interface that is dead-simple to integrate with. Furthermore, Spreedly doesn’t litter the payment screens with UI that would distract customers, but has a simple, neutral interface that you can brand with your own logo.

Here’s how the Radiant Machine payment screens might look:

Best of all, Spreedly is run by my friends and colleagues at Terralien, who were very helpful to me in making this decision.

With that out of the way, I’ll be working a few days next week on some sexy features for the Radiant Machine instances that’ll make them even easier and more fun to play with!