Ask HN: Is Braintree on its death bed?
I've been using Braintree as a way to interface with Paypal subscriptions for 8 years now.
Paypal recently upped their subscription game with a better SDK, but I still prefer Braintree as I have 8 years of customer data sitting there. But I'm having second thoughts. Braintree seems like it's just waiting to die. My experience:
- I sent two support requests into Braintree 8 days ago. I received an auto-response but then nothing.
- I setup a couple issues on their github also 8 days ago and nothing. I don't assume that there needs to be any SLA here so this could be a moot point.
- Their documentation is out of date. Most of the features are completely undocumented and I have to go through the source code on github to understand what params I should be using
- Also on their docs, I would run into 404s.
Is it time to throw in the towel and just build subscriptions direct with PayPal? What is your experience recently with braintree?
Isn't Braintree owned by paypal anyway ? If they do kill it, they will probably move customers to their new thing ?
I do agree that Paypal has become a clusterfk of things where they have created a mess of their own products and some they acquired. Now there is too much confusion with names like "Paypal Standard", Paypal pro and what not. Do I take credit cards directly with paypal pro or do i use braintree or ?? Confusing!!
I know Square is venturing into this space if it isn’t already in it with Square e-commerce.
It seems like right now the only viable option in this space is Stripe. I’m hoping Square e-commerce can provide be the next competitor in this space with good DX.
All the braintree developments over the past years are to support enormous enterprise customers.
If you’re a SMB paypal doesnt care about your business in the braintree product line, cc processing is too small margin business for them to have even a single person updating documentation. Or phone support, or any kind of support really.
Remember they used to have better phone support than like any other company?
If Braintree doesn't have the resources, it's Paypal's fault since they acquired them.
I use Stripe for my SaaS, and I'm also thinking of accepting crypto with Bitpay. Users have requested using Paypal, but given Paypal's recent account bans [1] I won't be considering it.
[1] https://reclaimthenet.org/paypal-bans-free-speech-union/
I use stripe as well, but I found offering PayPal upped paid user conversion rate by 30%. I really have no choice but to support it.
Why not Stripe?