In reply to jwz.

My refusal to believe in nominative determinism takes several hard hits when I run across initialisms like this one.

In reply to jwz.

Yeah, I can believe it. I supported and installed about 11 different systems during my time there. None of them were great. Still, if you're looking for simple and relatively cheap recurring monthly charging, going directly with a processor is a good option. It sounds like you do enough volume to be an attractive customer for them.

In reply to Travis.

Dude the people who make our POS can't even figure out how to make bar tabs work.

I used to work for a point of sale reseller about 4 years ago. When I left they were reselling credit card processing as well. The services included a customer portal that allowed for recurring subscription payments. The processing fees were on par with those stand-alone card machines. Something in the 3-5% range plus $0.10 per transaction I think. We had a craft beer/BBQ place that used it for monthly memberships.

I don't know who you use for processing in the club and pizza shop, but they may already have that as an unused feature.

Oh man, I spent so much time in my past working with authorize.net, but I was so glad to leave that behind.

(As I recall, I left that company after telling them that storing customer credit card details in plain text in a database was a bad idea, that it was risky for the customers, and risky for the company. But alas, my complaints fell on deaf ears... until they got hacked, and the entire database got exfiltrated. Then, suddenly, we had the time and budget to implement things correctly. And this was the least of their sins.)

There seem to be some self-hostable open source alternatives. Haven't tried and don't know what payment processors they support. E.g. https://github.com/patroninc/patron

BTW coming from your blog rss I got the hn welcome

In reply to Nick gully.

There is exactly 0% chance of me building something that could be used by others because that is approximately 100,000% harder.

I have no advice or experience in this however I have been a patron for a while and I look forward to not having them taking a cut from my support.

You set something up, say call it Hatereon, and plenty of people would be willing to use it instead of them.