I'm trying to create a simple personal project: I want to give myself bounties for completing tasks that often fester on my todo list. If I complete a task, for example, $5 should automatically move out of my savings account into a discretionary spending debit card.
Are there any APIs or banks that have those APIs that could let me do that? All of the paypal APIs seem to charge a fee, which would be kind of silly if the money is simply moving between accounts. Any suggestions?
Most banks/organisations will charge I suspect as a vast amount of money made by these organisations is from transfer charges. I cannot think of free api that would let you do it.
However you could consider using another commercial organisation, say like Amazon, and perhaps use it's APIs to supply purchase with gift cards automatically? I'm not saying Amazon is free, I'm just using it as an example.
It's not quite what you want but may be acceptable.
it may not be pretty, but you can use curl to do transactions over https, provided your online bank uses standard html forms in some way, but it typicaly takes 3 processes
1. Login to get a token (user name and password will be required)
2. Use token to get a cookie (in some cases 1 and 2 are reversed)
3. use curl to post the form data for your transaction
There are some good pointers on using curl in similar ways here:
http://curl.haxx.se/docs/httpscripting.html
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I am sorry if this wasn't a good place to ask a question like this, but since I always got help from Stackoverflow I though I could get some answer to my problem.
So here is the thing, I am building a e-commerce website like many famous websites over there, where you can make bid offers for items on the market.
The thing I want to be sure is that when someone place a bid for some item, they can not turn back on their word, because if they get accepted the money should be withdrawn from their bank accounts, do you get what I mean?
Because I want the merchant to be safe if they accept a offer they want the money, and they don't want to look for another legit offer.
So how can I accomplish this?
Should I ask the credit card details when they make the bid offer and only make the withdraw operation from their accounts if the their offer was accepted by the merchant? [using some automated trigger on my database of course]
If this is not the best practice to accomplish this, which is the one??
I am really new into payment methods and I just started doing my search for Payment Gateways (maybe they offer me this functionality... I don't know?!)
You should never store credit card details, and have the details is not really any guarantee of getting paid since the card could just be canceled.
What you are probably looking for is for Authorization and delayed capture (depending on the timeline you are looking at). Different payment processors have different time requirements around how long you can hold an authorization. In general you would make a request with the API to Authorize the charges (kind of like a 'hold' on your credit card) and then later you would either cancel or Capture, where the funds would be transferred. See more info about the process and Square's API here: https://docs.connect.squareup.com/articles/delayed-capture-transactions/
I have been looking into various different APIs which can provide my the weather data I need in JSON format. A lot of these API's have certain limits such as: in order to get more requests per minute, you need to pay more money per month so that your app can make more API requests.
However, a lot of these API's also have free account which five you limited access to them.
So what I was thinking is, wouldn't it be possible for a developer to just make lots of different developer accounts with an API provider and then just make lots of different API keys?
That way, they wouldn't have to pay anything as they could stick with the free accounts. Whenever one of the API keys has reached the maximum daily request calls, the developer could just put a switch statement in their code which gets their software to use a different API key.
I see no reason why this wouldn't work from a technical point of view... but, is such a thing allowed?
Thanks, Dan.
This would technically be possible, and it happens.
It is also probably against the service's terms, a good reason for the service to ban all your sock puppet accounts, and perhaps even illegal.
If the service that offers the API has spent time and money implementing a per-developer limit for their API, they have almost certainly enforced that in their terms of service, and you would be wise to respect those.
(relevant xkcd)
I have developed one app in which i have used the Google Place API. This is what places doc says about limitation.
The Google Places API has the following query limits:
Users with an API key are allowed 1 000 requests per 24 hour period.
Users who have also verified their identity through the APIs console are allowed 100 000 requests per 24 hour period. A credit card is required for verification, by enabling billing in the console. Your card will not be charged for use of the Places API.
So my question is that if i enable billing for Place API then its free? Is it really true?
Yes, you will have what they are saying. I have done that, so I can confirm... If you put your credit card info, you are letting them know that you are a verified user, and that therefore you won't misuse their services.
And for the second question, we are talking about Google here. It is really true, you won't be charged, they can make money from other sources :)
EDIT:
Actually, if you need more than the "verified" option, it seems you can contact them as stated by Thor Mitchell (Product Manager #Google) in this topic at Quora: Pros and Cons of Places API
"The limits on use (after identity verification) is 100,000 requests
per day, and we're happy to talk to developers who need more about
their requirements."
As of today, the limit is 150,000 free requests per day, but the documentation is hard to make sense of in terms of how they bill overage.
Latest update March 2019:
"For an overview of pricing for the Google Maps Platform products, please see the Pricing Sheet.
To learn more about how Google Maps Platform APIs are billed, please see Understanding billing for Maps, Routes, and Places."
Before jumping in I'd like to know what all of my options are, and, if possible their pros and cons.
The two I know of are using ActiveMerchant, or the paypal_recurring gem, but will they satisfy these requirements?
Ability to accommodate monthly and annual billing
Ability to suspend, cancel accounts etc
Deal with out-of-date card details or failed payments
The to-do list for the paypal_recurring gem includes 'adding support for IPN' - how will not having this impact functionality?
I know there is the railskit SaaS but I'd rather code something myself as the railskit is still on 3.2.1.
I know there are services like cheddergedder/chargify etc, but do they tie you in? Are they US only? Are they worth considering - or are they usually just aimed at non-developers?
Thanks in advance.
I just finished going through this, so I'll try to shed some light on your options. I ended up using Paypal Express Checkout for all recurring purchases through Paypal. We had a custom-rolled recurring billing setup that charges a customer's credit card monthly through Authnet, but had to switch because we needed an international solution, and Paypal was one of the only ones that supported the currencies we needed, and wasn't entirely a nightmare to code.
You can use ActiveMerchant for recurring billing with this plugin, though keep in mind that it is not officially a part of ActiveMerchant, and therefore is subject to break if ActiveMerchant changes how it handles certain things. Because of that, I ended up using the paypal-recurring to handle communication through Paypal, and then rolled my own IPN parser, with help from Railscasts. Another link that helped me a lot was this, though all the :txn_type values ended up being different.
With regards to that last link, here are the 4 :txn_types that I specifically watch out for:
express_checkout - first postback.
recurring_payment_profile_created - sent on first postback when the user first subscribes.
recurring_payment_profile_cancel - sent if user cancels subscription from Paypal's site.
recurring_payment - Money has been transferred to your account. This is what I wait for before I renew their subscription on a monthly. This post also comes with payment_status, which needs to be completed.
The other stuff you mentioned, like handling failed payments and out-of-date cards, is handled through your Paypal account.
Just a word of warning - the only reason I ended up using Paypal is because it is universally recognized and trusted, and it accepted international currencies. There is an enormous amount of documentation on their site, and most of it is redundant, confusing, and entirely too long. My recommendation is to make sure you really want/need to deal with recurring payments, as they are difficult to implement correctly and can be more trouble than they're worth.
I'm currently looking at Ryan Bates example of Stripe. They are a California based company that uses/offers the features you have listed.
www.stripe.com
They only charge when you receive money. I think that they are 3% plus $0.30 per successful transaction. Much better than some other companies that have a monthly minimum. Right now you have to have a bank in the USA to use their services as a merchant. However, anyone can use your site with out of the country credit cards.
The SaaS Kit is now tested with Rails 3.2.2. :) It doesn't support IPN yet, but it's on to the todo list. With all the info here in one spot, I suppose I have no excuse not to get it done. :)
I've written a subscription based web app that I want to charge (by credit card) a monthly fee. There are 3 different plans and once they sign up, they should be billed that amount, automatically, every month until they cancel. Is there an easy way to set this up (some sort of online service maybe?).
You can use Paypal's merchant service to provide reoccurring charges for a subscription.
Pretty easy to implement, they provide plenty of examples and even a sandbox to get you up and running.
There are now some service providers that take care of your billing and subscription needs. You use their API and they handle billing and subscriptions for you. Their services work with payment systems like PayPal and Authorize.Net.
Take a look at the following sites:
Chargify
Spreedly
Cheddargetter
I would suggest not using Paypal or Authorize's recurring payments directly. Their APIs are brutal, and the functionality is very rudimentary. It may work fine for when you're just starting out, but if you ever want to change anything down the line, you'll be in trouble.
I work for CheddarGetter, so I'm biased, but you should check us out.
Our competitors are not as robust or flexible, but they are definitely better than using Paypal or Authorize.net directly.