[Announcement] Billing Module for your SaaS web application is here: ServiceMerchant
== In two sentences
ServiceMerchant is open-source library, developed in Ruby, which takes care of recurring billings and subscriptions of your SaaS application. The library sits on top of well known library ActiveMerchant and therefore gives you the variety of choice among payment providers.
== In more details
ServiceMerchant consists of number of well-defined reusable components, and may be used either as entire library or in chunks.
The components include: - Wrapper around ActiveMerchant to unify RecurringBillingAPI across implementations of various payment providers - Tracker (or local storage) of subscriptions which were sent to payment provider of choice, with the synchronization of renewals (with CSV import for those providers who do not allow API for pulling such information) - Tariffication component allows you to configure your service plans in number of ways, covering most of SaaS application. We also track taxes, should you need it. - sample UI implementation (webpages) so that user can view his billing profile, admin (back-office) pages to get the insight of failing and successful subscription statistics.
The library does not store the credit card PANs in local storage (relying to payment service provider), which simplifies your PCI- compliance a lot. At the moment, the wrapper around ActiveMerchant only supports mapping to Authorize.net and PayPal, but other supported by ActiveMerchant gateways are mapped in minutes.
== Project status
This is the first public appearance of the library. This is version 0.1 of it. The library is provided as is. Though the unit tests coverage is quite comprehensive, we advise that you apply your own QA before going live. We will be happy to receive any issues and include it into the development roadmap.
Also in roadmap: - create the component of real-time consumption information (at the moment, the functions allow to check the quality and quantity of service the specific user is subscribed to, but no information how much was already used and what is remaining) - online registration component (for new users and invites under corporate accounts)
== Resources
http://servicemerchant.org -- project website
http://gothub.com/itteco/service_merchant -- source codes on github
