spreedly

What is Spreedly

Spreedly is a payment orchestration platform that provides a single Application Programming Interface (API) to connect with a wide variety of payment gateways and third-party services worldwide. The core purpose of Spreedly is to give businesses the flexibility to work with multiple payment providers without being locked into a single vendor. This allows companies to easily switch gateways, route transactions intelligently to increase success rates, and expand into new markets with local payment options. The main functionality includes a secure card vault for PCI compliance, a universal API for transaction processing, and tools for optimizing payment performance. Founded in 2008, Spreedly is headquartered in Durham, North Carolina, and has established itself as a key player in the payment infrastructure space, processing billions of dollars in transactions for global customers.

Spreedly Features

Spreedly offers a suite of features designed to build a flexible and efficient payment stack.

• Universal Payment API: Connect to over 120 payment gateways and services through a single integration point. This saves significant development time and resources.
• Secure Card Vault (Tokenization): Securely store customer payment information in Spreedly's PCI Level 1 compliant vault. This reduces your PCI compliance burden and allows you to transact with any supported gateway using a secure token.
• Gateway and Receiver Integration: Easily add, switch, or test different payment gateways without needing to change your code. This helps in negotiating better rates and ensuring service continuity.
• Smart Routing: Set up rules to automatically route transactions to the best-performing gateway based on factors like card type, currency, or transaction success rates. This can increase authorization rates and lower transaction costs.
• Fraud Prevention Tools: Integrate with various third-party fraud prevention services to add layers of security to your payment process.
• 3DS2 Support: Implement 3D Secure 2 for Strong Customer Authentication (SCA), which is essential for transactions in Europe and other regions.
• Comprehensive Reporting: Access detailed reports and analytics to understand your payment performance, reconcile transactions, and identify opportunities for improvement.

Spreedly Pricing Plans

Spreedly's pricing is structured in tiers to accommodate businesses of different sizes and transaction volumes. While specific prices are customized, the plans generally follow a model based on the number of API calls or transactions processed per month.

• Starter Plan: Designed for startups and small businesses beginning to scale their payment operations. It typically includes access to the core vault and a limited number of monthly transactions.
• Growth Plan: Aimed at growing businesses with higher transaction volumes. This plan often includes more advanced features like smart routing and support for a larger number of gateways.
• Enterprise Plan: A custom plan for large-scale enterprises with complex payment needs and very high transaction volumes. It includes all features, dedicated support, and custom service level agreements (SLAs).

Spreedly Free Plan

Spreedly does not offer a perpetual free plan for live production transactions. However, they provide a free developer account for testing and integration purposes. This test account allows developers to use the Spreedly API in a sandbox environment, connect to test gateways, and build out their payment workflows without processing real money. It is a fully-featured environment for development but cannot be used for live customer payments.

How to use Spreedly

Getting started with Spreedly involves a few key steps for developers and businesses.

1. Sign Up for a Developer Account: First, create a free test account on the Spreedly website to get access to the sandbox environment.
2. Get Your API Credentials: In your Spreedly dashboard, find your environment key and access secret. These are your API credentials for making requests.
3. Collect Payment Information: Use Spreedly's secure iFrame or Express solutions on your checkout page to collect customer card details. This ensures the sensitive data never touches your servers, simplifying PCI compliance.
4. Tokenize and Vault: When a customer submits their payment details, Spreedly securely captures the information and returns a multi-use token. This token is stored in the Spreedly vault.
5. Add a Gateway: In your Spreedly dashboard, add and configure the payment gateways you want to use (e.g., Stripe, Braintree, Adyen).
6. Process a Transaction: Use the generated token and the gateway's token to make an API call to Spreedly to process a purchase or authorization. Spreedly then passes the request to the chosen gateway.
7. Monitor and Optimize: Use the Spreedly dashboard to monitor transaction success rates and configure smart routing rules to improve performance.

Pros and Cons of Spreedly

Pros

• Vendor Agnostic: Avoids vendor lock-in with a single payment gateway, providing flexibility to switch or use multiple providers.
• Simplified PCI Compliance: The secure vault and tokenization significantly reduce the scope and cost of achieving PCI DSS compliance.
• Global Reach: Easily connect to payment gateways around the world to support international expansion.
• Increased Authorization Rates: Smart routing capabilities help optimize transactions, leading to fewer declines and more revenue.
• Reduced Development Time: A single API integration saves countless hours of development work compared to integrating multiple gateways individually.

Cons

• Additional Cost: Spreedly adds another fee on top of the transaction fees charged by your payment gateway.
• Added Complexity: It introduces another layer to your payment stack, which can add complexity to troubleshooting issues.
• Requires Technical Expertise: Implementation and management require developer resources and a good understanding of payment systems.
• Not Ideal for Small Businesses: For businesses with very simple payment needs and low transaction volume, the cost and complexity may not be justified.

Spreedly integrations

Spreedly's core product is its integrations. It does not integrate with apps like Salesforce or Outlook in a traditional sense. Instead, it connects to a vast network of payment gateways, payment processors, and fraud management tools. This allows you to build a custom payment stack. Some of the key integrations include:

• Payment Gateways: Stripe, Braintree, Adyen, PayPal, Cybersource, Authorize.Net, Worldpay, and over 100 others.
• Alternative Payment Methods: Connections to services that support bank transfers, digital wallets, and other non-card payment options.
• Fraud Tools: Integrations with leading fraud prevention platforms to enhance security.

These integrations are managed via the Spreedly API and dashboard, allowing you to add or remove services as your business needs change.

Spreedly Alternatives

• Primer: A direct competitor focused on payment orchestration and workflow automation. Primer offers a visual workflow editor that allows non-developers to build and manage complex payment flows, which is a key differentiator.
• Zooz (PayU Hub): Another strong payment orchestration platform that offers smart routing and gateway connections. As part of the PayU ecosystem, it has strong capabilities in emerging markets.
• IXOPAY: A highly-configurable payment orchestration platform often used as a white-label solution. It is geared towards large enterprises that need deep customization and features like risk management and reconciliation.
• Braintree: While primarily a payment gateway, Braintree (a PayPal service) offers a vault and supports connections to other processors, providing some orchestration-like features. It is less flexible than a true orchestration platform but can be a simpler solution for some businesses.

Spreedly API

Yes, Spreedly provides a comprehensive and well-documented RESTful API, as it is the core of their product. The API allows developers to perform all necessary payment operations, including tokenizing payment methods, processing transactions, and managing gateways.

You can obtain your API keys for free by signing up for a developer account on the Spreedly website. The keys (environment key and access secret) will be available in your account dashboard.

Here is a basic cURL example of how to add a payment method to the vault using the API:

curl https://core.spreedly.com/v1/payment_methods.json \
  -u 'YOUR_ENVIRONMENT_KEY:YOUR_ACCESS_SECRET' \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{
        "payment_method": {
          "credit_card": {
            "first_name": "John",
            "last_name": "Doe",
            "number": "4242424242424242",
            "verification_value": "123",
            "month": "12",
            "year": "2028"
          }
        }
      }'

For complete details, visit the official Spreedly developer documentation.

Spreedly Affiliate program

Spreedly does not have a public, self-service affiliate program with standard commission rates. Instead, they operate a Partner Program aimed at technology platforms, agencies, and consultants who work with businesses that have complex payment needs. This program is more collaborative and focuses on strategic partnerships rather than simple referral links.

To join, you typically need to contact their partnerships team directly through their website. They will evaluate your business to see if there is a good fit for a partnership. This program is best suited for organizations that can integrate Spreedly into their own offerings or recommend it as part of a larger solution for their clients.