[deeege]

Hi Soupy

Thank you for contacting GoCardless support.

I'm sorry to hear that you are considering leaving us.

We do understand that changing our pricing structure might not be great news for some of our merchants. You see, we haven't changed our pricing since the very beginning of our operation, eight years ago, and we had to change it to reflect all the work that we have inputted in terms of improving the product, our geographic reach, all the partner integrations we have now and a number of aspects of the very growth and development of what we offer to our customers. Changing our pricing is definitely more a necessity for us to continue to operate as a company than anything else, although I can understand why it may seem like something else.

Regarding the Custom pricing we do have a volume requirement for this. I have taken a look at your account and unfortunately at the moment you don't meet this requirement.

If you decide to move away from GoCardless please do let us know and we can assist with moving your Direct Debits to a diffrent provider.

Kind regards
Amy

Thanks Amy. Not sure I'm bothered about funding your geographical reach.

I suppose if you're increasing your prices by that level you can swallow a certain percentage of drop off.

See ya.

Her response seems to imply that certain high end customers of GoCardless will be receiving a preferential rate. I wonder if any of the bigger window cleaning firms will be included?

[Soupy]

I guess so. We haven't been militant with our switchover so we're at around 900 transactions per month (tbf 100 of those were added this month)

[The Jester of Wibbly]

And another email from them.  Telling small businesses to terminate their contract with them if they are not happy!........... feeling insulted !!!     .....................





We are making some general improvements to our online terms & conditions (‘T&Cs’), and we wanted to let you know. The changes will be effective from 20 February 2020 (the ‘Effective Date’).

We’ve set out below a quick snapshot of what we think are the most important changes. However, we recommend that you take a look at the GoCardless Merchant Agreement, which you can find at https://gocardless.com/legal/merchants/.

We aligned our T&Cs with the new pricing of which you were recently informed

We moved the provisions governing our new Borderless Payments feature to a separate set of Product-Specific Terms, which will also house any new product features that we launch in the future

We added a confidentiality provision

If you are a Micro Enterprise (as defined in the GoCardless Merchant Agreement) and object to these changes, you can terminate your agreement with us immediately. Otherwise, you accept the changes by virtue of your continued use of the GoCardless service after the Effective Date.

Kind regards,

The GoCardless Team

 

[Simon Trapani]

I’m not pushing it anymore.  Only for repeated late payers. And even then I might just dump the customer instead. Gonna stick to bacs for now even if it is time consuming cross referencing.

[deeege]

And another email from them.  Telling small businesses to temeinate the contract with them if they are not happy!...........

If you are a Micro Enterprise (as defined in the GoCardless Merchant Agreement) and object to these changes, you can terminate your agreement with us immediately. Otherwise, you accept the changes by virtue of your continued use of the GoCardless service after the Effective Date.

Kind regards,

The GoCardless Team

They couldn’t be any more clearer that they are not really interested in small business’. I’d expect the price to keep going up and up to get rid of these smaller business’.

I wonder how Lee Priors conversation with the CEO went?

[The Jester of Wibbly]

lesson leaned is to never let your business become too dependant with a supplier or service holding you by your dangles.   Back up plans should always be in place.

[Status Check]

GoCardless want all their customers to be on the Pro plan which was 0.60p per transaction but has now increased to 0.80p per transaction plus £200 per month fee. This plan enables you to sign up customers over the phone and integrate the sign up system  using api through your own website.

The price of the Pro plan does fall in price if I think you have over 3000 transactions per month?  Trying to get the correct volume prices from GC is hard.

If you want to see how the Pro plan works take a look at The Guardian newspaper website. They use GoCardless to implement their customer sign ups via direct debit. The process is fully integrated into their own website.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk

Looking ahead I can only see the processing charges increasing for smaller business's like ours.

[Stoots]

I suppose its like anything, they started out as a solution for small businesses and in time have out grown that model and are now providing to much larger businesses on a global scale.

It sucks, but i can see why they are doing it and they wont care less.

Im in two minds about pushing it in future, on the one hand the new fees are a bit ridiculous but it is a such an efficent way to run a business compare to manually doing it via bacs etc.

I suppose for any future customers i sign up i will just have to add the fees on top of any quote.

[Soupy]

There new pricing isn't overly savage, I pay more to other money collection services. The problems with gocardless as I see them are:

They doubled their prices (poor mid term planning has forced them into doing this)

They are massively in debt. I don't claim to know how this type of business operates but if say, you ran your DD monthly and all your customers were DD, a company with £millions of losses could have an entire month's turnover. Not a great idea.

They haven't fixed (and flat out refuse to fix) the issue where they mark inactive mandates as active when they aren't.

There's other options available.

[The Jester of Wibbly]

New prices are now live