Spreedly - Don't Get Screwed by Payment Vendor Lock-in

Spreedly sits between you and payment processors, which sounds like adding complexity but it's actually insurance against vendor fuckery.

Stripe and Adyen process payments directly

• when you use them, your payment data lives in their system and you're screwed if they decide to change terms. Spreedly stores your payment tokens and lets you route them to any of 140+ connected gateways. Use Stripe today, tell them to fuck off tomorrow, switch to Adyen
• same stored card tokens work everywhere.

Magic. Well, not really

• Spreedly stores a payment method once and gives you a token that works across multiple gateways. The sensitive data never touches your servers (PCI compliance nightmare avoided), and when you get a token from Spreedly, it works with any of your connected gateways. It's like having universal payment compatibility, which sounds too good to be true but actually works.

The Advanced Vault is their premium offering that actually does useful shit like network tokenization and automatic card updating. Unlike basic vaulting where you just store payment data, Advanced Vault proactively maintains payment methods when cards expire, converts eligible cards to network tokens (better auth rates), and gives you extra metadata to optimize routing decisions. It costs more but actually prevents a lot of payment headaches.

Three ways they separate you from your money:

• Trial: Free 30-day access with unlimited production transactions (actually pretty generous)
• Flex: Starting at $1,500/month with usage-based pricing that somehow always ends up being more than you expected
• Enterprise: "Contact sales" pricing which means if you have to ask, you can't afford it

Spreedly maintains PCI-Level 1 compliance, the highest level of payment security certification. By storing payment methods in Spreedly's vault and using tokenization, merchants significantly reduce their PCI compliance scope since sensitive payment data never touches their servers.

Yeah, they can import your existing payment methods, but it's a massive pain in the ass and you'll need to coordinate with your current processor. Pro tip: they also let you export everything if you decide to leave, which is refreshingly non-evil.

Spreedly supports all major payment types including credit/debit cards, Apple Pay, Google Pay, ACH payments, PayPal, and many alternative payment methods. The specific payment methods available depend on the connected gateways.

Spreedly's Composer workflows enable intelligent payment routing based on customizable rules. You can route transactions based on factors like gateway success rates, geographic location, transaction amount, or custom business logic. Failed transactions can automatically cascade to backup gateways.

You can integrate with their simple iFrame form or go full API if you hate yourself. The iFrame option gets you up fast, JavaScript APIs give you customization, or the direct API gives you complete control and weeks of debugging.

Spreedly provides both 3D Secure 2 Global and gateway-specific 3DS2 solutions. The platform handles the complex 3DS authentication flow while providing detailed control over when and how authentication is triggered.

The Spreedly app provides comprehensive reporting including transaction analytics, gateway performance metrics, authorization rates, and detailed reconciliation data. Enterprise customers receive customized reporting capabilities and dedicated account management.

Network tokenization replaces card numbers with secure network tokens issued directly by Visa and Mastercard. These tokens provide enhanced security, better authorization rates, and automatic lifecycle management, as issuers proactively update token information when underlying card details change.

Yes, Spreedly supports payments across 100+ countries and multiple currencies through its extensive gateway network. It handles currency conversion so you don't have to deal with exchange rate nonsense and local payment method requirements based on the connected regional gateways.

Spreedly's orchestration capabilities include automatic failover to backup gateways when primary processors experience outages. Routing rules can be configured to detect failures and immediately route subsequent transactions to alternative processors, maintaining payment availability.

They claim $40+ billion in GMV annually (sounds about right but can't verify independently) with enterprise infrastructure. But here's the thing

• if Spreedly goes down, all your connected gateways go down too. You're trading single gateway risk for orchestration platform risk. They have good uptime, but you're still betting your business on one vendor.

The $1,500/month minimum means most startups are priced out before they even look at the features. Also, debugging payment failures across multiple gateways is a nightmare

• you'll spend hours figuring out which gateway actually failed and why.

Spreedly says it's quick. Reality: 2-6 weeks minimum if you're lucky, 2 months if not. If you want the simple iFrame integration, maybe 1-2 weeks if you're lucky. But if you want full control with direct API integration, plan for at least a month of webhook debugging, testing different gateway behaviors, and questioning your life choices.

Gateway-specific configurations can break when Spreedly updates their platform or when individual gateways change their APIs. You're dependent on Spreedly to maintain 140+ gateway integrations correctly. When something breaks, you're stuck waiting for them to fix it.

Webhook endpoints will randomly stop working and you'll spend hours debugging before realizing Spreedly changed their retry logic in v2.3.1. The sandbox environment behaves differently than production in about 12 subtle ways - like test cards expiring at different intervals than production network tokens.

Gateway-specific error codes are normalized, which sounds great until you need to debug why American Express transactions are failing and Spreedly returns "INSUFFICIENT_FUNDS" when Stripe actually returned "CARD_VELOCITY_EXCEEDED" because some asshole customer tried to buy something 6 times in a row.

Also, their webhook delivery timeout is 10 seconds in production but 30 seconds in sandbox, so your webhook handler works fine in testing then dies in prod. Don't ask me how I know this.

That $1,500/month minimum becomes $4,000 real quick once you add transaction fees, multiple gateway connections, and premium support. Your AWS bill will also increase because you're now making API calls to Spreedly instead of direct gateway calls.

The $1,500/month is just the base. You'll pay extra for:

• High transaction volumes
• Multiple gateway connections
• Advanced features like network tokenization
• Premium support response times
  Budget at least $3K/month for any real implementation. Plus engineering time for initial setup and ongoing maintenance.

When payments fail, you'll get a normalized error from Spreedly, but the actual gateway returned something completely different. Good luck debugging that. Testing in production is scary enough without having to test routing logic across 3 different gateways.

One client had Spreedly route all transactions to their most expensive gateway for 6 hours before anyone noticed because they fucked up a routing rule that checked transaction amount >= $100 instead of <= $100. Cost them an extra $4,000 in processing fees.

Another beauty: Spreedly's 3D Secure flow broke on mobile Safari 14.2 because Apple changed some iframe behavior, but only for Visa cards processed through Adyen. Took 3 weeks to figure out it wasn't our code, it was a Spreedly bug with their mobile JavaScript SDK. Lost about 15% of mobile transactions during that period.

The best one: their webhook retry logic has exponential backoff, but if your endpoint is down for more than 6 hours, they give up permanently. No manual retry button, no way to replay the webhook. You have to query their API to find missed transactions and reconcile manually. Found this out the hard way during a 8-hour AWS outage.