G

GoCardless Blog

gocardless.com · Company blog · on HN since 2011

Engineering and product blog of GoCardless, a UK payments company focused on Direct Debit, covering Ruby, Postgres, and containers.

What HN saysHN commenters mainly mention the GoCardless service as a UK Direct Debit option compared with Stripe, and cite its fast single-page site.
89HN people shared it
63linked it in comments
61stories submitted
1.6Kstory points
3 months agolast shared
2011people per year2026

Most-shared posts

  1. 1
    Direct Debit API for 1%; max £2
    22 people · 127 points · first shared 2012 · 92 comments on HN
  2. 2
    Jobs
    8 people · first shared 2011
  3. 3
    When good controllers go bad: getting started with Coach
    4 people · 7 points · first shared 2017 · discussion on HN
  4. 4
    Statesman: A modern, robust Ruby state machine
    4 people · 3 points · first shared 2013 · discussion on HN
  5. 5
    Debugging the Postgres query planner (2018)
    3 people · 89 points · first shared 2019 · 24 comments on HN
  6. 6
    How we built the new gocardless.com
    3 people · 12 points · first shared 2015 · 4 comments on HN
  7. 7
  8. 8
    Bank account data
    3 people · first shared 2023
  9. 9
    How to build a large Angular.js application
    2 people · 125 points · first shared 2013 · 52 comments on HN
  10. 10
  11. 11
    Hutch: Inter-Service Communication with RabbitMQ
    2 people · 68 points · first shared 2013 · 10 comments on HN
  12. 12
  13. 13
    Coach: An alternative to Rails controllers
    2 people · 5 points · first shared 2015 · discussion on HN
  14. 14
    A guide to recurring payments
    2 people · 3 points · first shared 2014 · discussion on HN
  15. 15

What HN people wrote when they linked it

chrisfarms · 2014-03-27
Is "ACH" basically the same as what we call "Direct Debit" in the UK? If so I'd also love stripe support for Direct Debit ... like GoCardless[1] [1] https://gocardless.com/
sailfast · 2012-02-01
Seems like a great service. Thanks for the article. How does Stripe line up in terms of services compared to GoCardless which was up here the other day: https://gocardless.com/ Differences in the agreement / metrics / UI / API? Seems like the 1.9% fee difference could add up.
lawrjone · 2021-01-03
Author here! These 10B log lines are from the last 60 days of activity from https://gocardless.com/ systems. It includes: - System logs, such as our Kubernetes VM host logs, or our Chef Postgres machines - Application logs from Kubernetes pods - HTTP and RPC logs - Audit logs from Stackdriver (we use GCP for all our infrastructure) > do you ever do anything with them that requires you to store so much data rather than just a representative subset? Some of the logs are already sampled, such as VPC flow logs, but the majority aim for 100% capture. Especially for application logs, which are used for audit and many other purposes, developers expect all of their logs to stick around for 60d. Why we do this is quite simple: for the amount of value we get from storing this data, in terms of introspection, observability and in some cases differentiated product capabilities like fraud detection, the cost of running this cluster is quite a bargain. I suspect we'll soon cross a threshold where keeping everything will cost us more than it's worth, but I'm confident we can significantly reduce our costs with a simple tagging system, where developers mark logs as requiring shorter retention windows. Hopefully that gives you a good answer! In case you're interested, my previous post mentioned how keeping our HTTP logs around in a queryable form was really useful for helping make a product decision: https://blog.lawrencejones.dev/connected-data/
stevedomin · 2015-07-13
As with everything, if you're going to do SPA, you should do it well. So far, one of the best SPA website I've seen is https://gocardless.com (disclaimer: I work there). Once loaded it's probably one of the fastest website I've browsed, and it doesn't have any of the drawbacks you mentioned: navigating to a new page is quick: ✓ navigating back is quick: ✓ remembering scroll position: ✓ cancelling navigation: ✗ but we won't allow duplicate requests so not an issue SEO: ✓ Navigation and data loss: ? (no idea how we handle that tbh) Navigation and loading CSS & JS: ✓ we load everything on the first load (~ 880kB) and that's it. I don't think it will ever be worst than MPA Analytics: ✓ Automated functional testing: ✓ our unit + e2e test suites run in about 4 minutes (CI) Our splash pages are open-sourced if you want to have a look at our setup: https://github.com/gocardless/splash-pages
5evOX5hTZ9mYa9E · 2024-11-29
https://gocardless.com offers a fairly generous free tier, and it can do transaction syncing with nearly every European bank
Dennip · 2023-10-20
ActualBudget (https://actualbudget.org/) supports open banking via GoCardless (https://gocardless.com/). GoCardless (previously nordigen) deal with meeting the Open Banking standards and connecitng to all the banks and provide you with a fairly straightforward API for it.
kristineva · 2023-04-10
GoCardless | Software Development Engineer - Core Infrastructure | Full-Time | ONSITE | Riga, Latvia | https://gocardless.com We’re an award-winning London-based fintech, with additional offices in Riga, Paris, Melbourne and New York. Now we are searching for engineers interested in infrastructure management and the site reliability engineering problem space. Do you enjoy working with the tech stack below? Python, Ruby, Golang; Terraform; Terragrunt, Atlantis AWS, GCP; Kubernetes, GKE; Github, GitHub Actions, ArgoCD; Grafana, Prometheus, Zabbix; Elastic If yes, here is the job description, list of benefits, and a lot more: https://grnh.se/6d58a1ab1us
Arubis · 2023-01-23
I’d strongly recommend Statesman instead: https://gocardless.com/blog/statesman/ I’m unaffiliated, just have used a lot of Ruby SM libraries.
fyfy18 · 2018-01-18
GoCardless (YC S11) allow you to accept direct debit payments across Europe: https://gocardless.com/
afarrell · 2016-04-02
One option, depending on where you are located: Direct Debit with https://gocardless.com/
mcollier000 · 2016-01-12
GoCardless is another ycombinator business providing a very similar platform for the whole of the UK & Europe. https://gocardless.com/
mapleoin · 2014-09-12
Direct Debit, he's one of the founders of: https://gocardless.com/
atldev · 2013-08-16
Ran across this after reading the (fantastic) GoCardless article here: https://gocardless.com/blog/building-a-large-angular-application/
ottbot · 2013-08-16
Take a look at what http://gocardless.com are doing with Direct Debit in the UK. Not sure what "mobile payment" really means, outside of in-app purchases?
nqureshi · 2013-08-15
(I work at GoCardless). GoCardless and Stripe tend to solve very different problems. We're a Direct Debit provider, whereas Stripe do card payments. In short, Direct Debit is great for recurring payments and variable billing. It's traditionally really hard to get access to in the UK if you're a smaller business; but we allow people to sign up instantly and start using it without having to go to the bank. DD is a great solution if you're in a service business or are charging a similar set of people each month. It's a less good solution if you're doing e-commerce/physical goods, since you need fast payment timings/clearing. That's the sort of problem cards (and therefore Stripe) are optimized for. More info here: https://gocardless.com/direct-debit/use-cases/
noir_lord · 2013-05-10
If you are in the UK and you are billing monthly then I've had nothing but a good experience with these guys so far http://gocardless.com and of course DD's don't expire like a card does.
timrogers · 2013-02-04
At GoCardless, our current support staff (including myself) are pretty technical. We regularly push code to the main project repo, and it's a great way to get the things we want done, done. For our support documentation, we're using the Desk.com knowledge base. Although not ideal, it works pretty well for us and is at the very least easy to update. We took steps like this with our blog (https://gocardless.com/blog) which we've now built using Jekyll. This is awesome because: a) Anyone can write articles if they can write Markdown b) Full text previews in our GitHub pull requests...with images (perfect for reviewing!) We want to transfer these great advantages to our help documents. Jekyll really is a great tool for any (relatively) static site, not just for blogs.
andycroll · 2013-01-10
You're looking for https://gocardless.com/ who I'm pretty sure are a YC company.
iambot · 2012-08-30
GoCardless [1] based out of London is looking like it'll be the Stripe of the UK. [1]: https://gocardless.com/
clarkdave · 2012-08-30
Although GoCardless is great, it's not the same as a Stripe. Direct debits don't offer immediate transfer of funds[0] (they take a few days) which limits its suitability for a lot of e-commerce applications. As someone else mentioned, the lack of refunds is also an issue. That said, for service invoicing, subscriptions, etc it's fantastic. [0] https://gocardless.com/direct_debit
adam-_- · 2012-08-14
https://gocardless.com looks quite nice but unfortunately it's UK only at the moment.
alexmunroe · 2012-08-06
There is the option of GoCardless (https://gocardless.com/) in the UK, however they use the Direct Debit system rather than card processing which does somewhat limit you geographically.
ZeroMinx · 2012-05-18
I've not used it yet, but I would still like to add GoCardless to this list. https://gocardless.com/
IsaacL · 2012-05-08
I've heard that these guys (YC S11) are doing something very similar in the UK. https://gocardless.com/
mattmanser · 2012-04-02
GoCardless is built on top of the Direct Debit scheme, which is pretty great. Some details about DD here: https://gocardless.com/direct_debit Fun fact: Without scaremongering, as I'm certain it happens once in a blue moon, technically speaking someone can ask for some or all of their money back from their bank without even talking to you whenever they want and GoCardless will give it to them. But as I said, blue moon. I did this to an electricity company that had failed to close my account 3 times, walked into the bank, asked for 6 months DD payments back. Bank did it with no quibbles.
ciaron · 2012-03-19
There's GoCardless (https://gocardless.com), currently UK only, but their FAQ says they're planning a European rollout by mid-2012.
hcm · 2012-02-01
GoCardless is a VC-backed London-based startup looking to hire for the following positions: - Backend engineers - Front-end developers - Business development roles We're building the next generation of online payment tools, and are partnered with one of the world's largest banks. GoCardless is built using bleeding edge Ruby and Rails, Postgres 9, Coffeescript and Redis. Experience with any of those technologies is a plus, but certainly not required. More detail here: https://gocardless.com/jobs
tomblomfield · 2012-02-01
London, UK - GoCardless is a VC-backed startup looking to hire for the following positions: - Backend engineers - Front-end developers - Business development roles We're building the next generation of online payment tools, and are partnered with one of the world's largest banks. GoCardless is built using bleeding edge Ruby and Rails, Postgres 9, Coffeescript and Redis. Experience with any of those technologies is a plus, but certainly not required. More detail here: https://gocardless.com/jobs
justincormack · 2012-01-26
It appears so from this example, where there is a usage based fee https://gocardless.com/docs/api_guide#pre-authorization I can't see any guidelines about how you are recommended to approach these types of situation. In some ways pre-setting a max limit is nice for the customer if you warn them when they approach. I know people who have been billed huge amounts on AWS without really realizing. SO long as you hand hold the customer and your pricing model is simple to understand you should be able to make it work out I would think. For upgrades there is probably no reason not to get explicit agreement (presuming it is just a checkbox really, no need to give the acount details again after all), it is variable usage that is more complex I would think.
notpushkin · 2026-08-02
Not all banks do SEPA Instant, yeah. I suppose the answer to that is connecting using PSD2 and sending the payment request then checking payment actually went out (using something like https://gocardless.com/). Many countries also have local bank link systems (e.g. in the Baltics it’s common to have dedicated buttons in the payment form for the big 3 or 4 banks everyone uses). I’m talking about in-person payments though. It would be so easy to implement QR payments backed by the existing SEPA Instant rails. Many bank apps already understand EPC QR codes (usually found on invoices), so shops could just show these to accept payment. In case your bank doesn’t support SEPA Instant, you could show the cashier the receipt in your bank app, which, well, horribly insecure, but probably fine for low-stakes cases like grocery shopping (you don’t want to be banned from your grocery store chain for forging a 35 € payment).

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