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There is a rise in the number of payment management services for SaaS based businesses. The growth is good, it shows there is an increasing trend to subscription based businesses online and away from the software or long term licensing. However, many of these SaaS based businesses are just a wrapper around payment gateways. Their value is in the ease at which they enable the software developer to integrate a recurring payment stream. They provide reporting on top of the payment systems but they do little more. They don’t seem to integrate well with marketing efforts. Here’s a quick list of the ones I have checked out.

Yahoo has offered one of the broadest ranges of API’s for developers. The breadth has made it possible for numerous entrepreneurs to build out supplemental incomes or be their own boss businesses. However, as they begin to realign their business and strategies they have begun to kill off the API’s that made them so popular [...]

Yahoo recently launched YQL http://developer.yahoo.com/yql/ it provides developers with unique and compelling access to structured data. Instead of calling different web service interfaces that have limited inputs and limited outputs, you simply write a query. This is brilliant. As a developer I previously had to call multiple services, using different inputs, capture all the data [...]