> who might be better served by one or more of the alternatives and should at least be considering the full range of options available to them.
Which alternatives should I consider, if I need PSD2? I've written about my experience with Braintree above; there's SagePay but every client has been pleased to move away from them.
PSD2 implies Europe, so my first question is whether to accept cards as the primary means of payment at all. The various direct payment schemes are typically cheaper, more reliable and, in some countries, much more widely used. If you are handling recurring billing via a Direct Debit scheme then you are probably also outside the scope of the SCA rules that are going to interrupt payment flows using cards whenever the EU member states finally insist on following them.
I've used GoCardless to do some of this, but depending on where you are based, there seem to be quite a few other services now that offer some or all of the relevant schemes.
UK based here, so for most projects I/clients want cards as the primary payment method due to the audience as they are one-off payments.
I've used GoCardless on one project; as the developer I didn't enjoy the experience at all. Setting up testing for all states was painful (as was getting items to the right state to use their scenario simulator). I see Stripe have rolled out UK Direct Debit support now; hopefully their documentation and testing story are better than GoCardless.
I certainly agree that testing these integrations is unnecessarily painful, but given that both Stripe and GoCardless offer much the same facilities -- a single sandbox environment, but without comprehensive simulation of all important scenarios and with nothing useful for either automated integration testing or offline simulation at the developer's desk -- I'm not sure I'd say either is much better than the other. The only major difference I can think of is that since they simulate roughly realistic timing as well, GoCardless can also take several days to complete a test run for a new integration or bug fix, which is obviously absurd.
> who might be better served by one or more of the alternatives and should at least be considering the full range of options available to them.
Which alternatives should I consider, if I need PSD2? I've written about my experience with Braintree above; there's SagePay but every client has been pleased to move away from them.