Introduction To Online Payments - TL;DR: It's A Total Bitch
TL;DR indeed.  it doesn't have to be that complicated.i needed a credit card processor for corduroy (plug: http://corduroysite.com/) to process monthly subscription charges.  i filled out a form (i think, it was 2 years ago) on braintree's website (http://www.braintreepaymentsolutions.com/), they emailed me back some info, i filled out and faxed over their forms about my business and already-established checking account, they created my american express/discover/visa/mastercard merchant accounts for me, and i used activemerchant (http://www.activemerchant.org/) to talk to their gateway via my rails app.  according to my email archive, i received the signup forms from them on april 14th and they emailed to confirm my first charge through their gateway on april 22nd.i wrote some simple code to use activemerchant to process the monthly subscriptions from a cron job that submits a charge to braintree using the customer's vault id (the only thing stored locally, braintree actually stores the credit card and address information) and the subscription monies are deposited into my bank account the next day.i get a monthly statement from braintree in addition to instant email receipts.  i've had to change my bank account and address information once, which involved contacting braintree and american express/discover/visa/mastercard and was relatively painless.i'm not sure what is so difficult that services like recurly are trying to make easier, but if the problem is lots of different points of contact, i'm not sure that another middleman is the answer.  braintree stores and charges the credit cards, the credit card companies deposit the money into my local bank account.  simple.