When we launched Credit Card Terminal, we received some feedback from small merchants that setting up the Authorize.Net^® and merchant accounts for credit card processing was too complicated and too expensive, including some penalties that were hard on small merchants.

At this time, we’re very happy to announce that we’ve secured much better credit card processing rates for our Credit Card Terminal customers.

As a small business ourselves, we understand the importance of clear, predictable rates. And we hate paying for setup or termination — it puts a lot of pressure on up-front decision making instead of letting us try things out. We hope our new offering will make it easier and cheaper than ever to try Credit Card Terminal.

When you take advantage of our new Authorize.Net + Merchant Account sign-up, there are no application, sign-up, or termination fees, and no monthly minimum processing fee. Getting rid of the minimum processing fee is a big win for small merchants, since it results in a predictable monthly bill with no worries of paying penalties for months of low or no volume.

Here’s a comparison table, assuming you need to sign up for both Authorize.Net and a merchant account:

* Range in monthly fee reflects the $25 minimum processing fee as part of the old rates. The new merchant account has no monthly minimum, so there is no penalty for charging less on a monthly basis.

Credit Card Terminal is now for sale in the App Store. Thank you to everyone who participated in our Early Customer Program!

To go with our release, we’ve put together some additional information that will help you to get started with Credit Card Terminal.

• Understanding the Settings
• Getting Your Transaction Key
• Tips & Tricks

Ok, so there’s the innerfence blog, the Photosleeve blog, and then the actual Photosleeve website. What’s the relationship?

Inner Fence is the company that develops and runs Photosleeve. The Photosleeve blog is for product-related announcements; things that users of Photosleeve might be interested in. This blog, the innerfence blog, is about our experiences starting up a consumer web site. Here we share business and engineering experiences with the startup and web development community at large — the kinds of details that our Photosleeve customers are unlikely to be interested in.

Some of the articles here will be very technical, and may include code. We’ve been somewhat frustrated with how other public forums “share” code, since the licensing tends to be very unclear. In contrast, we want to be absolutely clear that you are free to use our code.

We plan to share our experiences with front-end engineering, search engine optimization, modern Perl backend development with the Catalyst MVC framework, AJAX development using YUI, hosting using lighttpd and FastCGI, etc.

It’s just the two of us running around doing everything, so we try to keep things as simple as possible, even though we have our thumbs in a lot of different technology pies. Hopefully we’ll come up with a gold nugget or two that others will find useful.

Inner Fence is Derek Del Conte and Ryan D Johnson. We live in Seattle. If you must make a distinction, Derek is the “business guy” and Ryan is the “technical guy”, but we only get along because both of us are interested in both things.