Hello MoonClerk! Iron Yard Alumni Announces Public Product Launch

Ask any small business and they’ll tell you that accepting recurring payments is either a huge hassle, overly expensive, or probably both. Sure, there are awesome point of sale tools for almost any type of vendor (Square, etc.), but if your business runs any type of subscription based product or service, you’re probably in for a headache.

Enter MoonClerk, Iron Yard 2012 alumni.

Dodd Caldwell, the founder, was really fed up with having to either develop fully custom payment solutions for each new project, or use existing providers that were painful to work with (ahem, PayPal, ahem). So he decided to solve the problem from the ground up.

In a sentence, here’s what it does:

MoonClerk is a web-based service designed to help small businesses easily accept recurring and one-time online payments.

“But they can already do that!” you say. True, but not without a lot of difficulty or a lot of money. In fact, you don’t have to have any technical capability to use MoonClerk. It differentiates itself from e-commerce solutions and point-of-sale systems such as Square by allowing businesses to gather credit card information from their customer or donors and then charging that credit card on a recurring or subscription basis.

And, it’s amazingly easy to set up and use:

Businesses can set up MoonClerk without any technical or programming skills. The entire setup process generally takes around 5 minutes to begin accepting payments because there are no merchant accounts, payment gateways, or other systems to apply for and implement. MoonClerk provides bank-level security so businesses don’t need to deal with SSL certificates or PCI compliance. Checkout works on all devices – desktop and mobile.

Not only that, but it automates some of the annoying administrative tasks associtated with running a small business:

So, for instance, a lawn care service can set a customer up on-site with a subscription payment and then forget about having to send and collect on invoices. We also help them with some of the back-office issues, like sending out automatic receipts.

Here’s what Dodd had to say about building the product:

When my co-founder, Ryan Wood, and I decided to build MoonClerk, we really wanted to help businesses convert customers. When someone decides to pay you or donate to you, you want them to complete the process. By giving our customers control of the design of the checkout experience and other great tools, we’re able to help them accomplish that goal. PayPal was one of the only recurring systems out there for small businesses and it didn’t really allow non-technical users to do that.

How much does it cost? MoonClerk piggybacks on payment processor Stripe. Businesses can set up a Stripe account while activating their MoonClerk accounts. Funds are automatically transferred into the business’s bank account, and pricing starts at $9/month. Stripe charges 2.9% + $.30 per successful transaction.

Three cheers for an amazing product, Dodd and Ryan.

Want more? Visit www.moonclerk.com or contact Dodd Caldwell at dodd(at)moonclerk(dot)com