The Core

A friend of mine is running http://www.goodiebox.dk same concept.

They're running it on Magento and have huge headaches with the crm. Who got their boxes? Who cancelled? Whos credit card expired? etc etc.. PITA.

OK cheers guys, will give it more though.

WOW, never knew how deep the rabbit hole went - http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2012/06/start/graze-anatomy

Word to the wise on the woo commerce subscription plugin, you can only add one product at a time and if you change the price of your product it cancels all of your existing subscriptions (I think this is a paypal definitive rather than a plugin one) so you will have a large fall out rate. It won't offer you the flexibility you need from the sounds of it. If you find something let me know as I am also on the hunt as well, for later this year. Good luck and if I come across something I will post.

Yes I am in the same position I haven't come across anything that is quite there yet and I prefer to work with wordpress wherever possible so I am hoping something will pop up in the next few months, I have a lot of other things to do so subscriptions can be put on the shelf for a while. The fear of loosing all built up subscriptions for a price change is a real problem when dealing with physical product and continuous cost increases in supply and postage and the reason why I haven't got this system going already.

With regards to the site you mention

Hmmm actually it looks like it is and something I haven't considered until you pointed it out. I have worked in the GPL arena before and the freedom of re-distribution of GPL licenced code and derivative works is very well guarded. In essence they are actually providing the code but really charging for the upgrade, download and support service.

Drupal explain it well here....

9: Is it permitted for me to sell Drupal or a Drupal module or a Drupal theme?

Yes. However, you must distribute it under the GPL version 2 or later, so those you sell it to must be allowed to modify and redistribute it as well. See questions 6 and 7 above.

Whether encouraging the redistribution of commercial plugins and themes is productive to the industry is questionable but the practice of redistributing gpl products is widely practiced, perfectly legal and many companies do it with commercial gain ie redhat, the monetary value is not in the code but in the services surrounding it.

I'm going nutts with this.
I managed to get on the UK Beta for Stripe, thought YAY! I will finally get to a point where I can bootstrap something together........ but no........... they don't allow the business I'm in..... p*ssed is an understatement.

My only option now I think is to use several services and combine them together.
e.g. Sagepay for their merchant account and payment gateway, recurly to manage the subscription billing and the storing of card details in a 'Vault', all of which giving away little slices of the pie which is adding up.

I just can't see how to give a front end to it all though. Something Woo+Sub+Stripe would have given me....

Might go down the pub and have a few jars to cool off and look at it from a different perspective me thinks

Yea Braintree looks interesting but alas, they wont allow what I want to do

Fusebill looks interesting so does Chargebee but they don't offer a customer portal for them to manage their subscriptions out of the box.

Will look at worldpay, cheers