If it's interesting and well written, nobody will balk at the length of your posts. Just go check out patio11's blog. The average post there is huge, but I (and I think many with me) read it all the way through anyway because there is so much value in it.
I'm sorry you understood it that way. I wanted to point out that it is in fact a pretty big deal! Human produced CO2 (mainly from fossil fuel burning) is changing the global environment pretty dramatically. nathannecro wanted to see evidence that we're doing something on the macro scale, here it is.
It surprised us too. And it is actually the merchant account provider, Adyen in our case, who ask for this reserve. This money is used as a security in case we would charge eg. 100 customers, receive the money, spend it all on marketing and then notice our product is broken and we have to declare bankruptcy because we do not have any savings left.
As I understand it, the amount can vary greatly depending on the amount of risk they see in your business plan.
The API does work like a charm. If history can be a reference, Paymill is going to get bought by one of the big players who want a quick start in the European market (Stripe comes to mind). But I do get your reluctance.
By now we are working with Paypal to show the concept (Not an API you would recommend dough...). But we are planing to create a Ltd. in the states to work with Stripe. It will also make it easier to close a round with american VCs. We are based in Spain and the Spanish VCs are not what you could call that "venturous". They are more likely to invest in "me too" startups, or proven models.
We are a B2B company so we are not selling to consumers. If that is your primary market, I agree that you might lose a lot of sales with only offering credit cards (anyone has a reference for this?), but I also think paying with credit card is on the rise thanks to companies like Amazon.
Author here. Are there any other important payment solutions we should be looking out for (available in Europe, Belgium) that I forgot to mention in the blog?
As I just posted in the comments on your blog, Google Wallet is a serious consideration if your app is available in the Chrome Web Store (or on the Play Store). They charge relatively little and support European accounts and subscriptions.
There's also the Google Apps Marketplace to consider if your app targets the enterprise, which also hooks into the same payments APIs.
FastSpring is worth a look. My company (also European) has been using them successfully for subscription billing for over a year. I really like their system.
Klarna is a payment startup in Sweden focused on invoices and installments. Currently working in se,dk,no,fi,nl,de,at. Could be worth keeping an eye on.
We operate from Belgium. We only have to charge the Belgian tax rate (21%) for other Belgian companies or consumers living in the EU, in all other cases VAT rate is 0% (have to put a disclosure on the invoice referencing Belgian law though). Then again we don't sell any physical goods (luckily).
We don't automatically check validity of VAT number, so maybe I'll be able to answer that question in a couple of months.
A little bit of background information. The original Gmail gadget is a backbone js application. I rewrote all the parts (certain models, views and the router) making a connection to our server and substituted those methods to return json which could be parsed into Backbone models. The whole process only took a few hours and makes it more clear what it is exactly the gadget can do. I welcome all questions.
I like it, but would suggest repeating the date of the next episode on the individual pages and making this the most noticeable like you did on the frontpage. Perhaps even making it linkable so it scrolls down to the episode in question (and highlighting it).
Anyway, interesting article!