We asked ourselves: "why stop at 1,000?" Our standard pricing now offers developers their first $50k in processing free of fees.

Two weeks ago, we announced that we raised another $35M in funding from NEA and Accel. As we were raising the money and in the course of announcing the funding, we were asked countless times what we plan to do with the money, particularly since we've built a profitable business. While the primary use is to propel our efforts to build an iOS-like platform for payments that fuels innovation around the world, it's also important to us that we give back to the community of start-ups and developers that have made Braintree successful.

Braintree has helped thousands of start-ups and developers to easily accept payments online and on mobile. Many of those start-ups that built on Braintree have become some of the best known companies in tech, including Airbnb, Uber, Fab.com, Github and LivingSocial. We've been successful because we helped them succeed. With our new funding, we wanted to find a way to help the next generation of start-ups and developers to follow in the footsteps of the countless successful start-ups that have built on Braintree. So, we've decided to help launch the next thousand start-ups by giving them their first $50,000 dollars in processing for free.

We're developers and entrepreneurs too and we know that first $50,000 in revenue is the hardest. Braintree is the fourth start-up for me and I was a developer at the first two (still an engineer at heart). We know that there's no tougher time than when you're building out the early iterations of your product and getting your first customers. So, we want to do our part to make that a little easier. The first 1,000 start-ups that sign-up with Braintree using the link below, will get their first $50,000 in processing free of any fees. That's $50 million of processing in total, nearly $2 million dollars in revenue to Braintree, that we are going to give away. We're even covering all the interchange costs from the credit card networks that have to be paid on those transactions - that's more than $1 million dollars of hard costs that we'll pay out.

At this point you're probably asking, "So, what's the catch - is this just a marketing promotion." There's no catch, no strings attached, no BS -- we just want to do our part to give back to the community that made us successful and this is our way of paying it forward. To be totally forthright, we expect that people will enjoy the service and many will continue to use Braintree as they build their start-up. However, we're not asking for contracts or commitments or anything else that would guarantee we make money from this. In fact, there's nothing stopping someone from getting their free processing here and then going somewhere else before they pay us a nickel. We really do just want to help you launch, and if you like what you get and choose to stay so that we can help you grow, then that will be great too. All that we ask is that you only use this if you are truly a pre-revenue start-up or just started to collect fees for your product. If you've already got your start, then we're certainly happy to support you, we'd just ask that you save the free processing for others who are trying to get their start.

If you're a start-up working on launching your product and you want to be one of the next thousand start-ups that builds on Braintree you can get started here (this promotional offer has ended). We hope that we can do our part to help you become the next Airbnb, Uber, Fab, Github or LivingSocial.

If you have any questions see our FAQs.

Note: we're only able to offer this to start-ups with a presence in the US today. We recently launched in Europe and Canada and hope to be able to do something similar for international start-ups soon.