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.
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.
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?
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!