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Ask HN: How do you handle recurring payments in 2021?

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Ask HN: How do you handle recurring payments in 2021?

#1

Post by colesantiago »

Hey HN,

What is the state of recurring payments that most startups / companies use?

Been meaning to use Stripe for everything, but not sure why other competitors such as fusebill, chargebee, memberstack, chargify, recurly etc, exists or what their benefits are, not sure I even know the difference.

Do you use any of these in the list above or something else to handle recurring payments and how was your experience?

Thanks.

Re: Ask HN: How do you handle recurring payments in 2021?

#2

Post by tdevito »

Stripe all the way! They have the best infrastructure and security, you can build out any payments system with their APIs and now they even have treasury-as-a-service to build your own bank. Elon and Peter Thiel were early investors, I can't imagine any company catching up at this point.

Re: Ask HN: How do you handle recurring payments in 2021?

#3

Post by jon-wood »

These days I’d use Stripe for everything, but the other payment SaaS products exist because for a long time there were some big holes in Stripe’s subscription offering - most notably not having any simple way to handle expired/cancelled cards without building out all the UI for it yourself. They recently released self-service portals for that sort of thing making it much less painful to use.

Re: Ask HN: How do you handle recurring payments in 2021?

#4

Post by gingerlime »

tdevito wrote: post #2

Stripe all the way! They have the best infrastructure and security, you can build out any payments system with their APIs and now they even have treasury-as-a-service to build your own bank. Elon and Peter Thiel were early investors, I can't imagine any company catching up at this point.

We’re using Stripe and super happy in general. But they don’t cover PayPal (which lots of our users need), and also recently added 0.5% charge for all subscriptions [0]. Previously it was included. They definitely added value over time, but I would expect them to raise prices as well over time. Also their support, while still great overall, can be w bit patchy and much slower than before (from our own anecdotal experience).

I’m curious about the experience of others with chargebee etc as a layer that potentially lets you “swap” Stripe with something else. Is it worth it?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25072783

Re: Ask HN: How do you handle recurring payments in 2021?

#7

Post by sneeuwpopsneeuw »

In the Netherlands we prefer to use the dutch payment system "Ideal" (One of the best systems ever btw). Most dutch payment service providers give you an url back from there api and when you send the user to that url they can select their prefered payment option. So recurring payments with Ideal is just sending 1 additional boolean to the api.

https://www.mollie.com/en does this for example. (Disclaimer I worked in the same office as the dutch payments provider Qantani. They sold all their users to Mollie.)

I know of some dutch companies that check all the prices and based on the payments option the customer wants they sent the user to a different payments provider to save money on processing fees. I'm not very familiar with Stripe, I have only set it up on a wordpress website once. but if they do not allow you to do cheap recurring payments then just implement a second provider and switch between them.

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