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Ask HN: What are some low cost payment processing alternatives to Stripe?

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Re: Ask HN: What are some low cost payment processing alternatives to Stripe?

#71

Post by tmikaeld »

NavyG wrote: post #15
tmikaeld wrote: post #2

The most low-cost I know of with widest reach (most countries) is https://www.adyen.com/pricing Because you can choose which processor you want to use and there are many low-cost ones, including some inter-bank ones with fixed cost (no %) Most shops like WooCommerce and Shopify have ready-to-use plugins for it. (I'm not affiliated, but i build e-commerce for brands)

Adyen is a good option, however they have a monthly fixed fee ($120) and looks like they might not onboard small merchants with less than $50M ARR

The candy-shop on my street use Adyen, I'd be very surprised if they had $50M ARR

Re: Ask HN: What are some low cost payment processing alternatives to Stripe?

#72

Post by NavyG »

hknmtt wrote: post #3

Every country has couple, if not dozens, of payment processors. Most of them will support foreign customers as well. So you have hundreds and thousands of options here. Bottom line will be that they are all essentially the same when it comes to functionality and pricing because they are the middlemen between you and visa/mastercard/... and not much else. So there is very little variety possible in this little space.…

Exactly my concern, I'm basically looking to get a service provider that is as close to card networks or banks as possible. Not looking at which one is "pretty" at all. Willing to work with that provider to integrate them with my website

Re: Ask HN: What are some low cost payment processing alternatives to Stripe?

#73

Post by mbStavola »

khemdhaliwal wrote: post #62
mbStavola wrote: post #51

While we're talking about Stripe alternatives, anyone have a good Stripe Tax alternative? Their pricing is actually insane as they charge per API call rather than transaction amount. That sort of pricing made sense for TaxJar because it was their whole deal, but post-acquisition it would've made more sense to treat the tax product as a complement to the core business and just tack on a small 50c fee for successful ta…

Hey mbStavola, Khem from the Paddle team here. We see quite a few sites switch over from Stripe Tax - offloading tax (including the filing) is our core competency (rather than bundling loads of tools together) and we'd charge per transaction for everything to save you paying unnecessary fees. Happy to chat if you'd like to learn more :)

I'd absolutely love to switch to Paddle, the product seems great. Unfortunately, my business is a marketplace which I don't believe Paddle supports. Happy to be wrong on that though!

Are there any plans to have a marketplace offering?

Re: Ask HN: What are some low cost payment processing alternatives to Stripe?

#74

Post by NavyG »

khemdhaliwal wrote: post #66
rayquazatime wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay this includes fraud and tax as well. Any idea how paddle's Fraud management compares with Stripe's radar?

Khem from Paddle here - we'll be able to fight chargebacks on your behalf too as part of that :) The price above includes the entire payments stack (filing and remitting of taxes too), so you're compliant globally out of the box. We often help teams avoid having to hire lots of external accounting resource. Happy to chat if you'd like to learn more :)

Curious: you must have done a lot of groundwork to provide the whole stack as a solution, would love to hear from you how you internally select the processors you work with. Or are you directly integrated with banks and card networks?

Re: Ask HN: What are some low cost payment processing alternatives to Stripe?

#75

Post by abcd_f »

khemdhaliwal wrote: post #62
mbStavola wrote: post #51

While we're talking about Stripe alternatives, anyone have a good Stripe Tax alternative? Their pricing is actually insane as they charge per API call rather than transaction amount. That sort of pricing made sense for TaxJar because it was their whole deal, but post-acquisition it would've made more sense to treat the tax product as a complement to the core business and just tack on a small 50c fee for successful ta…

Hey mbStavola, Khem from the Paddle team here. We see quite a few sites switch over from Stripe Tax - offloading tax (including the filing) is our core competency (rather than bundling loads of tools together) and we'd charge per transaction for everything to save you paying unnecessary fees. Happy to chat if you'd like to learn more :)

[flagged]

Re: Ask HN: What are some low cost payment processing alternatives to Stripe?

#76

Post by NavyG »

notwhereyouare wrote: post #58
NavyG wrote: post #13

Has anyone used Helcim or Stax? These processors pricing seems to be around $0.15 per transaction. If this is true why don't so many people use it?

I’ve used stax in the past. It is cheaper than stripe, but you’re also paying a monthly fee. In our case, it was $120 a month for a physical terminal in the office. I don’t know what the differences are for API transactions. It wasn’t something we were doing. We are now with mxmerchant and they are okay? I’ve never seen a credit card merchant go down and not take transactions, but in the 1.5 years we’ve used them, th…

Interesting, have you also tried online payments (card not present) with them? If so how is the reliability in that case?

Re: Ask HN: What are some low cost payment processing alternatives to Stripe?

#77

Post by NavyG »

bibosj wrote: post #46

Full disclosure, I work for Stripe. The question you want to ask is why are these alternatives cheaper than Stripe? What is the tradeoff.

Yes, want to understand the trade off and would like to know what the challenge is in integrating directly with a payment provider that is closer to the networks / banks. I love Stripe for how easy it is to get started with but I am looking for opportunities to save cost further but getting closer to the acquirer

Re: Ask HN: What are some low cost payment processing alternatives to Stripe?

#78

Post by NavyG »

dubcanada wrote: post #60

Have you considered going to one of the archaic platforms and getting a proper merchant account? Moneris, banks (Chase, Wells Fargo), etc? Pretty much all of them will probably offer better support (a customer support line) and cheaper transaction fee. You lose the developer friendliness, so you'll have to debate if that matters to you. To me it never did. Or you could take a look at stax https://staxpayments.com/

Yess I am willing to trade off developer friendliness. Have you personally used stax or any of these archaic platforms?

Re: Ask HN: What are some low cost payment processing alternatives to Stripe?

#79

Post by ericpauley »

abcd_f wrote: post #75
khemdhaliwal wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey mbStavola, Khem from the Paddle team here. We see quite a few sites switch over from Stripe Tax - offloading tax (including the filing) is our core competency (rather than bundling loads of tools together) and we'd charge per transaction for everything to save you paying unnecessary fees. Happy to chat if you'd like to learn more :)

[flagged]

Disagree. In the real world prices aren’t all that simple. Especially in payments it could come down to the riskiness of the business, fees imposed by upstream providers, etc. Simplifying that is a valid business decision, but it’s hardly “spam” not to.
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