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Ask HN: Stripe or Braintree?

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Re: Ask HN: Stripe or Braintree?

#41

Post by ianhawes »

nickjj wrote: post #32
joosters wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then on top of that I got questioned because I don't have any credit (I purposely made a life choice not to use credit cards), so they demanded 3 months of my most recent bank statements. That's not Braintree's fault. In fact, that's them being sensible. The problem is that having no credit records makes you harder to tell apart from a fraudulent user.

Yeah but Stripe just asked me for my bank account number and last 4 digits of my social. There was no background check and having to send over copies of various bills, statements, license, etc.. I felt like Stripe requested the least amount of info to legally accept payments where as Braintree requested a million things to build up some type of profile that they'll benefit from later. You know, it's like the guy who…

Ultimately they're both going to want the same information. If you had started processing more than, say, $10K per day, Stripe would freeze your account and demand the same information. The difference being that Braintree wanted that information upfront and without the stress of frozen funds at risk.

Re: Ask HN: Stripe or Braintree?

#42

Post by skylark »

I currently work at a medium sized startup which processes ~100 million dollars / year. We offer both Stripe and PayPal.

The vast majority of our users prefer PayPal (80%+). For one particular product we had to roll out using Stripe only, the number one customer service request we had was to provide PayPal as an option. Subscription numbers rose by over 50% overnight when including it as a choice (literally tens of thousands of people signed up after the change).

Internationally, PayPal seems like the de facto choice for making online purchases. In addition, outside of the Bay Area tech bubble, I believe people in the states are simply more comfortable with using PayPal over Stripe.

While PayPal gets a lot of hate, I'd think long and hard before deciding not to offer it as a payment processor. It's possible that you're leaving a significant amount of money on the table.

Re: Ask HN: Stripe or Braintree?

#43

Post by davidsawyer »

Stripe's documentation and API design are both the gold standards in my mind. Braintree is good as well, but they fall just a little short of Stripe in almost all categories.

The most notable shortcoming for me has been Braintree's testing/sandbox environment. They require different dollar values in order to trigger certain payment processor errors, and a payment won't fail in their sandbox environment if you use a bogus nonce. This behavior alone caused me to mistakenly ship a placeholder nonce to production, and it took us a while to figure out what was going wrong in production since all purchases worked perfectly in the sandbox.

tl;dr Braintree has burned me, and Stripe has not.

Re: Ask HN: Stripe or Braintree?

#45

Post by mgkimsal »

asadlionpk wrote: post #23
davismwfl wrote: post #13

You can search HN and find this question many times. My 2 cents, I don't trust any company owned by Paypal as Paypal has a very strange, aggressive and non-transparent and inflexible process to holding funds from businesses, charities etc (even after providing all the extra "evidence" they ask for). Stripe has a lot of advantages, API being a huge one. I have heard of a few people that complain about delays in respon…

Dumb question, wouldn't rolling a wrapper over existing payment service also require me to store credit cards myself somewhere so I can easily switch integration later? If so, isn't that risky.

gentle plug - spreedly is a service that handles this for you. one of the guys in our coworking space uses this for his service, and it allows his customers to be able to swap processors relatively easily, as spreedly acts as a middle-man secure vault to hold that info away from any one particular service.

there may be other services that do something similar, but if you're concerned about switching services, and don't want to have all your customers reinput billing info, spreedly (or similar) would probably be worth investigating.

Re: Ask HN: Stripe or Braintree?

#46

Post by lcarlson »

nickjj wrote: post #32
joosters wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then on top of that I got questioned because I don't have any credit (I purposely made a life choice not to use credit cards), so they demanded 3 months of my most recent bank statements. That's not Braintree's fault. In fact, that's them being sensible. The problem is that having no credit records makes you harder to tell apart from a fraudulent user.

Yeah but Stripe just asked me for my bank account number and last 4 digits of my social. There was no background check and having to send over copies of various bills, statements, license, etc.. I felt like Stripe requested the least amount of info to legally accept payments where as Braintree requested a million things to build up some type of profile that they'll benefit from later. You know, it's like the guy who…

Actually, they do run a form of background checks on you. It's a process called KYC. Both payment vendors have to get a certain amount of information before allowing you to process. Stripe has made it much easier however. I don't think either company is collecting your personal information for anything other that underwriting and would ask for less if they could.

Re: Ask HN: Stripe or Braintree?

#48

Post by duncanawoods »

Keats wrote: post #24
duncanawoods wrote: post #10

For those selling to the EU from the UK - what subscription payment/accounts package combination can you recommend for pain free handling of VATMOSS type complexity?

I wrote about that last year ( https://blog.wearewizards.io/looking-at-payments-solution-fo... ) and I need to actually implement it this week. Haven't decided yet but quaderno + stripe is the best choice I've seen so far. Definitely interested in more feedback too!

Thanks, thats good info. I am very interested to hear about your conclusion and experience when you set it up. Are you integrating with an accountancy package like Xero/Sage?

Quaderno/Stripe sound promising to me too but I can't find genuine feedback from Quaderno users. Its a real shame Recurly isn't priced to be an easy choice. It seems expensive to triple dip on subscription fees, transaction fees and %revenue and beyond frustrating that multi-currency is an enterprise "call us for pricing" feature.

Re: Ask HN: Stripe or Braintree?

#49

Post by duncanawoods »

pbowyer wrote: post #22
duncanawoods wrote: post #10

For those selling to the EU from the UK - what subscription payment/accounts package combination can you recommend for pain free handling of VATMOSS type complexity?

All I know is from https://rachelandrew.co.uk/archives/2014/11/25/how-small-com... : http://rachelandrew.github.io/eu-vat/third-parties.html https://www.taxamo.com/ https://quaderno.io/

Thanks. Have you implemented any of these yourself?

Re: Ask HN: Stripe or Braintree?

#50

Post by Gcam »

I wrote a comparison for Australian companies recently:

https://medium.com/@grmcameron/stripe-vs-braintree-for-your-...

1. Feature Related Main Takeaways:

Stripe vs Braintree feature comparison: Braintree allows payments through Paypal (This can increase conversion if you believe your customer base feels more comfortable when using Paypal, a name they will likely recognize, as their card details are not revealed.) Stripe accepts American Express while Braintree does not Braintree allows you to bring your own merchant account The stripe ecosystem is (arguably) more developed (i.e. Atlas)

2. Cost Related Takeaways:

If you are going to be bringing in under $200k revenue, then Braintree will likely be the better option in terms of cost considering their first $50k fee-less revenue. However, if you are to be earning more than $200k, then Stripe will likely be the better option in terms of cost considering their lower % fee on transactions. Additionally, the number should be re-calculated based on your international/domestic split, your estimated no. of charge backs and your average transaction size.

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