Stripe Billing • Hacker News Board

Re: Stripe Billing

#61

Post by acabal » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 6:17 PM UTC

Yikes, I've been using Stripe subscriptions happily for a few years and now I'm upset to see they're going to be charging a fee. It's unclear if the fee starts at $1MM total revenue or $1MM/year. $1MM/total would hurt a lot of the small lifestyle businesses for no gain in service--we already had subscriptions built in to the cost and we don't need invoicing or any of the other new-fangled stuff :(

Paypal has free recurring billing. Sure it's a pain to set up but once you've built it in it works pretty damn well with little to no maintenance. If you do even a smallish amount of business through them you can set up daily sweeps into your bank account to stave off the famous Paypal "random freezing of funds" nonsense.

Re: Stripe Billing

#62

Post by tarstarr » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 6:18 PM UTC

nhangen wrote: post #33

tarstarr wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(PM for Stripe Billing here!) If you’re an existing user of Stripe Subscriptions, you can continue as you were! Your existing integration will still work as before and your customers won’t be impacted. That said, you’ll also get access to all of the new tools as well -- would love for you to try them (and see if it improves your experience!) If you go to the Dashboard, we walk you through what changed in detail -- le…

But fees will change right?

tl;dr there's no change to pricing for existing users.

There's a note on pricing in the email to existing users (but let us know if you have any questions!)

Re: Stripe Billing

#63

Post by pbarnes_1 » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 6:18 PM UTC

tarstarr wrote: post #18

mythz wrote: post #9

Just received an Email saying this "replaces Stripe Subscriptions", what does that mean exactly? e.g. what happens with our existing Customers and their active subscriptions? IMO this is a poor communication and confusing announcement with lots of open/unanswered questions for existing Customers, which is unlike what I've come to expect from Stripe.

(PM for Stripe Billing here!) If you’re an existing user of Stripe Subscriptions, you can continue as you were! Your existing integration will still work as before and your customers won’t be impacted. That said, you’ll also get access to all of the new tools as well -- would love for you to try them (and see if it improves your experience!) If you go to the Dashboard, we walk you through what changed in detail -- le…

You guys are burning a lot of good will here with the sneak additional fee (if it applies to existing customers).

Re: Stripe Billing

#64

Post by nodesocket » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 6:18 PM UTC

Under invoices there are two new documents "Invoice PDF" and "Receipt PDF" which are different from the standard e-mail receipts. Are these documents emailed to the customer automatically? Is there a way to control this?

Re: Stripe Billing

#65

Post by welder » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 6:19 PM UTC

brianwawok wrote: post #7

I see a new 0.4% to 0.7% fee, that is enough to make me start shopping competitors on Monday. The stripe processing fee is already high. It seems that all I get is some hosted invoice stuff.. which I could build in a weekend and not have to pay a fee on? Thinking about it, a medium sized SaaS company billing 15 million a year. 14,000,000 *.004 = 56k a year? For the same product they already had? Obviously it is cool…

Looks like Stripe Payments (the minimum you need to process credit card payments) is still 2.9% + 30¢ per transaction, for existing Stripe recurring billing users. For any new projects I'll be using Braintree for recurring billing.

Edit: the fee increase is only after $1M in revenue so still makes sense to use Stripe in a project's early stages.

Re: Stripe Billing

#66

Post by mythz » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 6:20 PM UTC

pbarnes_1 wrote: post #54

jacquesm wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's all about the fraud control and the reduction in chargebacks. Yes, you can hack up a credit card payment gateway in a long night (been there, done that), but on the modern web you'll get killed by fraud. That's the hard part and if it is your own merchant account you're always going to be a few chargebacks away from losing that merchant account and by extension getting into really hot water with your business.

The point is they already had this yesterday. It's literally a bunch of 'value add' features maybe you'll use for a 0.4% increase in fees you didn't ask for. Let me opt in to the new stuff.

Yeah the development of existing functionality is a sunk cost that should be optimized and depreciate in cost over time with additional volume, not incur additional charges after you're already invested the integration effort to lock yourself in to their gateway. Here they've auto-enrolled us into a new pricing scheme we didn't want or asked for.

Re: Stripe Billing

#67

Post by tarstarr » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 6:20 PM UTC

digitalbase wrote: post #29

tarstarr wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(PM of Billing from Stripe here) Tools like Stunning, and the many other extensions that work with Stripe, are very complementary to Stripe Billing. As you’d expect from Stripe, we’ve taken an API-first approach, so that our partners can actually take advantage of our recovery tools when building their solutions. We expect that particular businesses will want to use both!

@tarstarr can you email invoices? Also do you have multi currency subscriptions? Or do i need to create a pro_monthly_euro, expert_yearly_dollar subscription ?

Hey! Yes you can email invoices to your users (finally!) We heard that feature request so many times. :)

Re: multicurrency subs -- we thought about this quite a bit. At the moment you'd need to create a plan per currency, with our reasoning being that you'd want to control the FX rates on your own (and setting a price internationally is a very intentional decision.) That said, how can we make this easier? This launch is a start of our investment in this space, really interested in feature requests.

Re: Stripe Billing

#68

Post by balls187 » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 6:21 PM UTC

tnorthcutt wrote: post #5

Free for the first $1 million of recurring charges. After that, 0.4% on recurring charges Does this mean recurring charges don't carry Stripe's standard 2.9% + $0.30 charge? Or is the free at first/then 0.4% _on top of_ the 2.9% + $0.30 charge?

> Does this mean recurring charges don't carry Stripe's standard 2.9% + $0.30 charge? Or is the free at first/then 0.4% _on top of_ the 2.9% + $0.30 charge?

Charges do carry the standard fee.

There are two different products, each with different pricing models.

Billing - tools to manage reoccuring subscriptions. Payments - tools to accept/charge a credit card.

Payments pricing: 2.9%+ $0.30 per-charge.

Billing pricing: 0.4% after the first $1M in reoccurring subscription charges.

Re: Stripe Billing

#69

Post by anthony_franco » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 6:21 PM UTC

acabal wrote: post #61

Yikes, I've been using Stripe subscriptions happily for a few years and now I'm upset to see they're going to be charging a fee. It's unclear if the fee starts at $1MM total revenue or $1MM/year. $1MM/total would hurt a lot of the small lifestyle businesses for no gain in service--we already had subscriptions built in to the cost and we don't need invoicing or any of the other new-fangled stuff :( Paypal has free rec…

Did they email the announcement to you? If you already used Stripe subscriptions in the past, you'll be grandfathered in for free. This is the relevant line:

"Since you used Stripe Subscriptions in the past year, the Stripe Billing Starter plan is included in your current pricing."

Re: Stripe Billing

#70

Post by universenz » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 6:22 PM UTC

Well, this is all a bit cheeky. Backed Stripe for so long now, kinda lost touch with the options. What are some other decent recurring payment processors that support Asia Pacific, specifically Australia/New Zealand?