141–150 of 364 posts
Can anyone explain me why Stripe is so hyped on HN ? It's the most expensive card processing service I know. I am using one where I pay 1.9% for all my clients and another for EU clients where I pay only 1.7%. I don't see anything in their offer that is worth paying additional 1.2% of my business to card payment processor.
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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.
Except that's not how it works.
What companies does this hurt? Recurly? Zuora (which recently had an IPO)? Chargify? The truly interesting feature to me is the credit card recapture part which updates automatically cards that are re-issued.
Stripe cofounder here. For anyone wondering about pricing, here's our approach. - For new Stripe customers, this is free up to the first (lifetime) $1M of payments. - For existing customers, there's no pricing change. You just get more functionality than before for free. This is what we generally try to do: we want Stripe to continually become better value for you over time, as you get more functionality for the same…
> For existing customers, there's no pricing change. You just get more functionality than before for free. This is what we generally try to do: we want Stripe to continually become better value for you over time, as you get more functionality for the same price. The email that existing customers received was ambiguous on this point. It said this: "Since you used Stripe Subscriptions in the past year, the Stripe Billi…
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(Engineering Manager at Stripe Billing) Ah - sorry about that, a last minute fix caused a bug. This is now fixed in production. Thank you so much for reporting!
Thanks for the update. Am I understanding the ACH payment flow correctly: 1) Send a user an invoice 2) The user copies the auto-generated bank details and manually initiates a transfer from their bank?
Somewhat off-topic question, but how do others handle the need to create an invoice that corresponds to a Stripe charge? We've been using Stripe Subscriptions (I guess, now Stripe Billing) to auto-charge customers, and we separately define recurring invoices in QuickBooks Online. It's a clumsy process, but I'm assuming all Stripes Billing users have to solve it. Is there a better way to handle?
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…
"build in a weekend"
Having used Chargebee for a long time I would say that this problem space is much larger than it first appears. There are a lot of boxes to tick before a solution like this does all the stuff you’ll need it to (but have no idea about).
I'm in the midst of integrating Chargebee. Do you feel like this new offering is a good replacement for Chargebee? I don't know what I don't know yet.
Don't get me wrong. I love Stripe, and we use it for handling all the payments. Over time I'm sure this billing offering will grow in functionality but it's unlikely to even get close to feature parity with Chargebee.
Many days from now you're going to have this internal monologue while in Chargebee; "Noooo, I have to do this really weird thing with promotional credits and coupons and pro-rating and adjusting subscriptions all at the same time and there's no way... oh, wait, that all works. And it showed me everything that was going to happen on screen before hand so I could double check. Just. Amazing."
Stripe cofounder here. For anyone wondering about pricing, here's our approach. - For new Stripe customers, this is free up to the first (lifetime) $1M of payments. - For existing customers, there's no pricing change. You just get more functionality than before for free. This is what we generally try to do: we want Stripe to continually become better value for you over time, as you get more functionality for the same…
Will anything change for those of us who might not need that new functionality? The wording in the email is that Stripe Billing "replaces" Stripe Subscriptions, but historically Stripe has been good at not breaking its API. We're concerned about another situation like GoCardless last year, where existing integrations would get broken.
The one thing we'd love to see improved is fixing failed charges. We've never been able to find much documentation on the previous settings for Dunning management, and support emails on the subject went unanswered. However, our stats for churn caused by mysterious Stripe payment failures are consistently quite a bit worse than the ones you mention in your publicity today, and relatively few of our customers resubscribe after their subscription is cancelled like that even if they were previously happy and active users so this does significantly hurt growth. This has been our #1 problem with Stripe for a long time. If this new system leads to better Dunning management and better documentation about how it works, that would be positive.
When communicating important and potentially difficult to understand information: have some non-insiders read the text and ask them what they think it means.