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Stripe Billing

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Re: Stripe Billing

#221

Post by pccampbell »

dictum wrote: post #199
scrollaway wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using Profitwell, switched away from Baremetrics. Its a lot better, cleaner, more featureful and it's free.

> it's free For non-basic usage, that's a con, not a pro.

Hey Dictum - we're free for non-basic usage, basic usage, and everything in-between. I explained a lot of why this is the case in the blog post link below (when we went all in for free), but it really comes down to the following:

PHILOSOPHICAL 1. In software (and the subscription economy) we're moving away from function based pricing to outcome based pricing. Putting this simply in the context of analytics/reporting means that if I just take your data and put it into a bunch of graphs, it's helpful, but not valuable, even if they are the right graphs (and most of the time they aren't the right graphs, at least in most BI/analytics products).

2. Based on this, we believe in outcome based pricing. We make money by selling products like Retain, Price Intelligently, etc. that all have a specific number we can point to (in your free ProfitWell account :)) that we helped move in the right direction. For some of these products we then only perfectly charge based on our performance. Others where we can't measure this precisely, we still price on a value metric axis.

ANALYTICAL 1. Metrics/analytics are a terrible business from a willingness to pay and unit economics perspective. People don't really appreciate how much work goes into 100% accuracy (that's our thing compared to our competitors fwiw). It took years to be perfect and even now we're still finding edge cases of edge cases. Multiply this by the number of billing systems and it takes a lot of work to support this free product.

Here's the thing though - back to that lack of appreciation - when measuring the willingness to pay for analytics/metrics, people just aren't willing to pay that much. We measured this well ahead of going all in on free and found that our unit economics, especially in a market that's weak in number of logos (subscription market is much smaller than people think). As a result, most BI/analytics companies go up market. We're upmarket and do have an enterprise plan for all the fun enterprise fixings people need, but we don't want to waste massive amounts of CAC fighting for $50/month or even $150/month. Creating a phenomenal user experience (we're not there yet) is so much valuable. Plus, we're able to show our customers they have a problem that we can then sell an add-on for.

Long story short, this business and space requires a scalpel, not a sledgehammer for growth. Hope that's helpful. Always up for answering questions.

Here's the blog post we wrote up with some of the data, too: https://www.profitwell.com/blog/why-we-released-a-better-pro...

Re: Stripe Billing

#222

Post by harigov »

andkon wrote: post #217
RobertRoberts wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just rebuilt about 60% of our invoicing system this past week. So yes, depending on your needs, it can be done.

So... 2.5 weekends, and you're only 60% done.

And as they say, you get 90% of the work done in 90% of the time and the remaining 10% in 90% of the time.

Re: Stripe Billing

#223

Post by flurdy »

Silhouette wrote: post #191
mstefff wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still have not found a single subscription solution that seamlessly handles adding sales tax and properly reporting it. Stripe does not. Recurly does not. TaxJar does not work with subscriptions. Avalara does not work with subscriptions... What are people doing?

What are people doing? With my UK small business hat on: Sometimes, it is just easier and cheaper to build it yourself than to rely on an outsourced service that doesn't do exactly what you need. We have a database table of VAT rates per country with starting dates when they come into effect. All customer accounts are tied to a specific country, so all payments or subscriptions for an account can look up the current…

Smells like a service someone should make and sell. VAAS - VAT-as-a-service

Re: Stripe Billing

#224

Post by jtokoph »

tarstarr wrote: post #101
pg_bot wrote: post #84

This is extremely disappointing. For my business this means an additional 0.4%-0.7% fee added onto a service I currently use for free justified by features that I cannot use for compliance purposes. This new invoicing process does not qualify as an exempt financial service for a covered entity. (see subsection 1179 of HIPAA) So unless they are now willing to sign a business associates agreement I just got a price hik…

(PM from Stripe) If you're an existing user, there's no extra fees, even if you are past the $1M lifetime threshold. For existing Stripe Subscriptions users, Stripe Billing is included in your current price. (You should have received an email about this earlier today, but you can always ping me (tara@stripe.com))

The email went to spam on all of my google hosted email accounts that are associated with a stripe account.

Re: Stripe Billing

#225

Post by pccampbell »

scrollaway wrote: post #200
dictum wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's free For non-basic usage, that's a con, not a pro.

But it's better than Baremetrics, so I don't get your point. It being free just makes it both better and less expensive. ChartMoguls is excellent if you want to be on a paid plan. It's also super expensive.

Thanks so much for the love here. :)

Re: Stripe Billing

#226

Post by usaphp »

A really cool touch is that those animated examples of pricing and other elements are actually animated html elements, not GIFs or video files. Again really slick touch from designers at Stripe.

Re: Stripe Billing

#227

Post by joking »

I understand how handy are solutions like stripe, but at least in Europe you can have a payment gateway from your bank just like they can give you a handheld device, and the rates are way cheaper, I just looked one which is 0.50%, six time less than stripe.

Re: Stripe Billing

#228

Post by scrollaway »

Shpigford wrote: post #218
scrollaway wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using Profitwell, switched away from Baremetrics. Its a lot better, cleaner, more featureful and it's free.

Would love to hear what "more featureful" means for you and your business! What are the big features they have but we don't? (I honestly don't pay attention to them so not sure what features they offer...genuinely curious how we could be serving businesses like yours better.)

Josh to be honest we used you guys for almost a year and repeatedly gave large amounts of feedback, none of it which was really acted upon. To the point it felt that Baremetrics had essentially stalled. In fact, the only change I remember from the time we used Baremetrics is that the colors of the dashboard changed to be more pastel.

Baremetrics is a great "early release" product, but we don't see development on it, nor even a hint at a roadmap. Profitwell has a lot more features (Paypal support, customer tracing, a powerful UI, etc) and we constantly see new features being added.

I could tell you the same stuff I said when we unsubscribed: Paypal support, a better API, "cancel at period end" support (which Profitwell does have), etc... Wish you well with it, and I hope for your success as I really like how transparently you run Baremetrics, but the product just doesn't cut it for us. And I think you should definitely pay attention to what Profitwell is doing (or any competitors really).

Re: Stripe Billing

#229

Post by StefanPretty »

As a connect platform partner this is a bit of a blow as this impacts our customer acquisition funnel, we drive customers to Stripe and then they use us.

I have been talking with Tara who has been very helpful on this matter but wanted to pitch in here.

I think from a connect platform partner stand point it comes across as a bit inconsiderate almost.

I have already seen some people immediately put off considering using Stripe now due to the additional fees and complexity. It just doesn't seem to sit well.

The Subscriptions API was the main reason for Stripe's success and now it's being charged for, why not charge for the dashboard usage and leave the api users alone?

Re: Stripe Billing

#230

Post by markwcollins »

madamelic wrote: post #178
nhangen wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to me that Stripe has gone from easy to cheer for underdog, to payment processor that wants to eat the world (ala Facebook). I love that they are constantly innovating, but every time they do, I have to refactor my product, and then decide how much of my current product's custom functionality can be replaced by Stripe. Then I have to decide if I want to double down on Stripe (at the peril of other integratio…

>This is starting to kill my love affair with Stripe. More and more I feel Stripe catering to the non-engineers who just want a simple workflow at the expense of customization. I still dislike v3 for the fact it tries to push me to use their own interface. I was happy hooking your library up to my form. I know I can "customize" it (change the css classes... wooo) but it completely replaced v2 with no way to get that…

I think the changes in v3 might have been for PCI compliance reason as much as anything
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