Stripe Billing

I couldn't believe my eyes when I read that you weren't returning fees anymore. I get not returning the flat 0.30 transaction fee, but not returning the % fees smacks of being more worried about the corporate bottom line than customers. Many processors refund the % fees, and there's no way you couldn't negotiate special dispensation with "the various payment partners we work with" to at least be able to return the % fee.

I used to unabashedly recommend Stripe as the best payment processor -- a little expensive on the rate, but easy to set up and no monthly or hidden fees to worry about.

That changed as soon as I had my first new customer screaming about getting whacked with fees on a refund. Didn't affect my account, and your messaging was horrible on that change as well, so I blissfully recommended unaware of the change until a new customer to whom I'd sung the praises of Stripe got hit and had to yank all of the Stripe code and go to a direct processor.

Just because you grandfather existing customers doesn't mean you get off scot-free on unfavorable policies.

My recommendation immediately changed to only use Stripe if access to special niche features like Stripe Connect or non card payments were required, and otherwise use a direct card processor with defined fees (and much lower rates, like 0.5% lower at least).

Clearly your focus has changed from doing right by the little guy to "customers handling large amounts of revenue" and policies tilted toward the bottom line vs "rightness". That's fine, and a natural part of many corporations during growth... Just telling you how it's affected my perceptions of Stripe and my recommendations to customers.

Negatively.

> I know of no acceptable automated method for doing this, so we just have to review the information manually at frequent intervals.

The short answer is 100%, absolutely no - we do not, have not, and will not ever sell your data. We say this pretty clearly at the top in our terms and services, which you didn't link to (found here: https://www.profitwell.com/terms-security). For context, there's a difference between a privacy policy and a terms of service. I'm not a lawyer, but from my understanding the reason here we structured things this way (as a lot of BI/analytics providers do) is because one handles the actual handling of data, especially pursuant to EU/International/US law, and the other handles the actual service of that data. For instance, we will share your email address with our email service or with our payment processor. The terms are inclusive of the privacy policy.

From a terms perspective, we don't access someone's account unless given permission for QA, analysis, and the like. We do aggregate data for research purposes, but there needs to be a minimum of 30 companies in that data set and if you'd like to opt out of that we're more than happy to sign/put together custom Ts&Cs, which we do with almost every company that requests one.

Additionally, with GDPR the nature of our privacy policy is going one step further beyond EU/Swiss Privacy Shield compliance to offering up DPAs and a whole host of new functionality to make sure we go beyond the requirements.

Apologies if I'm coming off any bit passive aggressive/defensive. Just trying to explain and sometimes the legalease can be tough to sift through. I started my career working in network security/intelligence, so I personally take this really seriously and we put a lot of work into all of this fun stuff (pen tests, training, our policies, etc.), so I take it too personally when hearing someone misinterpret how we work. We can always make this clearer, as we tried to do with the pre-amble to our terms, but happy to do what some other companies have done and really refine the plain speak of our terms and privacy policy (especially since they're shifting a bit with GDPR). Assume you meant the best here with your comments though, so hope this clears this up at least a bit.

From a monetization perspective, we do offer a service to _someone_ - our customers. We sell Price Intelligently, ProfitWell Retain, ProfitWell Recognized, and ProfitWell Premium. All of these products are feature and performance based - and more than paying the bills for us to continue to invest in building the company without a drop of funding (which is intentional to keep us independent).

The reason we set up our monetization this way is that frankly we don't think there's a whole lot of value in taking your data and putting it into a bunch of graphs. I know that's trivializing BI/analytics, but that's the crux of the industry right now. Plus, doing willingness to pay and pricing analysis supports this - hence why most BI companies have to go upmarket to survive/grow. Instead, metrics are the gateway.

The world we're building is one where ProfitWell can show you the one graph (or few) that you need to look at - not the 60 you need to sift through to truly understand if there's a problem or not. Then we're going to help you see exactly the metric you should worry about (and the ones you shouldn't worry about) before offering up resources to help you fix it or a product that takes care of that metric for you with 0 work on your part through what we call an anti-active usage product (like ProfitWell Retain). This just feels like the right move to best serve our customers and the greater community.