151–160 of 257 posts
Our company Moonlight was an early beta tester of the Stripe Corporate Card. Each person on our distributed team of five has a card, and it's made things like arranging travel or covering minor SaaS charges simple. Happy to answer any questions about the end user experience!
How does the card validation work? Do most payment processors accept it?
Well, 2% on some things + 1% on everything else is better than I am getting with Amex now. Plus, $50k in free processing is like $1,450 in free money. Honestly, I wouldn't believe that deal, except that I have a multi-year history with stripe as our CC processor and it has been nothing but positive and as-promised. So, I submitted an application. It sounds like a great deal to me.
As long as they don't renege later. Every single cash back card I have jumped on board with started with 2% ... changed the terms a year in to 1% ... then went down to 0.5% even later. And increased fees later as well. Maybe just bad luck on my part. For example: https://www.reddit.com/r/PersonalFinanceCanada/comments/6164...
This is the second time Stripe has been at the top of HN in the last week. Any theories on why? Is this really that novel of a business?
Because stripe is essentially in the business of fixing broken, old stuff in the payment business. It made a really good core product that developers love, then branched out to other payment-related products and applied that same excellence to those products, too. It is user-friendly, has helpful support, and can be easily integrated. In short, it solves real problems without making itself one more head-ache for peop…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Who is the guarantor? The employee? That seems like a very shady thing to do given every expense put on that card is for work.
Yes, the employee. Why do you think it's shady? In my years of working in and around people with the same setup I've never heard of any complaints, and I know most of the other large consulting companies do it the same way. AFAIK the thought behind it is that not every expense on the card is for work - as a consultant, I travel every week and I put all kinds of expenses on the card (not all of which are strictly "for…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is this card tied to an individual or the company? We use Amex and it's tied to individuals so when that person leaves we have to do the dance of migrating the payment to another person. Can we avoid that w/ stripe?
You can have named users or you can have (conceptually) a role account, like saas_subscriptions@example.com. We recommend businesses set up the latter for recurring purchases on e.g. infrastructure that aren't tied to a particular person, for the same reasons that you don't want your logins for all of your SaaS or infrastructure to be under individuals' email addresses.
Well, 2% on some things + 1% on everything else is better than I am getting with Amex now. Plus, $50k in free processing is like $1,450 in free money. Honestly, I wouldn't believe that deal, except that I have a multi-year history with stripe as our CC processor and it has been nothing but positive and as-promised. So, I submitted an application. It sounds like a great deal to me.
I push all our spending through a 2% cash back capitalone business visa. Can't find a better cashback rate, though you could run multiple cards through different vendors with their own credit cards, but you get diminishing returns. If you are a big amazon spender (products, not AWS), it makes sense to do an amazon visa, and then the capital one for everything else. It's really easy to believe the deal when you look a…
The Amazon Business card from Amex is great for Amazon spending, products and AWS included.
I wonder why companies prefer to use a corporate credit card over debit cards (which are very easy to get)? Do they just like having the line of credit? Is it really worth the extra complication/hassle/thing to worry about just to push off payments by ~15 days (Stripe seems to require that the balance be paid off each month)? I also wonder how that is enforced (by reducing credit limits as a company's bank balance st…
For debit, you would need a bank account for each employee/team and keep them funded. Credit cards let you make employee cards with set limits.
You also get stuff like chargeback protection and whatever else comes with the card. Amex tends to have various insurances for example.
Note that I don't work in a corp, am just thinking through what debit would require.
This is one of amex's corp cards: https://www.americanexpress.com/us/credit-cards/business/cor...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, the employee. Why do you think it's shady? In my years of working in and around people with the same setup I've never heard of any complaints, and I know most of the other large consulting companies do it the same way. AFAIK the thought behind it is that not every expense on the card is for work - as a consultant, I travel every week and I put all kinds of expenses on the card (not all of which are strictly "for…
The point is you're trusting the company to not screw you over and refuse to reimburse you or pay the bill, for whatever reason. Everyone has some horror story of waiting months to get reimbursed for something from an employer. It's less annoying if it's very occasional or the amount is small, but when you're racking up thousands a week there's a non-zero risk.
Here the credit card statement is not enough for accounting, you need to have detailed receipt for each charge. Hunting these every month for various SaaS services and other purchases takes time. And it’s not easy to outsource since in many cases the billing stuff is only visible to service admin.
It’s impressive to see the velocity of new products that Stripe is putting out. I’d be really interested to see a blog post or similar on how they decide which initiatives to invest in, how they structure those teams and set milestones, etc
[Stripe cofounder] Thanks! We're always paranoid that we're too slow, for whatever it's worth. We're still iterating on the supporting models and frameworks. We think a lot about pace layering -- how do we have teams that think on multi-year horizons (infrastructure, security, etc.) alongside teams that are rapidly iterating at much earlier stages of development. I think a lot goes wrong when organizations insist on…
Do you have a link? Thanks.