Stripe raises $600M at nearly $36B valuation • Hacker News Board

Re: Stripe raises $600M at nearly $36B valuation

#361

Post by classics2 » Fri, Apr 17, 2020, 2:52 AM UTC

3pt14159 wrote: post #76

fbelzile wrote: post #55

I'm very happy with Stripe and for their success, but I plan on switching all my payments to go through PayPal again. I did some math and PayPal offers a better deal for Canadian businesses after Stripe bumps me off of their grandfathered conversion fees in a couple months. I love the slick interface, but it's simply not worth the thousands per year I'll be saving with the switch. For me the main selling point for an…

I've worked for FreshBooks and three other invoicing or payment related companies, and I have lots of friends that work at Shopify or run online stores. Billing through PayPal is playing with fire. They can and do freeze accounts and it can take months to get the issue resolved. It will probably be fine, of course, but I've seen it happen and personally, if I were in a high margin business, I'd stick to Stripe. Espec…

PayPal is fine until it isn’t. They ban hammer people “for life” and tell them it cannot be appealed for cryptic and often inscrutable reasons they won’t elaborate on or even bother to speak to you about.

Re: Stripe raises $600M at nearly $36B valuation

#362

Post by windlep » Fri, Apr 17, 2020, 3:15 AM UTC

pc wrote: post #75

Stripe cofounder here. This isn't really new -- it's an extension of our last round ( https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/19/fintech-start-up-stripe-notc... ). That said, we've seen a big spike in signups over the past few weeks. If any HN readers have integrated recently and have feedback, we're always eager to hear it. Feel free to email me at patrick@stripe.com and I'll route to the right team(s). As always, thank you to…

My biggest two issues:

1) Stripe docs are inaccurate. They frequently don't work exactly as they describe for given subscription workflows. Sometimes an API call is entirely wrong, sometimes it doesn't return the data the docs indicate, and sometimes the arguments it describes just doesn't exist. (Yes, I've ensured I'm using the latest API version in use).

2) The docs have no changelog. There's an API changelog that indicates when API's change, there's nothing indicating when entire chunks of the documentation change on the website, along with the recommended way to integrate. The most obvious example of this is that the subscription workflow docs got a huge makeover in the past year (sometime), with some really great flowchart diagrams. But back to point #1, some of the API calls listed here are not actually valid. If I've just missed the changelog for the website docs, please point me in the right direction. :)

For reference, I'm using Node at the moment, but I've also integrated with Python, and there were breaker bugs in those docs as well. I eventually end up reading the HTTP API docs, then going through the SDK's to see where they went wrong, or the docs went wrong.

Re: Stripe raises $600M at nearly $36B valuation

#363

Post by robhunter » Fri, Apr 17, 2020, 3:24 AM UTC

pc wrote: post #191

robhunter wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stopping new Stripe Capital offers during the COVID-19 pandemic is completely understandable, but feels like it wasn't really well communicated to long-term clients. Will you continue to originate new Strike Capital offers? When?

Yes, we will! (And, while we are trying to make sure we understand the impact of Covid-19 across our lending portfolio, we haven't stopped extending new loans.)

OK - for months, we had an available offer of $25k - disappeared in mid March despite minimal/normal churn at the time. Felt to us like the plug got pulled.

Re: Stripe raises $600M at nearly $36B valuation

#364

Post by geofft » Fri, Apr 17, 2020, 3:35 AM UTC

plantain wrote: post #261

Cu3PO42 wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

German checking in. One of the reasons why it’s hard to get us to use a CC is that many of us don’t have credit cards. And why would we? (Except for online payments and other fringe cases.) However, Stripe offers SEPA direct debit, which is usable with any European bank account and may work better for you. EDIT: This seems to have sparked some confusion. I'm not saying Germans don't do card payments, I was only speak…

>However, Stripe offers SEPA direct debit, which is usable with any European bank account and may work better for you. 1) SEPA has an 8-week no-questions no-appeal refund model, which is fundamentally incompatible with a SaaS business 2) Stripe doesn't support SEPA on Checkout 3) Stripe doesn't support SEPA on non-EU/US accounts

Why does that affect SaaS businesses specifically? I would think that's at least as much a problem (if not worse!) for businesses that do non-recurring sales and also for businesses that sell physical goods or non-scalable services. It sounds like if I pay for a steak or a haircut with SEPA, I can get a full refund eight weeks later and make it the restaurant or barber's problem to chase after me for the money, right?

Re: Stripe raises $600M at nearly $36B valuation

#365

Post by switch11 » Fri, Apr 17, 2020, 3:45 AM UTC

pc wrote: post #75

Stripe cofounder here. This isn't really new -- it's an extension of our last round ( https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/19/fintech-start-up-stripe-notc... ). That said, we've seen a big spike in signups over the past few weeks. If any HN readers have integrated recently and have feedback, we're always eager to hear it. Feel free to email me at patrick@stripe.com and I'll route to the right team(s). As always, thank you to…

Patrick, good to see you responding

I'd like to add a few points, especially those considering Stripe vs Paypal

This: Billing through PayPal is playing with fire. They can and do freeze accounts and it can take months to get the issue resolved.

We are very thankful to Stripe because Paypal left us high and dry

We found out they were calling up our customers and pretty much forcing them to do disputes

They also locked our funds FOR SIX MONTHS

If we did not have backup funds and if we did not have Stripe we literally would not be able to continue as a company

Paypal basically have ZERO consideration of the fact that you are running a business and that your payment provider should not just randomly end the business arrangement

Our dispute rate for the last $1.5 million processed through Stripe is roughly 0.3% whereas with Paypal it was considerably higher. I even have saved emails from our customers of Paypal asking them to open disputes even when they said they were happy and did not want to

Even eBay stopped using Paypal, and switched to Adeyn

consider how extreme things have to be if the company from which you were spun off as a separate company (eBay spun off Paypal), even they stop working with you

Stripe is much, much better than Paypal

Most importantly, it is much more dependable, much more small business and startup friendly, and developer first mentality

Paypal always has the attitude of - We're big and we don't give two hoots about you

Whereas Stripe they will always talk to you as a fellow human being

*

Stripe: The CEO is coming here to Hacker News and personally responding As are various members of the Stripe Team

Paypal: Will freeze your account for no reason at all. Will not even respond. The lady on the phone will shout at you even though you are politely asking why account is frozen. Plus as a bonus they will freeze funds for SIX Months

They froze funds equal to TWENTY TIMES the total disputes and refunds combined total from the Past 5 years. For SIX MONTHS

Re: Stripe raises $600M at nearly $36B valuation

#366

Post by teruakohatu » Fri, Apr 17, 2020, 4:02 AM UTC

chrischen wrote: post #197

csdreamer7 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you mind sharing your percentage of fraud with the two services? (I assume you are using Braintree.) Honestly, you are the first person to make a good case on using PayPal over Stripe. Especially with the arbitrary horror stories I hear about PayPal all the time. > It's a shame Stripe doesn't offer the Radar service (helps detect and prevent fraud) with custom rules as part of their normal service. You can only…

I agree with the poster that in our own numbers we see almost 0% chargebacks on Paypal vs almost regular occurrences on Stripe (via credit card). Even in the rare instances where a chargeback or dispute happens PayPal has never failed to side with us or otherwise cover it under seller protection. And this is all done at the same fee levels as Stripe.

That is interesting because I have never had a problem getting a refund from PayPal, with one exception notable exception. I assumed they always sided with the buyers.

In the one exception the seller had proof of delivery, yet it was not possible to have been delivered that day because of a road closure. PayPal sided with the seller. A year later out of the blue, with no prior communication, the seller sends me a full refund and said the package was returned by the delivery company. No idea where it has been sitting for about a year before being returned.

Re: Stripe raises $600M at nearly $36B valuation

#367

Post by rswail » Fri, Apr 17, 2020, 4:04 AM UTC

thesimon wrote: post #302

adambyrtek wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to live in Poland (so just across the border from Germany) and now I'm a UK resident, and your question is really baffling, since in both of these countries people use (contactless) card payments for pretty much everything. Germany is definitely an outlier and your comment doesn't really explain why. Is this a cultural thing, regulatory issue, or maybe banks colluding to protect their interests?

>or maybe banks colluding to protect their interests? Mostly banks and retailers colluding together to use a cheap domestic-only POS-only scheme (think Przelewy24, but offline or LINK but at POS).

Hardly "collusion" that most nations have some form of debit payment system that is independent of the Visa/MC networks.

Re: Stripe raises $600M at nearly $36B valuation

#368

Post by wikibob » Fri, Apr 17, 2020, 4:11 AM UTC

patio11 wrote: post #355

wikibob wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many headcount do you have open for SRE?

Stripe doesn’t make the distinction between software engineers and SREs that some firms do. We’re all responsible for shipping things that work for our customers, regardless of whether we’re working on a product team or an infrastructure team. You can see our open roles at https://stripe.com/jobs/search?t=engineering (some corresponding to multiple people). They’re very real. We hire hundreds of engineers every year.

Thanks for the info about the team structure Patrick! Hope you're staying safe out there

Re: Stripe raises $600M at nearly $36B valuation

#369

Post by rswail » Fri, Apr 17, 2020, 4:14 AM UTC

pc wrote: post #134

rconti wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate like I'm 5? Just very high level for those of us who only know "they charge a flat fee and a percent which makes microtransactions hard". What are the strategies/thoughts in the industry? Holding and batching payments on a per-user basis? Trying to get agreements so you can batch payments on a per-processor or per-network agreement? Hourly? Daily? Weekly?

> Just very high level for those of us who only know "they charge a flat fee and a percent which makes microtransactions hard". That's pretty much the story :-). And so the questions are then whether we subsidize the transactions, batch them (as you say, though that makes refunds and statement descriptors tricky), get card networks to change their policies, or somehow shift how the payments are made (e.g. encouraging…

In the public transport space, batching is absolutely required, usually there's a mechanism of "preauth on first tap" and rapid distribution of deny lists.

Payment requests are accumulated and batched, combined with "capping" of travel costs (eg max/day, weekly discounts etc).

Re: Stripe raises $600M at nearly $36B valuation

#370

Post by BurningFrog » Fri, Apr 17, 2020, 4:32 AM UTC

jackson1442 wrote: post #226

pc wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just very high level for those of us who only know "they charge a flat fee and a percent which makes microtransactions hard". That's pretty much the story :-). And so the questions are then whether we subsidize the transactions, batch them (as you say, though that makes refunds and statement descriptors tricky), get card networks to change their policies, or somehow shift how the payments are made (e.g. encouraging…

I'm honestly a bit surprised credit card companies haven't been more open to the option of lowering the cost of microtransactions, since that seems to be what the Internet's moving towards as a whole.

Makes you wonder how much those companies really compete.