Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Building a Developer Cult

subvert.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 132 posts

Re: Building a Developer Cult

#81

Post by dmitriid »

gregdoesit wrote: post #36

If we are taking about Stripe, we should mention the silent competitor barely anyone talks or knows about outside the payments industry: Adyen. Stripe’s current, (private) valuation is $36B. Developers love them. Adyen’s current, public valuation is $43B (they IPO’d amongst little press coverage). Most developers don’t know about them. So what is the difference? Market strategy. Adyen only goes after large businesses…

> Adyen only goes after large businesses and has something many others, including Stripe cannot compete with efficiently: (far) lower pricing, higher market coverage.

The reason is: larger businesses will require more payment options than Stripe offers.

India? Adyen got you covered: [1] Philippines? Yup, everything [2], including offline payments in stores [3]. Mobile payments in Africa? No worries [4] And so on and so forth. On their payment site they don't even list all payment methods, there are so many. You search for a country or a payment method, and they show what's available.

Stripe has a very long way to go to realistically compete with Adyen.

[1] https://www.adyen.com/payment-methods#pmx=india

[2] https://www.adyen.com/payment-methods#pmx=the-philippines

[3] https://www.adyen.com/payment-methods#pmx=convenience-stores...

[4] https://www.adyen.com/payment-methods#pmx=mobile-network-ope...

Re: Building a Developer Cult

#82

Post by porker »

Silhouette wrote: post #76
porker wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is my experience too. > who might be better served by one or more of the alternatives and should at least be considering the full range of options available to them. Which alternatives should I consider, if I need PSD2? I've written about my experience with Braintree above; there's SagePay but every client has been pleased to move away from them.

PSD2 implies Europe, so my first question is whether to accept cards as the primary means of payment at all. The various direct payment schemes are typically cheaper, more reliable and, in some countries, much more widely used. If you are handling recurring billing via a Direct Debit scheme then you are probably also outside the scope of the SCA rules that are going to interrupt payment flows using cards whenever the…

UK based here, so for most projects I/clients want cards as the primary payment method due to the audience as they are one-off payments.

I've used GoCardless on one project; as the developer I didn't enjoy the experience at all. Setting up testing for all states was painful (as was getting items to the right state to use their scenario simulator). I see Stripe have rolled out UK Direct Debit support now; hopefully their documentation and testing story are better than GoCardless.

Re: Building a Developer Cult

#83

Post by SifJar »

unityByFreedom wrote: post #59
shaan7 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But "focusing on users" != "focus on delighting their users". The former is the process of discovering what delights their users, the latter is the actual "delighting" process. Also, +1 to the parent comment. I worked at a startup where we made exactly that mistake - we delayed releases until it met a high standard of UX - took us more than couple of years. By this time, competitors that built a _much_ crappier produ…

> But "focusing on users" != "focus on delighting their users". The former is the process of discovering what delights their users, the latter is the actual "delighting" process. If these two things are not equal then you're doing it wrong.

I think the point is you can easily get so focused on making the experience "delightful" that you work on things that would delight you, but that your users actually don't care about so much. And you need to take a step back, build something functional but not necessarily completely "delightful" & then figure out what your initial users actually do care about and iterate from there

Re: Building a Developer Cult

#85

Post by HatchedLake721 »

chrismorgan wrote: post #68

Ah, the new Stripe design. https://dribbble.com/shots/13676278-Home covers it, and the comments on it are unanimously positive (and also shallow). Yet I open https://stripe.com and observe a page mostly incapable of hitting 60fps in its animations, which doesn’t scroll smoothly because of this, and which is intensely CPU-demanding (it immediately makes my laptop’s fans spin up, and I imagine it’d be draining the batt…

You really think anyone looking for a payment processing for their business cares about CPU and frames per second on a marketing website?

Re: Building a Developer Cult

#86

Post by DrBazza »

koreth1 wrote: post #39
stu2b50 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're seeing what the benefit is, though: it feels like you're just using an API to some company's DB. Payment processing is one area is that just a complete nonstarter to homebrew on your own. It's fucking awful. There's no choice. Bank's still require you to transfer them files via ftp to make transactions. And god forbid the legal, and technical mess when you want to accept foreign currency, or even multi…

Work in fintech, can confirm. Moving money around the global banking system is a pus-drenched no man's land of technological anguish and despair. Every time you think you've seen the worst of it, you find out you were wrong.

Agreed. I had to implement a transaction audit using SOAP in 2019.

Re: Building a Developer Cult

#87

Post by dkarp »

dmitriid wrote: post #81
gregdoesit wrote: post #36

If we are taking about Stripe, we should mention the silent competitor barely anyone talks or knows about outside the payments industry: Adyen. Stripe’s current, (private) valuation is $36B. Developers love them. Adyen’s current, public valuation is $43B (they IPO’d amongst little press coverage). Most developers don’t know about them. So what is the difference? Market strategy. Adyen only goes after large businesses…

> Adyen only goes after large businesses and has something many others, including Stripe cannot compete with efficiently: (far) lower pricing, higher market coverage. The reason is: larger businesses will require more payment options than Stripe offers. India? Adyen got you covered: [1] Philippines? Yup, everything [2], including offline payments in stores [3]. Mobile payments in Africa? No worries [4] And so on and…

Many many countries have payment methods that only exist in that country, but make up a large percentage of online payments within that country. I’ve personally seen Adyen chosen over Stripe at a few companies that were aggressively expanding internationally for exactly that reason.

Adyen seems to implement every payment method you can think of. And if you don’t want to implement them, their white label payment page is able to dynamically show payment methods based on user location and merchant preferences.

Re: Building a Developer Cult

#88

Post by polote »

gregdoesit wrote: post #36

If we are taking about Stripe, we should mention the silent competitor barely anyone talks or knows about outside the payments industry: Adyen. Stripe’s current, (private) valuation is $36B. Developers love them. Adyen’s current, public valuation is $43B (they IPO’d amongst little press coverage). Most developers don’t know about them. So what is the difference? Market strategy. Adyen only goes after large businesses…

> It will be fascinating to see what happens as these two companies expand to compete with each other

Very unlikely, as both markets (smb payments and enterprise payments) is unlimited, there is a few chance they will try to compete with each other. On the other hand almost no company is able to be a leader in both the smb and enterprise space, because as you mentioned it, the cultures need to be different, the customer support need to be different, the product need to be different,... More info here : https://blog.luap.info/why-most-saas-companies-cant-be-succe...

Re: Building a Developer Cult

#89

Post by BillinghamJ »

andy_ppp wrote: post #79
pg_bot wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adyen's pricing seems to be higher and way more confusing than Stripe's.[0][1] AMEX and Discover's transaction costs are a percent higher on Adyen, and I can't actually tell what Mastercard or Visa will charge since it is obfuscated. The cherry on top is the FAQ at the bottom that describes what interchange++ is but doesn't actually tell you a range of fees that it can be. I guess it's cool to see in detail all the m…

It basically is always cheaper for almost everything than Stripe (except AMEX). Interchange++ is always less than Stripe's equivalent charge (2.9% or lower for European cards) and 12¢ is less than 30¢. The page I agree is confusing.

Bear in mind, at any meaningful volume, Stripe does IC++ too and it isn't expensive

edit: Looking at their (listed) acquiring and processing fees, Stripe appears to be cheaper

That said, I don't know how Adyen's support is, but sadly Stripe's is honestly absolutely crap. Every single support interaction I've had with them has been incredibly slow and incredibly painful.

Re: Building a Developer Cult

#90

Post by Silhouette »

porker wrote: post #82
Silhouette wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PSD2 implies Europe, so my first question is whether to accept cards as the primary means of payment at all. The various direct payment schemes are typically cheaper, more reliable and, in some countries, much more widely used. If you are handling recurring billing via a Direct Debit scheme then you are probably also outside the scope of the SCA rules that are going to interrupt payment flows using cards whenever the…

UK based here, so for most projects I/clients want cards as the primary payment method due to the audience as they are one-off payments. I've used GoCardless on one project; as the developer I didn't enjoy the experience at all. Setting up testing for all states was painful (as was getting items to the right state to use their scenario simulator). I see Stripe have rolled out UK Direct Debit support now; hopefully th…

I certainly agree that testing these integrations is unnecessarily painful, but given that both Stripe and GoCardless offer much the same facilities -- a single sandbox environment, but without comprehensive simulation of all important scenarios and with nothing useful for either automated integration testing or offline simulation at the developer's desk -- I'm not sure I'd say either is much better than the other. The only major difference I can think of is that since they simulate roughly realistic timing as well, GoCardless can also take several days to complete a test run for a new integration or bug fix, which is obviously absurd.
Post reply on HN