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Building a Developer Cult

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Re: Building a Developer Cult

#91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't understand where Stripe is showing as being cheaper?

Adyen for example for Mastercard: €0,10 + Interchange++ (average total 0.90% - 1.10%)

Stripe advertised in Europe for Mastercard: €0,25 + 1.4% of transaction.

Re: Building a Developer Cult

#92
post #25
post #22

I recently built a Stripe integration, and can't say I'm especially impressed. Unless I completely missed some aspects, it mostly just seems like an interface to their database. While this is great for some advanced workflows, the vast majority of use cases are all very similar: "create subscription and customer", "change subscription", etc. Common workflows require quite some coding, and there's no support for trans…

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…

Cryptocurrency gets a bad rap here (most of it rightfully so), but one thing is for sure, once you use it you realize how broken digital payment infrastructure is. With crypto, I can trivially send any amount of money very cheaply across any sort of borders. Also, accepting crypto as a merchant is extremely easy even to roll your own custom solution.

Re: Building a Developer Cult

#93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't understand where Stripe is showing as being cheaper? Adyen for example for Mastercard: €0,10 + Interchange++ (average total 0.90% - 1.10%) Stripe advertised in Europe for Mastercard: €0,25 + 1.4% of transaction.

It's not publicly listed, but from experience, their IC++ costs are decent

Re: Building a Developer Cult

#94

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…

One of the startup I worked for in London was using Adyen. That is to say they are not limited to enterprise customers.

We were processing a few millions a year at that time, which is quite small by enterprise standards. No idea how much volume it was years before when the company started using Adyen, I imagine not a lot.

Re: Building a Developer Cult

#95
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll warn against getting way too focused on this as an early company. Getting something up and running is often waaaaaay more valuable then achieving Stripe level UX from the outset, and then as time progresses you must make a conscious effort to improve. Remember, Stripe has been an app for about a decade. That's a decade's worth of learning what users care about and what details matter. And clearly that's a decade…

> A trap I see /a lot/ is that people focus on delighting their users before they even know what delights their users or what their users care about. That's odd. The point of focusing on users is to discover what users want. If you're not doing then you're not really focused on users.

I think of it like listen to your users, but don’t do everything they ask. Use your judgement to make sure it aligns with your goals, and hopefully you have a goal beyond ‘make monies’.

Re: Building a Developer Cult

#96

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…

Seems like Discover and AE are more expensive than Stripe at least for North America:

https://www.adyen.com/pricing?navItem=northamerica

Re: Building a Developer Cult

#97
post #86
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We actively maintain multiple SOAP servers so an OEM can connect as a client, and send us data.

The OEM required us to stand-up the servers so they could send us the data.

We also still use FTP for some vendors (we host).

Re: Building a Developer Cult

#98
In my previous job, I implemented the backend integration with Stripe and also the frontend for iOS (Native Swift App). It was a piece of cake to get the whole implementation done across the stack. Six months later, our company decided to switch to Adyen so we could target more local payment methods in different countries. Back then, Stripe wasn't so flexible on that. With Adyen, we could for example offer "carte bancaire" in France and "iDEAL" in the Netherlands with zero changes on our accounting and backend infrastructure. I have to be honest, from the developer perspective, Stripe is light years ahead of Adyen regarding docs and simple to integrate (simple != easy). But once we deployed Adyen, our sales skyrocketed after we enabled local payment methods for specific countries across Europe.

If you are outside of the US, you should really consider Adyen instead of Stripe from the business standpoint. I am still a super fan of Stripe btw.

Re: Building a Developer Cult

#99

In my previous job, I implemented the backend integration with Stripe and also the frontend for iOS (Native Swift App). It was a piece of cake to get the whole implementation done across the stack. Six months later, our company decided to switch to Adyen so we could target more local payment methods in different countries. Back then, Stripe wasn't so flexible on that. With Adyen, we could for example offer "carte ban…

Wow honestly haven't heard of Adyen until reading several of the comments in this post. Thanks for sharing your experience and for the tip!

Re: Building a Developer Cult

#100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A trap I see /a lot/ is that people focus on delighting their users before they even know what delights their users or what their users care about. That's odd. The point of focusing on users is to discover what users want. If you're not doing then you're not really focused on users.

I think of it like listen to your users, but don’t do everything they ask. Use your judgement to make sure it aligns with your goals, and hopefully you have a goal beyond ‘make monies’.

Additionally, think about why they're asking for a certain thing, and whether their request is really the best way to solve the underlying problem they want solved
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