We're very happy ChargeBee customers - I guess this doesn't affect us as we only use Stripe to store the card details - ChargeBee is the actual recurring billing engine.
Not affiliated to CB - just a happy customer!
Stripe migrates Stripe Subscriptions users to more expensive Stripe Billing
21–30 of 331 posts
Re: Stripe migrates Stripe Subscriptions users to more expensive Stripe Billing
#22We (Streak yc s11) signed up for Stripe way back in the day and have just been paying their standard payment processing fees for years. We haven't upgraded our API version or used any of their new billing features or anything like that. Basically we get the same value from Stripe we did from the day we integrated. I thought our pricing was going to be grandfathered but this change will cost us tens of thousands of do…
Earlier this year, they made other changes for long-term customers:
- increased fees for non-US payments (3.9% + 30 cents)
- did not refund fees when you refund customers
If there was a compelling alternative that isn't PayPal we'd jump in a heartbeat
Re: Stripe migrates Stripe Subscriptions users to more expensive Stripe Billing
#23Is there any downside (other than a little more work for the implementer) to just using their main payment processing API, and to implement subscription billing with a cronjob? This is what sr.ht does [1], at least as of a year ago. If doing it manually now means saving a bunch of money, seems like a no-brainer.
Re: Stripe migrates Stripe Subscriptions users to more expensive Stripe Billing
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, and they can because being a payment processor is not easy. If it were, nobody would need middle-men like them.
But of course, it ought to be, and there should be no need for the middle-men, certainly not ones that take 2-4% of the transaction.
Middle men save you the pain of surviving an audit over mishandling PII.
Re: Stripe migrates Stripe Subscriptions users to more expensive Stripe Billing
#25Isn't this backwards? Shouldn't a steady cash flow be rewarded?
Re: Stripe migrates Stripe Subscriptions users to more expensive Stripe Billing
#26I'm mostly joking but.. didn't they hire the guy who wrote the really famous "charge more" post?
Re: Stripe migrates Stripe Subscriptions users to more expensive Stripe Billing
#27We (Streak yc s11) signed up for Stripe way back in the day and have just been paying their standard payment processing fees for years. We haven't upgraded our API version or used any of their new billing features or anything like that. Basically we get the same value from Stripe we did from the day we integrated. I thought our pricing was going to be grandfathered but this change will cost us tens of thousands of do…
Same thing has happened for Radar for example. We set up our whole infrastructure with their beta 3DS and Radar products, and then one day (a few months back), it is $ 0.07 per txn in Radar as well as no returned fees on refunds.
Stuck with nowhere to go.
Not against improving margins, but customers that have walked hand in hand with Stripe for so long and seen them thru their early growing pains should definitely be grandfathered.
Grandfathering would be the cool thing to do.
Re: Stripe migrates Stripe Subscriptions users to more expensive Stripe Billing
#28We (Streak yc s11) signed up for Stripe way back in the day and have just been paying their standard payment processing fees for years. We haven't upgraded our API version or used any of their new billing features or anything like that. Basically we get the same value from Stripe we did from the day we integrated. I thought our pricing was going to be grandfathered but this change will cost us tens of thousands of do…
Email your rep and tell them you want to move to interchange plus pricing.
Make sure you run the numbers first. If you have a lot of international traffic, you may end up paying more.
Re: Stripe migrates Stripe Subscriptions users to more expensive Stripe Billing
#29Edwin from Stripe here. It’s worth distinguishing between charging money on Stripe (for which you incur payments pricing) and using Stripe Billing (which is a separately-paid product).
Stripe Billing has had this pricing for a few years. For some longtime users of Subscriptions, we originally didn’t change their pricing but are doing so now. We think charging a separate fee for our Billing product is fair, given comparable products in the market (say, Recurly or Chargebee) charge something similar. (Generally more!)
We’ve been investing a ton in making Stripe Billing better. For example, from talking to users we learned people needed it be significantly easier to get up and running with subscriptions. So in the last year we built the Customer Portal[0]. (We’ve also listened to you and improved the analytics[1].) Payments is a low-margin business and our customers are (quite reasonably) very price sensitive. So to be able to make Billing a great product, we realized it was going to have to charge a fee commensurate with the product scope.
[0] https://stripe.com/docs/billing/subscriptions/customer-porta...
[1] https://support.stripe.com/questions/billing-analytics-dashb...
Re: Stripe migrates Stripe Subscriptions users to more expensive Stripe Billing
#30Confused because I thought Stripe Billing referred to the Customer Portal functionality and some advanced Stripe Checkout features like customer-facing promotional codes. I thought subscriptions were part of the core Stripe functionality. Can anyone clarify?
It’s what I thought as well. If we knew it’s gonna to cost us an extra .5% of revenue, we would have built our own billing system instead of hacking one around Stripe one.