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Stripe migrates Stripe Subscriptions users to more expensive Stripe Billing

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Re: Stripe migrates Stripe Subscriptions users to more expensive Stripe Billing

#241

Post by gizmo »

pc wrote: post #155
merlinbeard wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We process a significant amount of charges through Stripe and this is hitting us hard. We’re basically being told that you’d like to keep some of our money for yourself. We were never told that we should expect such a fee increase. This smells a lot like bait and switch.

I'm sorry that it feels that way. Stripe Billing's pricing has been public since 2018. (We didn't charge any of our existing users from the outset precisely because we wanted to avoid any sense that there's a bait-and-switch. We wanted to wait until we really were confident that we had a good product that businesses are willing to pay for.)

We were told we were grandfathered in, actually. We specifically asked before we started our migration process to Stripe Billing.

Re: Stripe migrates Stripe Subscriptions users to more expensive Stripe Billing

#242

Post by _kyran »

dawnerd wrote: post #108
TAForObvReasons wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They've been chipping away at the grandfathered accounts this year. What bothered me the most was earlier this year when they stopped refunding fees when issuing refunds. They rolled out a feature during the early days of the pandemic, and in the same week they started charging older accounts for refunds https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22371330

Is there anyone left that refunds fees? Paypal stopped last year and AFAIK all of the other processors also keep the fee.

Braintree only takes the $0.30 and refunds the percentage.

Re: Stripe migrates Stripe Subscriptions users to more expensive Stripe Billing

#243

Post by jerrod »

wakatime wrote: post #233
polote wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unfortunately, we're kind of hostage to it. The day you decided to go with Stripe you started being hostage of them, but this is not a bad thing, this is business, you choose a partner, they are allowed to change the terms if the contract permit it. People on HN always think they deserve to be treated better than others

That's why we integrated with 4 payment providers. We use a common Quote object that knows how to "apply" itself to subscriptions on all 3 (GitHub is inverse) providers. 1. Stripe 2. Braintree 3. Coinbase Commerce 4. GitHub Marketplace https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22177088

This is smart, Alan. I like it.

Re: Stripe migrates Stripe Subscriptions users to more expensive Stripe Billing

#244

Post by Silhouette »

porker wrote: post #206
mytailorisrich wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Managing recurring billing is a significant engineering problem It's not. Sure it's a problem and it requires thought and engineering skills. But overall it is not one of the complicated problems and quite standard work for an engineer. Sometimes I feel that people have become so used to have a third party API for everything so that they are scared of doing actual engineering work... ;) That said, of course weighin…

> It's not. Sure it's a problem and it requires thought and engineering skills. But overall it is not one of the complicated problems and quite standard work for an engineer. If you reduce it to "Charge them again after X period" then sure. If you want to comply with worldwide payment laws and tax requirements, then I'd disagree it's "not one of the complicated problems". Edit: And dunning. And pro-rata'd subscriptio…

If you want to comply with worldwide payment laws and tax requirements, then I'd disagree it's "not one of the complicated problems".

It's also not something that a service like Stripe will handle for you to a useful degree.

Edit: And dunning.

Which, AFAIK, you still can't actually test properly with Stripe's system before making it live. I'm not even sure it's fully documented yet, and if it is, that's a relatively recent development.

And pro-rata'd subscription changes. And pro-rata'd refunds.

You can literally write the code to do things like this in a few minutes, including all conceivable edge cases. Many of us have. It's basic arithmetic combined with some almost-but-not-quite-trivial logic around dates.

We pay Paddle 5% of every subscription transaction for a reason.

But Paddle's model is a merchant-of-record, which also takes care of things like the tax reporting and remittance headaches that a service with Stripe's model doesn't. It's not a fair comparison.

Re: Stripe migrates Stripe Subscriptions users to more expensive Stripe Billing

#245

Post by jb775 »

edwinwee wrote: post #29

Edwin 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 comp…

At the end of the day, you're using electricity to send around a bunch of 1's and 0's. The amount of electricity used doesn't change much whether it represents $10 or $100,000...so why do you need a percentage of the total?

I understand existing banking structures already work on the percentage model (so there's probably downstream percentage-based charges Stripe must pay), but why can't this entire banking structure be disrupted to transfer that value back to society?

Re: Stripe migrates Stripe Subscriptions users to more expensive Stripe Billing

#246

Post by __float »

Alupis wrote: post #128
larrik wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Stripe Checkout with Fraud detection - which requires you to use their hosted checkout page Does it? In my experience you can just use their Hosted Fields which are actually really great.

That's not how they pitched it to us - and I asked for clarification multiple times because of how absurd the proposal was for a well established eCommerce site. Sending customers off-domain for a payment is not something we were willing to do for a normal credit card checkout flow. Even "hosted fields" is absurd (and by that I assume you mean an iFrame you embed), and would require redesigning significant portions o…

You don't have to use "hosted fields", but it does mean you have significantly increased requirements regarding PCI compliance (SAQ D vs the much simpler SAQ A, for example).

Re: Stripe migrates Stripe Subscriptions users to more expensive Stripe Billing

#247

Post by __float »

hugoromano wrote: post #201
donor20 wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like you could clean up in this space at $00.001 per transaction!

¢5/transactions for billing services we could do it, might need some small seed funding to set up a small dev team. Do you think we could get interest customers?

You could get customers, but you'll quickly learn they ask for very complex features, and you'll struggle to pay your dev team with 5 cents per transaction.

Re: Stripe migrates Stripe Subscriptions users to more expensive Stripe Billing

#248

Post by xtracto »

sigwinch28 wrote: post #46
alooPotato wrote: post #12

We (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…

An extra 0.5% is going to cost you "tens of thousands of dollars"? You're literally moving millions of dollars a year through your billing platform. That's not a little bit of money. That's a lot. Own it. You're not a hostage. You're deeply integrated through nobody's fault but your own.

> You're not a hostage. You're deeply integrated through nobody's fault but your own.

Exactly this. We started being Stripe customers after they bought some third party several years ago. While Stripe maintained the deal it was good for our business but recently they decided to end the deal we had (I don't blame them, it was a very sweet deal for us). Fortunately my startup always have had more than one provider and now we can calculate a "least cost routing" process, which will definitely move a lot of our volume outside of Stripe.

But it is just that, business. You should not trust any one provider with your business, not even AWS (i.e. not even at that level).

Re: Stripe migrates Stripe Subscriptions users to more expensive Stripe Billing

#249

Post by fbelzile »

iffycan wrote: post #223
pc wrote: post #93

(Stripe cofounder.) Hi folks -- as Edwin points out elsewhere in the thread, the article title isn't accurate. (I'll update or delete my comment if it's fixed.) [Update: it was changed. It used to read "Stripe is now charging 0.5% more for recurring charges."] You can happily make recurring charges yourself and no additional fees are incurred. Lots of Stripe customers do this and we don't charge anything extra for it…

When I first signed up with Stripe years ago, it was a breath of fresh air. Stripe did one thing exceedingly well, at an understandable price and took minutes to integrate with. I could sell Stripe to my developer friends (and did, a lot!) in a single sentence: "You can add credit card charging to your site in about 15 minutes for 2.9% + 30¢ per transaction." I can't do that anymore. Stripe is no longer a single-sent…

I agree. I feel like good companies like Stripe want to keep growing. With this, comes the need to increase revenue to cover the extra costs. I don't know if it's investor pressure, or the fear of being stagnant, but some companies are arguably better off the way they are. There's no need to grow at all costs.

If you want more users, double down on marketing to existing users instead of pissing them off. Although it's really hard to measure, happy users do the marketing for you and bring in more customers.

First they started charging for international cards (with the "grandfathering" for years excuse), now this. I've already migrated off of Stripe and now actively recommend people think twice about going with them. Instead, I'm recommending Braintree... aka Paypal. It seems we've come full circle already.

Re: Stripe migrates Stripe Subscriptions users to more expensive Stripe Billing

#250

Post by hugoromano »

__float wrote: post #247
hugoromano wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

¢5/transactions for billing services we could do it, might need some small seed funding to set up a small dev team. Do you think we could get interest customers?

You could get customers, but you'll quickly learn they ask for very complex features, and you'll struggle to pay your dev team with 5 cents per transaction.

Complex customers can use 0.5% extra service from Stripe, they could even build their own solution. Billing, recurring, invoicing can be done here. What could be interesting is setting up a billing service that the client brings its own Payment Service (checkout.com, stripe.com, adyen.com).
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