Isn't this a natural progression as the business grows? They specialized and now, they're expanding to fill a broader market? Similar to AMZ being a platform, but now they also sell and compete with sellers directly with AmazonBasic
Stripe isn’t a platform, it’s a mouse
11–20 of 84 posts
Re: Stripe isn’t a platform, it’s a mouse
#12The author got their point across - I understand the author is frustrated with Stripes business practices. However, the author fails to get me to agree with their view, in part because of the poor taste comparison of Stripe to record industry executives. The author tries to keep the record exec comparison to the record industry's fiscal stranglehold over artists, but as a reader all I think about are the stories that have come out from the girls that were physically taken advantage of by those execs. It feels like a dog whistle, and in my opinion discredits the rest of the argument.
Re: Stripe isn’t a platform, it’s a mouse
#13I collect payments on my website with PayPal and Stripe, and am satisfied with neither. So what alternatives do I have?
From my perspective, the advantage of PayPal is that users worldwide can pay in weird currencies and it just works. Stripe is much better designed but I'm not keen on their plans for world domination. I just want a payment system that works and does not take exorbitant fees for routine transactions.
Re: Stripe isn’t a platform, it’s a mouse
#14I feel like its inevitable to grow most businesses in which they are structured from outside investment. Outliers here may be Microsoft And Apple, but they swallowed nascent markets that were either just underway or they had major capital to spend their way aggressively toward the top of the heap (Apple, with the Macintosh and later the iPhone, Microsoft with Office / Windows and now Azure) Most other platforms strug…
I wonder are they awaiting a big wave to take them to the next level of profitability and releasing "nibble" features until it happens.
A comparative YouTube/Cloud Computing/Whatsapp moment. It might be crypto who knows.
Will be interesting to see if there is enough vision there to spot/pursue the opportunity.
Re: Stripe isn’t a platform, it’s a mouse
#15I'm in need of a platform I can point to for my business and businesses I partner with. So if I can't reliably use Stripe without looking over my shoulder, who should I turn to? Square is not the solution I'm looking for, as they seem to cater to POS.
Re: Stripe isn’t a platform, it’s a mouse
#16I believe this holds true for all platforms (profit motive will beat any altruism in the long run). All platforms are "mice" (or will become mice, given sufficient time and pressure).
Building on top of any platform should trigger your "I'm making a tradeoff" spider sense. It's pretty obvious that using Stripe is net positive for any small company starting up right now. In 5 yrs, ehen that startup is doing $100M/yr in sales, the net gain of using Stripe is less obvious. But would the startup have been able to grow to $100M/yr without sending payment links or invoices via Stripe? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Re: Stripe isn’t a platform, it’s a mouse
#17I collect payments on my website with PayPal and Stripe, and am satisfied with neither. So what alternatives do I have? From my perspective, the advantage of PayPal is that users worldwide can pay in weird currencies and it just works. Stripe is much better designed but I'm not keen on their plans for world domination. I just want a payment system that works and does not take exorbitant fees for routine transactions.
I'm not sure what you're looking for beyond what PayPal offers. You say you "just want a payment system that works and does not take exorbitant fees" but you also say that PayPal "just works," which seems to satisfy your requirements.
So, can you elaborate more on what you want? Do you feel that PayPal is taking exorbitant fees? What would make a "just works" system better than PayPal?
Does Stripe "just work" for you? If not, what doesn't work?
Are you looking for a payment processor with no "plans for world domination?" (Good luck with that! This problem is hard and globe-spanning ambition seems to be universal among the competitors.)
Re: Stripe isn’t a platform, it’s a mouse
#18As developers it's easy to look at these things and think "wait, that's my job". Except... it isn't. If these things can be abstracted away, made easier... that's good. That's what we strive for. You don't have to be the millionth dev to develop invoices or shopping carts. That's wasted effort imo. These things becoming available as a service frees us up to solve more interesting problems. If devs 20 years from now s…
I don't think there is any argument here isn't that everyone should build their own payment stack, or their own shopping card, or invoicing software.
It's that other companies that have built on top of Stripe as a platform are all being eaten away at, and often done in a way that a "stripe platform" user can't compete with (either through private APIs, or across-the-board data access, etc).
Stripe bills itself not just as an end-user service, but also as a "platform". The argument is if you effectively kick your "business partners" off your platform as soon as you want to do the thing they do, then you're not really a "platform".
Re: Stripe isn’t a platform, it’s a mouse
#19I collect payments on my website with PayPal and Stripe, and am satisfied with neither. So what alternatives do I have? From my perspective, the advantage of PayPal is that users worldwide can pay in weird currencies and it just works. Stripe is much better designed but I'm not keen on their plans for world domination. I just want a payment system that works and does not take exorbitant fees for routine transactions.
I'm not sure what you're looking for beyond what PayPal offers. You say you "just want a payment system that works and does not take exorbitant fees" but you also say that PayPal "just works," which seems to satisfy your requirements. So, can you elaborate more on what you want? Do you feel that PayPal is taking exorbitant fees? What would make a "just works" system better than PayPal? Does Stripe "just work" for you…
PayPal's APIs, SDKs and documentation are leagues below Stripe's. It's simply much more of a pain to work with. And if you are using PayPal for a SaaS, it quickly becomes clear that it's not the intended use case (every payment has the option to "print a packing slip", for example).
Re: Stripe isn’t a platform, it’s a mouse
#20"everyone agreed on a solution: let the cat handle it. And so, for what seemed like an eternity, the cat went to work on the mouse, slowly torturing it limb-by-limb. This went on for at least a day, probably longer."
Yikes. What the hell is wrong with these people?