Why doesn't Stripe use Stripe Billing?

Dogfooding can often be a good thing but not if your target customer is a very different type of business than your own.

For example, Stripe is a _very_ large company but their product is geared mostly towards small and medium size businesses.

It's very possible that in the process of making Stripe Billing work for Stripe, they'd make it work less well for their actual customers.

It's the same reason why Intuit probably doesn't use QuickBooks to do their accounting.

That’s why SRE teams at companies I have been at always keep an IRC server hosted separately from all their other infra.

(I work on Stripe Billing). This is a question we raise fairly regularly internally at Stripe. The real, prosaic answer is because when we started working on Stripe Billing in 2017, Stripe had already built an internal billing system to bill its own customers. Stripe was 7 years old at that point.

At the time, we got lots of feedback from the folks who had built that system. Our goal was to build a flexible billing system for all kinds of companies at different sizes, but we were definitely focused on smaller (doing maybe $100k–$10M of ARR) SaaS companies to start. We've come a long way since then and now power billing for a number of large/public companies. Atlassian, Figma, Notion and Slack are either using or migrating onto Stripe Billing today.

Stripe Billing is a powerful tool with a role to play in any company's revenue management system, including Stripe's. Newer Stripe products (such as Atlas) do build on top of Stripe Billing but we haven't gotten around to migrating our existing stack. That said, I do have a personal goal of taking on more internal billing responsibilities over time (e.g. I think we could easily use Stripe Invoices internally today, and it's mostly opportunity cost keeping us from actually doing so).

I do want to say that the specific use case covered in the post is something we have thought about a lot. I think about it as a pipeline with stages for collecting high volumes of usage events, aggregating them, mapping them to rate cards based on usage, and then producing recurring bills, collecting payment, dunning, etc... The post claims we don’t do a good job on the first two stages (collecting usage events and aggregating them) is perhaps missing that the style of percentage-based fees is a one-line addition to a Connect integration as my colleague edwinwee mentioned below. It is also possible to have a scalable usage event collection/aggregation pipeline integrated with Stripe Billing. You can read this AWS blog post https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/apn/building-a-third-party-saas... for information about how to build such a system according to our best practices.

While I’m here, I’m always eager to hear feedback on Stripe Billing from folks who are using it. My email is ark@stripe.com.

As the old men say at the park, there comes a moment in every SaaS's life where you need to spend a year of a team's time just adding Zuora. They are dark days but hopefully life is better on the other side.

Slightly off-topic, IMO Xero has really gone downhill. The Yodlee integrations with banks fail so often these days, it makes it hard to use the product at all. When you refresh a bank/credit card feed or log in for the xth time, you have no expected timeline as to when the feed will update or whether it will even work. There are multiple buttons to reset a feed, and they do different things.

It's nearly impossible to just log in and reconcile all your accounts because you are always fighting with unconnected bank feeds. This degrades the core value prop of making it easy to stay atop of bookkeeping—now I always have some form of "accounting debt" these days.

I got so frustrated that I am in the process of migrating my personal account to Tiller + Google Sheets, and I'm still looking for a solution for our small business account.

I agree about the billing issues; I waste time figuring out where the invoices live in the product and manually posting them. Otherwise, the product would be fine if outdated, if it wasn't for the unreliability of Yodlee.