If I were a regulator I would be suspicious if a company runs its own billing on its own billing software and then something goes wrong with the numbers. Keeps honest executives honest in a way. Also keeps outages and hacker attack vectors somewhat contained.
Why doesn't Stripe use Stripe Billing?
71–80 of 193 posts
Re: Why doesn't Stripe use Stripe Billing?
#72(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 s…
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Re: Why doesn't Stripe use Stripe Billing?
#73First off, yes, Stripe uses Stripe to bill our own customers. In fact, for our larger customers who have negotiated complex pricing plans, we're currently migrating much of our manual billing to a system that's inspired by Stripe Billing. Second, this article seems to miss the point of Stripe. It seems to want to build a platform, which is what Stripe Connect is designed for. For example, charging a percentage fee is…
> First off, yes, Stripe uses Stripe to bill our own customers.
This is confusing because you’re implying that Stripe Billing is used internally but another employee clarifies and says it’s not, it’s simply another billing service was created that predates Stripe Billing.
Re: Why doesn't Stripe use Stripe Billing?
#74I work at an HR/Payroll company with a phenomenal app that we put our blood, sweat, and tears into every single day. And every single day I clock in with Oracle Time and Labor. There's a legal reason for this and we do it for compliance. I'm guessing Stripe is in the same boat with this product despite its flaws.
Twilio is the same. They use Zoom & Slack internally, not their own video and chat offerings. Dogfooding is a good thing. You’d be surprised how few companies actually do it (which is terribly shocking).
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Re: Why doesn't Stripe use Stripe Billing?
#75I work at an HR/Payroll company with a phenomenal app that we put our blood, sweat, and tears into every single day. And every single day I clock in with Oracle Time and Labor. There's a legal reason for this and we do it for compliance. I'm guessing Stripe is in the same boat with this product despite its flaws.
Twilio is the same. They use Zoom & Slack internally, not their own video and chat offerings. Dogfooding is a good thing. You’d be surprised how few companies actually do it (which is terribly shocking).
There's got to be a better term than "dogfooding"
Re: Why doesn't Stripe use Stripe Billing?
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
This sounds terrible, it shows a lack of confidence in your own product, imagine if Google internally would use Zoom... I can tell you that devs that use their own product deliver better quality.
I mean, it also creates a circular dependency, if you have an issue with your own product and trying to fix it then you can suddenly not communicate.
The Facebook outage last year being a great example of this. They lost basically all internal communications.
Re: Why doesn't Stripe use Stripe Billing?
#77Xero is the same and it really pisses me off. In Xero you've got something called a "Xero Network ID", which is an ID that you can give to other Xero users and they can link it to your contact record on their account, which means that invoices they raise are automatically posted in your Xero account without you having to lift a finger. Now, you would have thought that Xero would do the same for their subscription inv…
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…
> I'm still looking for a solution for our small business account.
For a long time I resisted moving to Xero.
Unfortunately my hand was forced because my existing solution (MYOB which was then bought by Mamut) stopped being Apple compatible through their own lazyness (they refused to update the software for 64-bit compatability).
Apple had pre-announced the post-Catalina 64-bit requirement years in advance. Every other developer out there had made the change. But Mamut/MYOB ... nope, they sent out a long email one day basically making that absolutely clear they were not moving from 32-bit.
Their answer was to offer a "cloud" version. I say "cloud" because what they offered was a remote desktop connection to a Mac running an old version of software on their side.
So hence I was forced over to Xero. My accountant was pressuring me too, but Mamut/MYOB killing off their own product was the straw that broke the camels back.
(I believe they may have finally relented and brought out a 64-bit version subsequently, but by that time it was too late, I'd moved already. And I had lost trust in their software support abilities anyway by then).
Re: Why doesn't Stripe use Stripe Billing?
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Twilio is the same. They use Zoom & Slack internally, not their own video and chat offerings. Dogfooding is a good thing. You’d be surprised how few companies actually do it (which is terribly shocking).
There's got to be a better term than "dogfooding"
"Use your own product" was too simple and direct.
Re: Why doesn't Stripe use Stripe Billing?
#79I work at an HR/Payroll company with a phenomenal app that we put our blood, sweat, and tears into every single day. And every single day I clock in with Oracle Time and Labor. There's a legal reason for this and we do it for compliance. I'm guessing Stripe is in the same boat with this product despite its flaws.
Twilio is the same. They use Zoom & Slack internally, not their own video and chat offerings. Dogfooding is a good thing. You’d be surprised how few companies actually do it (which is terribly shocking).
Dogfooding is a good thing.
However, I find it can get tiresome / has potential compilations.
Customer's can be terrible with incomplete, bad idea, and nonsensical requests. But sometimes internally you get the worst "Someone spilled some words into email that don't sense / no you don't actually want that / bro this is accounting software not Photoshop." situations that folks who are more familiar with the origination might make, but customer's might not make.
It takes an extra level of internal discipline to deal with dogfooding side effects at times IMO. Still, a good idea none the less.
Re: Why doesn't Stripe use Stripe Billing?
#80First off, yes, Stripe uses Stripe to bill our own customers. In fact, for our larger customers who have negotiated complex pricing plans, we're currently migrating much of our manual billing to a system that's inspired by Stripe Billing. Second, this article seems to miss the point of Stripe. It seems to want to build a platform, which is what Stripe Connect is designed for. For example, charging a percentage fee is…
I would be shocked to learn you’re using stripe billing and checkout sessions successfully internally - those products are so convoluted in how they overlap and don’t as to be unusable. All but the most basic use cases are a nightmare to both implement and then track rev Rec on. So much so that you’ve got a whole new product dedicated to trying to figure it out. If that were the result of a dog-fooded product I’d be pretty sad to hear it.