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Why doesn't Stripe use Stripe Billing?

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Re: Why doesn't Stripe use Stripe Billing?

#151

Post by anthonys »

traceroute66 wrote: post #54

Xero 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…

Fairly sure Xero use NetSuite (or did- maybe they've since moved) and apparently went to great lengths at the time to make the invoice look like it was generated from Xero.

At least they aren't hiding that anymore.

Re: Why doesn't Stripe use Stripe Billing?

#152

Post by codazoda »

0_____0 wrote: post #136

Whenever I hear about a US based payment processor, I feel compelled to mention UPI, India's Unified Payment Interface. Basically, with fairly modest investment, the Indian government put together a system to allow instant transactions between bank accounts. There are no transaction fees. We have so many companies (sometimes the same company with multiple faces - Paypal/Venmo, Stripe, Clover, Square, all of whom want…

I think the U.S. federal government is working on a payment system. At first it will just work between banks. I dunno if that means consumers can use it between their banks or if it means B2B bank transactions, but they are working on something (and I recall it’s close).

Edit: FedNow, May 2023, pricing not yet released. It is for business and consumers

Re: Why doesn't Stripe use Stripe Billing?

#153

Post by dexterdog »

willio58 wrote: post #18
reaperducer wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The company where I work disallows us from using our own product because it would be considered a conflict of interest. Some co-workers say it's a federal regulation, but I've never seen that anywhere in print, so I suspect it's just a workplace rumor/justification. I've had customers complain to my face that we tailor the products to our needs, and are surprised (and sometimes vocally disbelieve) that we don't use i…

Yeah most of the time I hear conflict of interest I don’t believe it at this point. Conflict of whose interest? If you used your own product wouldn’t you learn some issues that exist within it?

And if you don't also use competing products you won't have intimate knowledge about what options are out there.

Re: Why doesn't Stripe use Stripe Billing?

#154

Post by throwaway2037 »

ekofish wrote: post #9

I 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.

It is strange that you did not name the company. Other people here might want to learn about your product.

Re: Why doesn't Stripe use Stripe Billing?

#155

Post by throwaway2037 »

grensley wrote: post #76
SaltySolomon wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is there a public write-up or blog post about it? It sounds interesting to read about!

Re: Why doesn't Stripe use Stripe Billing?

#156

Post by sturadnidge »

skissane wrote: post #146
Biganon wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, same reason why Microsoft uses SAP instead of Microsoft Dynamics. They would use their own product if they were to start now, but migrating from SAP would cost them millions and take a lot of time.

> but migrating from SAP would cost them millions and take a lot of time. Microsoft's annual revenue is almost US$200 billion. Even if the migration would "cost them millions", they can easily afford it, it would not make any material difference to their ultimate financial position. And, it would actually be justifiable as an investment in their own ERP suite – "eating their own dogfood" would send a signal to their…

I don't think people should be down voting you for this comment, but I imagine the reason why is because that's generally not how things work at large companies. Someone in product and/or sales might have made the same argument you have, but in my experience the business response to that argument is something along the line of "you can quantify the cost, but you can't quantify the value (i.e. sales upside) and there's no change in business capability? No." Revenue doesn't come into it... money is money. Or perhaps more correctly, value is value.

Re: Why doesn't Stripe use Stripe Billing?

#157

Post by Robotbeat »

Biganon wrote: post #108
kurrik wrote: post #66

(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…

So, same reason why Microsoft uses SAP instead of Microsoft Dynamics. They would use their own product if they were to start now, but migrating from SAP would cost them millions and take a lot of time.

Just personally, I value companies who "dogfood" their products a lot more than similar companies that don't.

An example is 3D printers. Prusa makes fantastic 3D printers, and about half of the structural parts for their printers are printed on their own printers. So they have 600 of their own 3D printers printing 24/7 printing their own parts. That means they are forced to address long-term durability and reliability issues even just to ship their own product.

Because it absolutely is true that at that scale, you're usually better off just injection molding the parts, but they'd lose the high-quality signaling that yeah, their 3D printers are good enough for the company to rely on them to print their product. They also lose out on insight to things they could do to improve their own product from a usability standpoint.

Re: Why doesn't Stripe use Stripe Billing?

#158

Post by WanderPanda »

joshpadnick wrote: post #110
kurrik wrote: post #66

(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…

We use Stripe Billing and it's gone very well overall, but the biggest miss for us is that Stripe conflates "contract term" with "billing frequency." We sign up customers for annual contracts but bill them monthly, but Stripe Billing only understands the "bill monthly" part of that. Are there any plans for first-class contract term support coming?

This is one of the darkest dark patterns I'm glad they don't allow it

Re: Why doesn't Stripe use Stripe Billing?

#159

Post by skissane »

sturadnidge wrote: post #156
skissane wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but migrating from SAP would cost them millions and take a lot of time. Microsoft's annual revenue is almost US$200 billion. Even if the migration would "cost them millions", they can easily afford it, it would not make any material difference to their ultimate financial position. And, it would actually be justifiable as an investment in their own ERP suite – "eating their own dogfood" would send a signal to their…

I don't think people should be down voting you for this comment, but I imagine the reason why is because that's generally not how things work at large companies. Someone in product and/or sales might have made the same argument you have, but in my experience the business response to that argument is something along the line of "you can quantify the cost, but you can't quantify the value (i.e. sales upside) and there'…

I used to work for Oracle. I can recall Oracle sales reps telling me how important it was that we internally used the software we sold to our customers, because if we didn't trust it with our own business, why should they trust it with theirs? Maybe Microsoft doesn't think the same way?

Of course, Oracle has so many different software offerings (duplication due to acquisitions, and lots of industry-specific offerings), it couldn't possibly use them all internally. But at least its sales reps could say, that if they weren't using the specific product they were selling, they'd be (for non-industry specific functions) using an equivalent product in Oracle's portfolio.

Re: Why doesn't Stripe use Stripe Billing?

#160

Post by chucky123 »

cpursley wrote: post #104

What I'm interesting in is a front end where the underlying payment provider can quickly be replaced when Stripe/PayPal etc cancel you (for any reason at all).

This is something many people are interested in. Certainly helps alleviate one of the most potent problems in financial services.
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