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Stripe Would Be Perfect If...

liamkaufman.com

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Re: Stripe Would Be Perfect If...

#11

Post by psycr »

Bakkot wrote: post #10

It seems to me that creating several dozen subscription plans on Stripe is indicative of a deeper problem: that you have several dozen different prices consumers end up paying. How about instead you advertise the prices that consumers will actually have to pay? Bump up all of your prices across the board by the expected cost of taxes to even out the cost. (Unless there's some law about not charging consumers in diffe…

This probably would've been the best idea really. And at the end of the day, if revenue grows at a break neck pace you can always swap out Stripe for something like Recurly.

Re: Stripe Would Be Perfect If...

#12

Post by jonknee »

liamk wrote: post #5
frankdenbow wrote: post #4

You can make invoices by using their webhooks ( https://stripe.com/docs/webhooks ). Just email your customers when a billing event occurs

Indeed, and that is what we're doing right now. However, it would be nice if they dealt with creating nicely formatted invoices and emailed them so we don't have to.

Where does that end? They're taking your payments, making your invoices, why not be an OAuth provider for your users? Host your app? Store and ship your physical products?

I love Stripe. They do one thing well, better than anyone else I have used. It's not perfect for everyone, but anytime someone tries to be perfect for everyone they stop being perfect for anyone.

Re: Stripe Would Be Perfect If...

#13

Post by jd »

peteforde wrote: post #6

I'm sympathetic to Liam's grief with calculating taxes, and handling the edge cases of people moving around different tax zones. It's not exclusive to Canada, of course. However, my perspective is that Stripe sits one level lower on the infrastructure map than a service like Recurly ( http://recurly.com ) which is designed to abstract the pain of subscription management away from app developers. I use Stripe first an…

Exactly. Stripe can't support every bit of functionality out of the box, because then the API would get really convoluted. Just think about what sort of discounts are commonly use: absolute discounts, percentage discounts, coupon codes with expiration dates, conditional coupon codes, bulk discounts, discounts that only apply for the first month. And so on. When dealing with billing logic there is a tremendous amount of accidental complexity.

Stripe offers a low-level API and a higher level API and framework can be built on top of that. So what we really need are some high-quality django/rails modules that deal with all the mundane bookkeeping. Then you can easily fork the module to make adjustments where needed.

Re: Stripe Would Be Perfect If...

#14

Post by adrr »

peteforde wrote: post #6

I'm sympathetic to Liam's grief with calculating taxes, and handling the edge cases of people moving around different tax zones. It's not exclusive to Canada, of course. However, my perspective is that Stripe sits one level lower on the infrastructure map than a service like Recurly ( http://recurly.com ) which is designed to abstract the pain of subscription management away from app developers. I use Stripe first an…

Recurly doesn't support sales tax(tax rate varies by location) as well. Easiest solution for both providers is to generate an invoice item called "Taxes" and add it for each bill cycle. There are many SaaS tax providers out there.

Re: Stripe Would Be Perfect If...

#15

Post by nateabele »

liamk wrote: post #5
frankdenbow wrote: post #4

You can make invoices by using their webhooks ( https://stripe.com/docs/webhooks ). Just email your customers when a billing event occurs

Indeed, and that is what we're doing right now. However, it would be nice if they dealt with creating nicely formatted invoices and emailed them so we don't have to.

...?

Stripe is a payment processor. If you want invoicing, use (FreshBooks|Xero|Blinksale|etc).

"It would be nice if" is often the death of good product design.

Re: Stripe Would Be Perfect If...

#16

Post by pbreit »

jonknee wrote: post #12
liamk wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, and that is what we're doing right now. However, it would be nice if they dealt with creating nicely formatted invoices and emailed them so we don't have to.

Where does that end? They're taking your payments, making your invoices, why not be an OAuth provider for your users? Host your app? Store and ship your physical products? I love Stripe. They do one thing well, better than anyone else I have used. It's not perfect for everyone, but anytime someone tries to be perfect for everyone they stop being perfect for anyone.

I don't think it's that crazy to wish for emailed invoices from a payment processor. Unlike the examples you provide, it's a pretty natural and easy add-on to such a service which many providers (eg, PayPal, Square) do.

Re: Stripe Would Be Perfect If...

#17

Post by sudonim »

frankdenbow wrote: post #4

You can make invoices by using their webhooks ( https://stripe.com/docs/webhooks ). Just email your customers when a billing event occurs

Agreed. We dogfood our own product (we do the send an email part) to do this and it is ridiculously easy:

Consume a stripe webhook / send an email:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2454/Slingshot/Pictures/Customer.io-...

Nicely formatted:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2454/Slingshot/Pictures/Customer.io-...

Re: Stripe Would Be Perfect If...

#18

Post by frankdenbow »

jonknee wrote: post #12
liamk wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, and that is what we're doing right now. However, it would be nice if they dealt with creating nicely formatted invoices and emailed them so we don't have to.

Where does that end? They're taking your payments, making your invoices, why not be an OAuth provider for your users? Host your app? Store and ship your physical products? I love Stripe. They do one thing well, better than anyone else I have used. It's not perfect for everyone, but anytime someone tries to be perfect for everyone they stop being perfect for anyone.

Agreed! Would make sense to have a Stripe marketplace similar to what Shopify has to extend this functionality to those that want it.

Re: Stripe Would Be Perfect If...

#19

Post by tucaz »

Bakkot wrote: post #10

It seems to me that creating several dozen subscription plans on Stripe is indicative of a deeper problem: that you have several dozen different prices consumers end up paying. How about instead you advertise the prices that consumers will actually have to pay? Bump up all of your prices across the board by the expected cost of taxes to even out the cost. (Unless there's some law about not charging consumers in diffe…

It's funny how different countries and cultures have different views over the same thing. I'm not sure about Canada, but in the US taxes are added on top of each purchase so you advertise a price of 14USD and end up charging X% on top of that price.

If I understood your suggestion correctly people dealing with these problems should do like we do here in Brazil: use the taxes to compose the final price so if I have a product that I want to sell for, let´s say, 10USD and will cost me an average 10% in taxes I would advertise it for 11USD and just deal with the taxes problem internally in my app and not by creating N different plans on the payment processor.

Re: Stripe Would Be Perfect If...

#20

Post by jonknee »

pbreit wrote: post #16
jonknee wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where does that end? They're taking your payments, making your invoices, why not be an OAuth provider for your users? Host your app? Store and ship your physical products? I love Stripe. They do one thing well, better than anyone else I have used. It's not perfect for everyone, but anytime someone tries to be perfect for everyone they stop being perfect for anyone.

I don't think it's that crazy to wish for emailed invoices from a payment processor. Unlike the examples you provide, it's a pretty natural and easy add-on to such a service which many providers (eg, PayPal, Square) do.

PayPal and Square are user facing companies. Stripe is currently strictly a developer facing company (I mean look at their home page, they have code samples!).

Stripe provides hooks that allow you to easily send your own invoices--that's a developer friendly feature that maintains flexibility (everyone will want invoices to work differently).

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