Stripe Would Be Perfect If... • Hacker News Board

Re: Stripe Would Be Perfect If...

#31

Post by shazow » Fri, Nov 09, 2012, 5:34 PM UTC

Everyone is piling on the "stop trying to feature-creep Stripe!" wagon but there is at least one reasonable suggestion in this post: A per-user fee tacked onto an existing plan.

> In total there are 4 different tax rates and then no taxes for international customers, for a total of 5 different tax levels. We currently have 3 monthly plans, and their 3 yearly equivalents. This means that we had to create (3 + 3) x 5 = 30 plans within Stripe.

This is definitely not ideal.

Agreed with everyone that asking Stripe to take care of figuring out the tax rates is far too much, but being able to say "Subscribe customer X to plan Y," which already exists, "and in addition add a Z fee to each charge." Z could be a percentage or an absolute value.

Maybe Z is tax. Maybe Z is shipping for a monthly package subscription.

Now Understoodit can keep their 3 + 3 plans. +1 to this.

Re: Stripe Would Be Perfect If...

#32

Post by trafficlight » Fri, Nov 09, 2012, 5:54 PM UTC

liamk wrote: post #8

jusben1369 wrote: post #7

This is a good write up. This is a challenge for Stripe though. They're a payment gateway that can manage recurring payments. Things like taxes and invoices are usually supported by additional applications that run on top of a payment gateway. Edge cases too. So I'm sure they're there saying "Where do we draw the line between where we end and other offerings/services begin"

If they support coupons, I don't see why they can't support taxes. Taxes are just the opposite of coupons and should be relatively easy for them to implement.

'Taxes' and 'easy' are two words that never go together.

Re: Stripe Would Be Perfect If...

#33

Post by bkorte » Fri, Nov 09, 2012, 6:30 PM UTC

shazow wrote: post #31

Everyone is piling on the "stop trying to feature-creep Stripe!" wagon but there is at least one reasonable suggestion in this post: A per-user fee tacked onto an existing plan. > In total there are 4 different tax rates and then no taxes for international customers, for a total of 5 different tax levels. We currently have 3 monthly plans, and their 3 yearly equivalents. This means that we had to create (3 + 3) x 5 =…

Agreed.

People are sure piling on OP for mentioning taxes -- I think you are all interpreting his request as "Stripe, please add tax calculation" but he's only asking for an additional charges field so he can track his subscriptions + taxes instead of his subscriptions with taxes.

Re: Stripe Would Be Perfect If...

#34

Post by jarek » Fri, Nov 09, 2012, 6:52 PM UTC

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…

> some province charges so much tax that to make other provinces eat a share of that cost would be unreasonable.

Sales tax varies from 5% to 15.5%, but only 11% of the country by population (Alberta and the territories) are at 5%, and majority are at 12 to 15%.

Re: Stripe Would Be Perfect If...

#35

Post by the_bear » Fri, Nov 09, 2012, 6:54 PM UTC

Every time I sign up for a service and receive an email from recurly (or similar services), my first thought is, "this company doesn't care about user experience if they're trusting recurly to send me important communications." The email content is always generic and cold, and it's particularly unimpressive when I sign up for a free trial and receive a "thanks for subscribing" email telling me that I was successfully billed $0.00.

I'm glad that Stripe keeps their hands off my invoices. You could argue that Stripe could just let me turn that feature off, but Stripe understands that their customers are 100% responsible for the end-user experience, and I respect their decision not to get involved in that at all.

Re: Stripe Would Be Perfect If...

#36

Post by robmclarty » Fri, Nov 09, 2012, 7:02 PM UTC

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…

I agree. I completed a similar e-commerce app for a client in Canada and, honestly, it wasn't too hard to make 13 optional, client-editable, tax percent values that get tacked on to an order before being sent for payment processing. Just takes a bit of elbow grease. I like, as a feature, that Stripe doesn't impose itself on how I want to implement payments in my app.

Re: Stripe Would Be Perfect If...

#37

Post by peteforde » Fri, Nov 09, 2012, 8:03 PM UTC

liamk wrote: post #8

jusben1369 wrote: post #7

This is a good write up. This is a challenge for Stripe though. They're a payment gateway that can manage recurring payments. Things like taxes and invoices are usually supported by additional applications that run on top of a payment gateway. Edge cases too. So I'm sure they're there saying "Where do we draw the line between where we end and other offerings/services begin"

If they support coupons, I don't see why they can't support taxes. Taxes are just the opposite of coupons and should be relatively easy for them to implement.

One of my developer pet peeves is when 3rd parties (especially ones that think they're helping you) tell you that something they want should be "easy" to do.

Changing the interface to a payment processing gateway, including all of the support documentation and code/security audits, is not easy.

If everyone that wanted something from you prefaced their request with "I don't see why they can't"... you'd probably get annoyed, too.

Re: Stripe Would Be Perfect If...

#38

Post by otakucode » Fri, Nov 09, 2012, 8:07 PM UTC

I can entirely understand why Stripe doesn't deal with taxes. They're insane. I was involved in implementing a site that sold off-site discount parking reservations near airports and dealing with taxes was certainly no fun. And this was restricted just to the US. There is a national consortium of states that makes getting state sales tax slightly easy.... but all the services that offer the ability to look up tax rates didn't cover the service we were offering, parking reservation. So we had to investigate the rates ourselves... and it's a good thing we did. Some counties or municipalities have created special taxes to apply specifically to this kind of service in order to make things more expensive so that parking at the airport isn't such a terrible deal.... oh and those laws don't stay static, of course. You have to keep on top of them, and modify your code/data/whatever when new laws take effect or old laws are repealed.

The most fun was when an area in Texas passed one of these laws taxing parking near airports (even if that parking is offered by a hotel or some other established business... if it has shuttle service to the airport, it must be taxed) but all the various people offering parking through our site didn't want to comply with the law, so they wanted us to not charge the tax to customers! Worse, the business types wanted to actually cater to these scofflaws. I refused to implement it though, because that's just stupid. We'll collect the tax, if the clients don't want to actually pay the municipality, that's their business... but we do have to keep track of who charges it, how much, when those rates change, etc... it's a a bit of a pain, and even the services dedicated to tracking this kind of stuff are not comprehensive.

Re: Stripe Would Be Perfect If...

#39

Post by otakucode » Fri, Nov 09, 2012, 8:13 PM UTC

JimmaDaRustla wrote: post #27

richardlblair wrote: post #26

When I read this article I honestly thought to myself "Are you kidding me??" Stripe makes receiving payments incredibly easy; easier than it has ever been before. Yet, somehow you complain that you need to deal with edge cases? There will always be edge cases... if your biggest issue in dealing with payments is handling taxes then I would say you are doing alright. Would it be a useful feature? Sure. Is it worth taki…

Also, there are scenarios when taxes are exempt on particular items and services. This could even occur on a per-item level. Multiply that by your regional settings and you got some nice bloat.

Absolutely. Even the StreamLined Sales Tax Governing Board rules are not comprehensive. They have many different product categories, but they do not have them all. They pay various companies to provide sales tax data to Internet businesses, but the companies I've dealt with basically do the minimum possible and aren't terribly interested in improving. The bottom line is that if you want to be safe around taxes, you have to hire a lawyer and have them investigate the tax situation with your particular category of product in all the different areas it's going to be offered. Really, that's not something I envision anyone doing for free. It's not something you could just do once. Podunk, UT might have a city council meeting next week decreeing a 27% tax on your product/service with penalty of death if you do not charge the tax to your customers.

Re: Stripe Would Be Perfect If...

#40

Post by scrame » Fri, Nov 09, 2012, 8:17 PM UTC

The author is not suggesting that Stripe handle taxes, he is suggesting that Stripe have an option within plans to handle different tax rates, rather than having to create a separate plan for each district that has a different tax rate, and the ability to have that calculated in to the total charge.