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Payments Startup Stripe (YC S10) Joins the Billion Dollar Club

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Re: Payments Startup Stripe (YC S10) Joins the Billion Dollar Club

#31
post #24
post #5

Stripe cofounder here. As this news breaks, I want to say thanks to the HN community. Stripe is in large part the result of the feedback and advice we've received here since we launched on HN back in Sept 2011 -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3053883 .

Hope to see you guys update the web interface a bit for a performance/little more flexibility. The API is great, but the web interface could use a bit more love :)

Agreed. On the way!

Re: Payments Startup Stripe (YC S10) Joins the Billion Dollar Club

#33
post #24
post #5

Stripe cofounder here. As this news breaks, I want to say thanks to the HN community. Stripe is in large part the result of the feedback and advice we've received here since we launched on HN back in Sept 2011 -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3053883 .

Hope to see you guys update the web interface a bit for a performance/little more flexibility. The API is great, but the web interface could use a bit more love :)

(I'm not associated with Stripe)

Can you please give at least one example or suggestion?

Re: Payments Startup Stripe (YC S10) Joins the Billion Dollar Club

#34
post #5

Stripe cofounder here. As this news breaks, I want to say thanks to the HN community. Stripe is in large part the result of the feedback and advice we've received here since we launched on HN back in Sept 2011 -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3053883 .

Seeing this comment makes me realise how much of a crazy technical risk I made choosing to use Stripe when I did.

My company started charging for things in April 2012, but I made the decision to use Stripe months before that, something like January 2012. Only 4 months after you launched!

We only did 1500 transactions on our launch day, yet at the time it was enough to break your service for a little while due to load. Your customer service at the time was really great and you refunded all the transaction fees for our launch day and gave us a list of all the customers who had tried and failed to make transactions so we could contact them.

I don't think I realised at the time how small you guys were. We are lucky that you guys didn't fail, and I doubt that the me of today would have relied on such a young company. Certainly we could have moved to a different payment processor, but losing all the saved card data would have sucked a lot.

So great work on that!

Re: Payments Startup Stripe (YC S10) Joins the Billion Dollar Club

#36

I am a developer interested in integrating a payment system into one of my sites where my target customers are mainly in the US. Could someone outline the major differences between Stripe and Balanced?

All depends on the country your bank account is in.

As an Australian company selling to the US, we've kinda been left in the lurch with their AU beta.

When it was launched we were told they were working on being able to accept/convert USD into AU accounts, so at the time we (incredibly naively) started building our subscription code around their API, assuming it'd be ready by the time we were.

Almost 6 months later and all we can get out of them is "we don't have an eta but we're working on it", and we've been sitting here the whole time losing money hoping that it's just around the corner, when really we should have just thrown out the work we'd done and gone with a provider that can already handle it.

Re: Payments Startup Stripe (YC S10) Joins the Billion Dollar Club

#39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And thank you, as a developer stripe has made a ridiculously difficult process ridiculously easy.

Not ridiculously easy, rather slightly easier as the merchant still must maintain aspects of their environment covered by the PCI DSS as they are still delivering Stripe.js from their server environment. Here's a bit more information on that: http://pciguru.wordpress.com/2013/06/30/developers-beware-st...

This post is inaccurate. (Check out Darragh's response in the comments.) It's also worth noting that 1) Stripe and its processes are audited every year (we're a PCI-certified service provider), and 2) that MasterCard has actually followed a very similar strategy with their Stripe competitor.

Re: Payments Startup Stripe (YC S10) Joins the Billion Dollar Club

#40
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hope to see you guys update the web interface a bit for a performance/little more flexibility. The API is great, but the web interface could use a bit more love :)

(I'm not associated with Stripe) Can you please give at least one example or suggestion?

Sure, glad to give feedback, though this would make sense if you're familiar with using stripe. Our team is of course not one of Stripe's larger users, though we do use them enough to fall under one of the volume discounts. Here's a few things that I can think of from the top of my head:

When selecting a user to change the plan, the modal takes about 3-4 seconds to populate the new plan dropdown. The new plan dropdown is like 200px wide, which makes managing multiple plans pretty cumbersome.

The main dashboard view only has Gross Volume, with no way to switch to other views (ie, no way to take into account refunds)

Event view is pretty cumbersome for managing things, as it shows only 20 events at a time. Also, event filters apply to all of customer payments, not one ( so going to filters resets whatever customer you were looking at )

Logs are labeled with non human readable things like "200 DELETE /v1/customers/cus_2fdyjF3lV1FYyc/subscription"

There's no dedicated "Name" field for customer details though there is a name field that lives under card details.

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