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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

#61

Post by ricardobeat »

patcheudor wrote: post #49
pbreit wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the downvotes have to do with what is a pretty serious accusation and not apparently backed up with facts. What would be helpful is if the accuser produced a better description of what he feels is out of compliance, wrong or misleading.

Because the PCI guidance isn't factual enough? An essay could be written about the problems with broad statements like merchants only needing to worry about the inclusion of Stripe.JS and the use of HTTPS to be PCI compliant. Luckily those already exist. This one covers it pretty well: http://pciguru.wordpress.com/2013/06/30/developers-beware-st...

That article is wrong on the technical implications, like "It may be their code, but it is executing on your server" (cc data is sent directly to Stripe's servers, never touching your own).

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

#62

Post by stephen_mcd »

hazelcough wrote: post #48
stephen_mcd wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

Oh no — I'm very sorry to hear that. We try to avoid giving ETAs for functionality in order to avoid having people get stuck like this. (At the same time, we sometimes do indicate when we plan to do something — which does have this failure mode.) But we should probably have been clearer that it wasn't going to happen imminently — want to drop me a line at michelle@stripe.com and I'll see if there's any way we can hel…

Email sent.

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

#63

Post by Silhouette »

JunkDNA wrote: post #22
patcheudor wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now if Stripe could practice truth in advertising that would be great. SpecificallY: "Anyone accepting credit card payments must be PCI compliant. Stripe makes it easy to do so: Serve your payment page over SSL, i.e., the page's web address should begin with “https”, not “http”. Use Stripe.js or Checkout to accept payment information and transmit it directly to Stripe's servers. And you'll be PCI compliant!" https://…

Instead of just down voting this post, it would be helpful to know what specific parts of it are incorrect. This is the first I've heard of these objections.

These posts are probably being downvoted because they come from a new account, which has been attacking Stripe repeatedly in multiple discussions now, including making some assumptions/claims that are readily confirmed to be false (and are obviously so to anyone who's actually integrated Stripe) and citing supporting web pages that don't necessarily support the claims made.

While the PCI compliance issue may not be quite as simple as Stripe's documentation has previously implied, nobody else seems to be able to identify the kinds of serious compliance issues that patcheudor keeps implying we're all suffering from by using Stripe and following their existing advice.

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

#64

Post by samstave »

kulkarnic wrote: post #56

This is both amazing and scary. The amazing part is obvious. The scary part is we now have companies that are worth a billion dollars that are unlisted and have no public scrutiny. Either a billion is not a very large number to the American people today, or we believe that public scrutiny is unnecessary for large companies today. I don't think at all that Stripe is one of them, but wouldn't a billion dollar company b…

Do you have any idea how big visa was as an unlisted private company for decades??

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

#65

Post by stephen_mcd »

nmjenkins wrote: post #52
stephen_mcd wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

You should check out https://pin.net.au/ – it's an Australian competitor to Stripe. You can accept payments in USD and Pin will settle in USD to an Australian account (this is exactly what we do at FastMail). We've been using them exclusively for the last few months and are pretty happy, other than the lack of Amex support, which they're still working on.

Thanks - we originally looked at them but they didn't have recurring payment support at the time.

Since then they "acquired" an entirely separate recurring payments company (I don't recall the name), and it was all just a bit too much of an integration mess at the time, when compared to Stripe who also announced their beta then.

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

#66

Post by kamaal »

kulkarnic wrote: post #56

This is both amazing and scary. The amazing part is obvious. The scary part is we now have companies that are worth a billion dollars that are unlisted and have no public scrutiny. Either a billion is not a very large number to the American people today, or we believe that public scrutiny is unnecessary for large companies today. I don't think at all that Stripe is one of them, but wouldn't a billion dollar company b…

I'm not sure what you mean by 'public scrutiny'. Surely any common person on the street has absolutely no influence over Google or Microsoft wishes to do. And going public hardly has any influence at all.

Beyond all Companies/Organizations are not Governments, they don't collect taxes and they are not voted into power. So they are not answerable to anyone. These are individual(s) who are investing their own time, money, and on their own risks to create wealth.

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

#67

Post by [deleted] »

Negitivefrags wrote: post #34
pc wrote: 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…

[deleted]

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

#69

Post by aculver »

diziet wrote: post #44
pc wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. On the way!

Awesome :) One big issue (with actual effect on revenue of your users) you guys could solve better would be handling delinquent/expiring cards better . We had to built some things in house to deal with this on our end, as once you have a non trivial amount of paying customers it can become at least a small pain. I know there are webhooks for failed payments etc but this stuff is really difficult to surface in the web…

Hey Alex, Churn Buster (http://churnbuster.io/) is available via Stripe Connect to solve exactly this problem. We're in private beta right now, so please email me at andrew@churnbuster.io if you'd like to take it for a spin. We've got a number of paying customers already (including some folks who previously had their own basic webhooks integration) and they're all saving much more in rescued transactions than they're investing in the product. Also, it's a 30-day free trial, so you literally can't lose! :-)

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

#70

Post by patcheudor »

ricardobeat wrote: post #61
patcheudor wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the PCI guidance isn't factual enough? An essay could be written about the problems with broad statements like merchants only needing to worry about the inclusion of Stripe.JS and the use of HTTPS to be PCI compliant. Luckily those already exist. This one covers it pretty well: http://pciguru.wordpress.com/2013/06/30/developers-beware-st...

That article is wrong on the technical implications, like "It may be their code, but it is executing on your server" (cc data is sent directly to Stripe's servers, never touching your own).

That was maybe not quite the right language, but is easily salvageable. What the author was trying to convey is that the Stripe.js code is instantiated within the user browser by an HTTP response from the server infrastructure owned by the merchant. The actual credit-card form is delivered by the merchants server & therefore they own all the PCI DSS related controls surrounding ensuring that the payment form code delivered via their HTTP response is secured. If instead of referencing Stripe.js, the merchant instead sent the user directly to https://stripe.com/payment... and the user could validate they are at stripe.com by looking in their address bar & checking the SSL/TLS security by clicking on the lock then that's a different story and the merchant would have far less exposure to the requirements outlined in the PCI DSS.
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