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Ask HN: How do you handle recurring payments in 2021?

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Re: Ask HN: How do you handle recurring payments in 2021?

#11

Post by futhey »

I love Stripe, it's amazing. For the 95% use-case it works better than all of the alternatives for payments in North America.

But it's the last 5% - 15% that will keep you up at night and/or eat up your time. Accepting payments from EU customers and international users. A typical B2B SaaS will eventually end up accepting checks in the mail, bank transfers from a half dozen countries, and (heaven forbid): PayPal. And you have to support tax compliance on top of all of that, and integrate it with your single source of truth for billing, and company accounting software.

Billing is a pain. Nothing is perfect. Stripe is a wonderful component of a complete solution, and a great starting point.

Most of the alternatives you listed handle a very narrow set of credit-card dunning issues, which Stripe is getting better and better at every day.

One thing on my radar is Paddle. They seem to be tackling a broader set of issues upstream/downstream of actual payment processing in an integrated way.

Re: Ask HN: How do you handle recurring payments in 2021?

#12

Post by enos_feedler »

futhey wrote: post #11

I love Stripe, it's amazing. For the 95% use-case it works better than all of the alternatives for payments in North America. But it's the last 5% - 15% that will keep you up at night and/or eat up your time. Accepting payments from EU customers and international users. A typical B2B SaaS will eventually end up accepting checks in the mail, bank transfers from a half dozen countries, and (heaven forbid): PayPal. And…

I often wondered if there is an opportunity to build a fully open source stack for handling all of these issues. It isn’t a competitive advantage for anyone and its a pain to get right. It also seems like everyone wants the same thing. I could imagine it being sponsored by mid tier companies that heavily rely on subscriptions and do well (say Tinder for example). Companies like this could donate time or an engineer or two. It would save everyone having to reinvent their subscription and billing infrastructure.

Re: Ask HN: How do you handle recurring payments in 2021?

#15

Post by seanwilson »

I use Paddle for taking subscription payments for a paid Chrome extension (https://www.checkbot.io/).

The main draw for me over Stripe is Paddle handle all country specific sales tax and VAT for me. Paddle send me a single pay out every month, I file that as income in my tax return and I'm done. Without Paddle, I'd need to charge the correct VAT for sales to each country plus keep on top of the changing rules (I'm in the UK).

How do other people do this? I'm curious how many people just don't know the rules around e.g. EU VAT and ignore it when they're small.

Re: Ask HN: How do you handle recurring payments in 2021?

#17

Post by colesantiago »

tdevito wrote: post #2

Stripe all the way! They have the best infrastructure and security, you can build out any payments system with their APIs and now they even have treasury-as-a-service to build your own bank. Elon and Peter Thiel were early investors, I can't imagine any company catching up at this point.

Thanks for this, seems Stripe is the way to go, I'm sure that Stripe has no issues with selling worldwide.

One thing I keep hearing is Stripe does not handle 'VAT' and all those tax stuff but not sure if I need it though.

Is this still an issue with Stripe?

Re: Ask HN: How do you handle recurring payments in 2021?

#18

Post by colesantiago »

jon-wood wrote: post #3

These days I’d use Stripe for everything, but the other payment SaaS products exist because for a long time there were some big holes in Stripe’s subscription offering - most notably not having any simple way to handle expired/cancelled cards without building out all the UI for it yourself. They recently released self-service portals for that sort of thing making it much less painful to use.

This sounds good, sounds like that Stripe has everything I need for subscriptions, I'll consider this.

Re: Ask HN: How do you handle recurring payments in 2021?

#19

Post by colesantiago »

mtnGoat wrote: post #10

Stripe, but eh, they nickel and dime you for stuff that should be included.

> Stripe, but eh, they nickel and dime you for stuff that should be included.

Do you care to elaborate what stuff Stripe doesn't have that others do?

I'm of the impression, that the only thing Stripe doesn't have really is Paypal integration, but that doesn't matter to me at my size.

Re: Ask HN: How do you handle recurring payments in 2021?

#20

Post by colesantiago »

futhey wrote: post #11

I love Stripe, it's amazing. For the 95% use-case it works better than all of the alternatives for payments in North America. But it's the last 5% - 15% that will keep you up at night and/or eat up your time. Accepting payments from EU customers and international users. A typical B2B SaaS will eventually end up accepting checks in the mail, bank transfers from a half dozen countries, and (heaven forbid): PayPal. And…

> But it's the last 5% - 15% that will keep you up at night and/or eat up your time. Accepting payments from EU customers and international users. A typical B2B SaaS will eventually end up accepting checks in the mail, bank transfers from a half dozen countries, and (heaven forbid): PayPal. And you have to support tax compliance on top of all of that, and integrate it with your single source of truth for billing, and company accounting software.

Interesting, I thought Stripe supports all of this for you? minus Paypal, I agree that it's a good starting point.

Would much prefer a no-code solution too all of this but will also consider looking at Paddle, if it has Paypal support.

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