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Billing with Stripe

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Re: Billing with Stripe

#11

Post by pc »

damoncali wrote: post #10
aculver wrote: post #4

My bare minimum recurring expense with Braintree is $130/mo. That's our largest recurring expense. What's wonderful about Stripe is that there is no "minimum" service charge. If you don't do a lot of transactions, you don't pay a lot of fees. That makes it very low risk to spin up a service and give it a little time to see if it works. When I've talked to people with day jobs about their SaaS side-projects, it's comm…

Does this fact cause you any concern over stripe's decision to serve small companies for whom 130 dollars is a significant amount over large customers who will be turned off by their percentage fees? My main resistance to switching to stripe is that I can't figure out how they are going to make any money. I'd like the extra 130 dollars each month, too, but will it last?

We don't quite see it that way. Large companies, processing millions a year, use Stripe too.

Re: Billing with Stripe

#12

Post by thegdb »

damoncali wrote: post #10
aculver wrote: post #4

My bare minimum recurring expense with Braintree is $130/mo. That's our largest recurring expense. What's wonderful about Stripe is that there is no "minimum" service charge. If you don't do a lot of transactions, you don't pay a lot of fees. That makes it very low risk to spin up a service and give it a little time to see if it works. When I've talked to people with day jobs about their SaaS side-projects, it's comm…

Does this fact cause you any concern over stripe's decision to serve small companies for whom 130 dollars is a significant amount over large customers who will be turned off by their percentage fees? My main resistance to switching to stripe is that I can't figure out how they are going to make any money. I'd like the extra 130 dollars each month, too, but will it last?

A company for whom $130 is significant today is not necessarily a company for whom $130 is significant tomorrow. One thing we want to do is lower the barrier to people trying out their ideas, and for those ideas that turn out well we've gained a large customer. For those that don't go well we (and our user) basically break even.

And as well as being a home for the casual weekend project, we have a number of users processing millions of dollars a year.

Re: Billing with Stripe

#13

Post by aculver »

damoncali wrote: post #10
aculver wrote: post #4

My bare minimum recurring expense with Braintree is $130/mo. That's our largest recurring expense. What's wonderful about Stripe is that there is no "minimum" service charge. If you don't do a lot of transactions, you don't pay a lot of fees. That makes it very low risk to spin up a service and give it a little time to see if it works. When I've talked to people with day jobs about their SaaS side-projects, it's comm…

Does this fact cause you any concern over stripe's decision to serve small companies for whom 130 dollars is a significant amount over large customers who will be turned off by their percentage fees? My main resistance to switching to stripe is that I can't figure out how they are going to make any money. I'd like the extra 130 dollars each month, too, but will it last?

Not concerned at all. One of the team members there mentioned in an earlier thread that some big customers are already using it. Furthermore, the pricing model is very similar to what Square did in the point-of-service credit card space, and they're doing a massive amount of business now. I think the vast number of folks that they'll attract will far outweigh that recurring $130 security blanket.

For the better part of $1560 a year, I'll take a chance on them. :)

Re: Billing with Stripe

#15

Post by tren »

Very easy to integrate, so far we've had no problems at all. I've been recommending stripe to any startup looking for a payment solution.

Re: Billing with Stripe

#16

Post by saurik »

thegdb wrote: post #12
damoncali wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does this fact cause you any concern over stripe's decision to serve small companies for whom 130 dollars is a significant amount over large customers who will be turned off by their percentage fees? My main resistance to switching to stripe is that I can't figure out how they are going to make any money. I'd like the extra 130 dollars each month, too, but will it last?

A company for whom $130 is significant today is not necessarily a company for whom $130 is significant tomorrow. One thing we want to do is lower the barrier to people trying out their ideas, and for those ideas that turn out well we've gained a large customer. For those that don't go well we (and our user) basically break even. And as well as being a home for the casual weekend project, we have a number of users pro…

I would imagine, though, that companies that are "on their game" enough to become big are probably also the kind of company that will realize that they are now being burned on per-transaction costs rather than fixed overhead, and have the wherewithal to spend the week required to recorde their backend for a different API. Some companies won't get around to it quickly (after all: successful companies are busy), but that still seems like an awkward thing to rely on.

So, on that note, have you thought about setting up fees that scale better for larger companies? If you are doing two million dollars a year, PayPal's fees (for an example; PayPal is even a little more expensive than most processors, but are simply so far reaching it is hard to avoid them) will have dropped to 1.9% from 2.9%, saving $1666/month; at $10 million a year, this is enough for a reasonably high quality full-time employee.

Re: Billing with Stripe

#17

Post by thegdb »

saurik wrote: post #16
thegdb wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A company for whom $130 is significant today is not necessarily a company for whom $130 is significant tomorrow. One thing we want to do is lower the barrier to people trying out their ideas, and for those ideas that turn out well we've gained a large customer. For those that don't go well we (and our user) basically break even. And as well as being a home for the casual weekend project, we have a number of users pro…

I would imagine, though, that companies that are "on their game" enough to become big are probably also the kind of company that will realize that they are now being burned on per-transaction costs rather than fixed overhead, and have the wherewithal to spend the week required to recorde their backend for a different API. Some companies won't get around to it quickly (after all: successful companies are busy), but th…

It is likely we will add volume-based discounts in the future.

Re: Billing with Stripe

#19

Post by PostOnce »

LaunchAlready wrote: post #14

It's very neat and simple. Would love to see some one do a python or a php version.

I tested out Stripe last weekend. It's really, really simple. You can be up and running and billing shit inside of an hour, HTML and all, depending on how quick you are. The tutorial is dead simple and so are the docs.

You should go check it out, if you're interested. You'll see that there's really no need to wait for a video.

(I set stripe up in both PHP and Python, did the HTML and CSS and everything in a couple of hours. Was easy. I like things to be easy. -- Now I just need something to charge for... :P)

Re: Billing with Stripe

#20

Post by diolpah »

damoncali wrote: post #10
aculver wrote: post #4

My bare minimum recurring expense with Braintree is $130/mo. That's our largest recurring expense. What's wonderful about Stripe is that there is no "minimum" service charge. If you don't do a lot of transactions, you don't pay a lot of fees. That makes it very low risk to spin up a service and give it a little time to see if it works. When I've talked to people with day jobs about their SaaS side-projects, it's comm…

Does this fact cause you any concern over stripe's decision to serve small companies for whom 130 dollars is a significant amount over large customers who will be turned off by their percentage fees? My main resistance to switching to stripe is that I can't figure out how they are going to make any money. I'd like the extra 130 dollars each month, too, but will it last?

What exactly do you mean by "large customers"? We run several million dollars worth of credit card transactions per year( through cybersource and authorize.net right now ), and we pay at or near the wholesale interchange rate.

Even so, our accounting department still can't fully untangle the mess of foreign transfer and conversion fees, float-related costs, gateway fees, amex vs visa discount rate differentials, pci compliance service fees, and all the other horrible shit that Stripe eats for you, in order to give me a straight answer as to whether or not we currently pay more or less than 0.30 + 2.9%.

This is not a hit on our accountants, cybersource, stripe, or our merchant bank - just making the point that it's not so easy to state categorically that Stripe's fees will turn off somewhat larger volume customers.

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