I love how a Ycombinator company can quickly get a HN story title changed to censor the whole "price increase" aspect being debated here.
Stripe migrates Stripe Subscriptions users to more expensive Stripe Billing
121–130 of 331 posts
Re: Stripe migrates Stripe Subscriptions users to more expensive Stripe Billing
#122Edwin from Stripe here. It’s worth distinguishing between charging money on Stripe (for which you incur payments pricing) and using Stripe Billing (which is a separately-paid product). Stripe Billing has had this pricing for a few years. For some longtime users of Subscriptions, we originally didn’t change their pricing but are doing so now. We think charging a separate fee for our Billing product is fair, given comp…
To clarify, is "Stripe Subscriptions" a subset-of/component-of/deprecated-into "Stripe Billing"?
Correct — Subscriptions was the really old one. Two years ago Billing was rolled out as Stripe's separate product for recurring charges and invoice management (https://stripe.com/billing).
Re: Stripe migrates Stripe Subscriptions users to more expensive Stripe Billing
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks pc! OT: You're very active, and usually one of the first to get involved, in Stripe-related discussions on HN. I'm curious how you manage this. Do you lurk HN all day like me and spot the new Stripe-related threads, or do others at Stripe let you know when they see a Stripe-related thread?
I've always wondered if there is a business opportunity here: a company that monitors social media for all mentions of your business and pings you about it. Maybe this already exists?
There are tons of companies that do that, with varying levels of automation and responses.
Re: Stripe migrates Stripe Subscriptions users to more expensive Stripe Billing
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
To clarify, is "Stripe Subscriptions" a subset-of/component-of/deprecated-into "Stripe Billing"?
Correct — Subscriptions was the really old one. Two years ago Billing was rolled out as Stripe's separate product for recurring charges and invoice management ( https://stripe.com/billing ).
Thanks, appreciated. I notice that the post title has been updated to clarify that as well (wasn't me, but glad someone did!).
Mod thread on title change here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25073970
Re: Stripe migrates Stripe Subscriptions users to more expensive Stripe Billing
#125(Stripe cofounder.) Hi folks -- as Edwin points out elsewhere in the thread, the article title isn't accurate. (I'll update or delete my comment if it's fixed.) [Update: it was changed. It used to read "Stripe is now charging 0.5% more for recurring charges."] You can happily make recurring charges yourself and no additional fees are incurred. Lots of Stripe customers do this and we don't charge anything extra for it…
is the Subscription API (https://stripe.com/docs/api/subscriptions) part of Stripe Billing and thus subject to the additional fee?
Re: Stripe migrates Stripe Subscriptions users to more expensive Stripe Billing
#126Would this thread have become #1 with this title?
The title used to read something like 'Stripe charges 0.5% more for subscriptions'.
edit: I would understand if this was actually the title of the page. But it isn't either.
Re: Stripe migrates Stripe Subscriptions users to more expensive Stripe Billing
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
An extra 0.5% is going to cost you "tens of thousands of dollars"? You're literally moving millions of dollars a year through your billing platform. That's not a little bit of money. That's a lot. Own it. You're not a hostage. You're deeply integrated through nobody's fault but your own.
Without knowing their business model, it really doesn't matter how much money is moving through their system. It could very well be that they have a lot of buyers because of a very low profit margin and this actually has a notable impact on the company's finances. Saying you are "held hostage" might be a bit of a dramatic way to phrase it, but for some companies a change like this actually makes a difference. Such is…
> It could very well be that they have a lot of buyers because of a very low profit margin and this actually has a notable impact on the company's finances.
This is the real problem.
From the sidelines, it's easy to dismiss an additional 0.5% overhead as trivial. After all, that's less than 1%, right?
But it's not so simple. That 0.5% comes out of the profit margin. If a company has 50% profit margins, losing that extra 0.5% isn't a big deal. However, if a company is operating on 10% margins, that 0.5% suddenly becomes an extra 5% overhead.
Re: Stripe migrates Stripe Subscriptions users to more expensive Stripe Billing
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe - they seemed really not interested in negotiating much at all and I got the impression they feel that their customers should be lucky enough to be allowed to use Stripe as a processor. My company went through negotiations with Stripe earlier this year. We were more than 1.5% + $0.10 away from our current processor, and they wouldn't budge to even match our existing rates. They kept saying they are a better val…
> Stripe Checkout with Fraud detection - which requires you to use their hosted checkout page Does it? In my experience you can just use their Hosted Fields which are actually really great.
That's not how they pitched it to us - and I asked for clarification multiple times because of how absurd the proposal was for a well established eCommerce site. Sending customers off-domain for a payment is not something we were willing to do for a normal credit card checkout flow.
Even "hosted fields" is absurd (and by that I assume you mean an iFrame you embed), and would require redesigning significant portions of the checkout process.
That, coupled with their refusal to even match our existing rates, was really off-putting. The sales people made little effort to understand our business and pain points - they just wanted to talk about how great Stripe is and all the AI stuff they do.
Re: Stripe migrates Stripe Subscriptions users to more expensive Stripe Billing
#129In my opinion, no one should be using recurring billing for any provider. If you do, you've basically tied yourselves to them--if you ever decide to move, you need to somehow get the subscription details for every customer migrated into your app! Instead, view your payment processor as just another PaymentProcessor enum. Own the recurring subscriptions yourself, or be willing to pay for someone to do it for you.
I think this is good advice or at least seriously worth considering it.
I remember DHH from Basecamp mentioning this once a few years ago. I forgot if I asked him on Twitter or if someone else did, but it came down to asking why Basecamp doesn't use Stripe's subscription API.
He said it didn't exist at the time but he also said it wasn't a ton of work to get it all working using the basic single charge API. Details are spotty since it was a random tweet from a while ago but the overall feeling of it was it's very doable.
I feel like the topic came up in one of those YouTube videos where DHH walked through real life code in Basecamp.
Even today it might be worth it. I mean if you try to integrate an abstraction on top let's say Stripe and Braintree, there's quite a lot of differences between the 2 for subscriptions. How much more work would it be to write your own subscription logic once and use it anywhere vs writing a really good abstraction.
Re: Stripe migrates Stripe Subscriptions users to more expensive Stripe Billing
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks pc! OT: You're very active, and usually one of the first to get involved, in Stripe-related discussions on HN. I'm curious how you manage this. Do you lurk HN all day like me and spot the new Stripe-related threads, or do others at Stripe let you know when they see a Stripe-related thread?
Thanks! Mostly a slightly excessive affinity for HN. But sometimes people point me to stories too.
Interesting!