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Why doesn't Stripe use Stripe Billing?

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Re: Why doesn't Stripe use Stripe Billing?

#131

Post by cachvico »

Thaxll wrote: post #29
tiffanyh wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twilio is the same. They use Zoom & Slack internally, not their own video and chat offerings. Dogfooding is a good thing. You’d be surprised how few companies actually do it (which is terribly shocking).

This sounds terrible, it shows a lack of confidence in your own product, imagine if Google internally would use Zoom... I can tell you that devs that use their own product deliver better quality.

This is a good question. Does Google use Meet? Are they still subject to the frankly ridiculous max resolution of 720p?

Re: Why doesn't Stripe use Stripe Billing?

#132

Post by wharfjumper »

yeutterg wrote: post #70
traceroute66 wrote: post #54

Xero is the same and it really pisses me off. In Xero you've got something called a "Xero Network ID", which is an ID that you can give to other Xero users and they can link it to your contact record on their account, which means that invoices they raise are automatically posted in your Xero account without you having to lift a finger. Now, you would have thought that Xero would do the same for their subscription inv…

Slightly off-topic, IMO Xero has really gone downhill. The Yodlee integrations with banks fail so often these days, it makes it hard to use the product at all. When you refresh a bank/credit card feed or log in for the xth time, you have no expected timeline as to when the feed will update or whether it will even work. There are multiple buttons to reset a feed, and they do different things. It's nearly impossible to…

What country are you in?

Re: Why doesn't Stripe use Stripe Billing?

#133

Post by kurrik »

AlecSchueler wrote: post #128
longboardcat wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hopefully because there's an actual business to be building.

Yeah, that's what I figured too as I was asking that. Focus on the product first. In a way it's actually a plus point that they haven't migrated, as it shows they're clearly focused on building.

I wouldn't say it's unappetizing for us. Even contemplating the possibility offers us insight about what companies the size and complexity of Stripe need to go through in order to migrate Billing systems. e.g. back of house processes for revenue reconciliation and recognition need to work across both systems, we need to support bulk migrations of data, both systems need to recognize the "canonical biller" for a customer so that you avoid double-billing issues, you need to backfill invoices and ensure no gaps in numbering, product teams need to update their integration and provisioning code and so on. My observation is that large companies can spend 10s-100s of engineers on the order of several quarters or years to do this kind of migration safely.

We've made several internal and a few external changes over the years to help our users with these kinds of issues and in my estimation we've been getting closer to making the commitment, but as of right now we haven't done a stop-the-world effort to change systems internally.

Re: Why doesn't Stripe use Stripe Billing?

#134

Post by kurrik »

joshpadnick wrote: post #116
kurrik wrote: post #66

(I work on Stripe Billing). This is a question we raise fairly regularly internally at Stripe. The real, prosaic answer is because when we started working on Stripe Billing in 2017, Stripe had already built an internal billing system to bill its own customers. Stripe was 7 years old at that point. At the time, we got lots of feedback from the folks who had built that system. Our goal was to build a flexible billing s…

(This is my second feature request on this thread; apologies for any noise.) Stripe Billing helpfully allows you to set the original subscription start date to a past date, but only at subscription creation time. If we could modify the subscription start date, then Stripe could be authoritative for when 100% of our subscriptions actually started.

Thanks! I'm curious about your use case and specifics about how you're looking at start date and how often you'd expect to update it (i.e. is this a one-time cleanup or a regular thing?). I'd welcome an email with some details!

Re: Why doesn't Stripe use Stripe Billing?

#135

Post by jawr »

joshpadnick wrote: post #114
anamexis wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could use subscription schedules to end the subscription after 12 months. https://stripe.com/docs/billing/subscriptions/subscription-s...

Yep, tried that. But we want an auto-renewing contract of 12 months, and subscription terms require you to have an end date.

Shameless plug, but at www.salesbricks.com we separate out billing schedule and contract terms. We also handle complex deal structures, upgrades and renewals!

Re: Why doesn't Stripe use Stripe Billing?

#136

Post by 0_____0 »

Whenever I hear about a US based payment processor, I feel compelled to mention UPI, India's Unified Payment Interface.

Basically, with fairly modest investment, the Indian government put together a system to allow instant transactions between bank accounts. There are no transaction fees.

We have so many companies (sometimes the same company with multiple faces - Paypal/Venmo, Stripe, Clover, Square, all of whom want a cut of transactions for the incredible service of making a number go up in one place and down in another place. Instead of fixing bank-to-bank transfers, we're stuck with ACH, which for some godforsaken reason takes days to clear.

There's no technical reason why the US can't have a system like UPI. There's no reason why we MUST allow rent-seeking payment processors to take a cut when someone in Mumbai can make a peer or merchant transfer for free in seconds.

UPI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Payments_Interface

Re: Why doesn't Stripe use Stripe Billing?

#137

Post by phyzome »

twstdzppr wrote: post #75
tiffanyh wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twilio is the same. They use Zoom & Slack internally, not their own video and chat offerings. Dogfooding is a good thing. You’d be surprised how few companies actually do it (which is terribly shocking).

There's got to be a better term than "dogfooding"

Why? Keeps you humble.

Re: Why doesn't Stripe use Stripe Billing?

#138

Post by thunky »

Biganon wrote: post #108
kurrik wrote: post #66

(I work on Stripe Billing). This is a question we raise fairly regularly internally at Stripe. The real, prosaic answer is because when we started working on Stripe Billing in 2017, Stripe had already built an internal billing system to bill its own customers. Stripe was 7 years old at that point. At the time, we got lots of feedback from the folks who had built that system. Our goal was to build a flexible billing s…

So, same reason why Microsoft uses SAP instead of Microsoft Dynamics. They would use their own product if they were to start now, but migrating from SAP would cost them millions and take a lot of time.

Billing seems much simpler though. If this comparison is apt, it's not a great look for Stripe.

Re: Why doesn't Stripe use Stripe Billing?

#139

Post by jmacd »

jawr wrote: post #135
joshpadnick wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, tried that. But we want an auto-renewing contract of 12 months, and subscription terms require you to have an end date.

Shameless plug, but at www.salesbricks.com we separate out billing schedule and contract terms. We also handle complex deal structures, upgrades and renewals!

1.9% fee per order booked.

Re: Why doesn't Stripe use Stripe Billing?

#140

Post by spartanatreyu »

juliansimioni wrote: post #62
tiffanyh wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twilio is the same. They use Zoom & Slack internally, not their own video and chat offerings. Dogfooding is a good thing. You’d be surprised how few companies actually do it (which is terribly shocking).

Dogfooding can often be a good thing but not if your target customer is a very different type of business than your own. For example, Stripe is a _very_ large company but their product is geared mostly towards small and medium size businesses. It's very possible that in the process of making Stripe Billing work for Stripe, they'd make it work less well for their actual customers. It's the same reason why Intuit proba…

^ This.

When dogfooding, you have to be very careful that you don't end up in a bubble and only see your own needs as the priority.

There's a propensity for developers to start using their own products then changing it to suit themselves thinking that the regular users use the same product the same way. You end up with this mismatch of expectations and it can even get so bad that the developers don't believe the users who tell them that things need to change.

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