Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why doesn't Stripe use Stripe Billing?

getlago.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 193 posts

Re: Why doesn't Stripe use Stripe Billing?

#181

Post by aeyes »

crystaln wrote: post #148
Biganon wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Right, but, don’t they want to sell their product against SAP? They would learn so much and then be dogfooding. I’m not surprised Microsoft hasn’t done this, because Microsoft. Microsoft doesn’t build products for users it builds products for its program managers.

I am sure a company like Microsoft has quite a few unique needs. So just getting everything implemented to even be in a position to dogfood would take away development time which could be better invested to improve the experience for paying or potential customers.

The departments are also not the same, the developers might be happy to have a customer like Microsoft but the hundreds of people using something else today really don't gain anything. They would have to retrain and take on a huge migration. And for a system that has grown for such a long time you can be sure that there are a lot of undocumented edge cases for weird business needs.

Smaller companies have burned millions trying to move off SAP. And there is nothing Microsoft can do or learn to make the migration to their product easier because it's all business problems, not so much technology. Their potential future customers aren't billion dollar companies which are on SAP today.

Re: Why doesn't Stripe use Stripe Billing?

#182

Post by throw_nbvc1234 »

nickmooney wrote: post #175
throw_nbvc1234 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I shuddered a bit when i heard that some GCP services are just external wrappers over internal systems. Feels like a bad setup for everyone involved: customers, wrapper owners and internal system owners.

What services have you heard this about?

Was mentioned in an onsite interview i had with them a few years back. Maybe i misunderstood but it seemed that internal teams didn't integrate with the same API as external customers. Not sure the other reply means that the "wrapper" doesn't exist or the wrapper's are just named the same as the underlying service or i just misunderstood the point.

Re: Why doesn't Stripe use Stripe Billing?

#184

Post by sturadnidge »

RockingGoodNite wrote: post #166
sturadnidge wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think people should be down voting you for this comment, but I imagine the reason why is because that's generally not how things work at large companies. Someone in product and/or sales might have made the same argument you have, but in my experience the business response to that argument is something along the line of "you can quantify the cost, but you can't quantify the value (i.e. sales upside) and there'…

>> Or perhaps more correctly, value is value. So, Microsoft's own Dynamics offers no greater value than their competitor SAP, even within ... Microsoft.

I mean there's no right or wrong in any of this, but it's not like that would be an invalid takeaway.

Re: Why doesn't Stripe use Stripe Billing?

#185

Post by vore »

throw_nbvc1234 wrote: post #167
Robotbeat wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just personally, I value companies who "dogfood" their products a lot more than similar companies that don't. An example is 3D printers. Prusa makes fantastic 3D printers, and about half of the structural parts for their printers are printed on their own printers. So they have 600 of their own 3D printers printing 24/7 printing their own parts. That means they are forced to address long-term durability and reliabilit…

I shuddered a bit when i heard that some GCP services are just external wrappers over internal systems. Feels like a bad setup for everyone involved: customers, wrapper owners and internal system owners.

Why is this bad? The customers get the same business-critical service Google is using.

Re: Why doesn't Stripe use Stripe Billing?

#186

Post by kyrra »

0_____0 wrote: post #136

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…

You're ignoring history and momentum. (I am likely wrong on some parts of the below). Credit cards have been present in the United States for a century (I believe originating as store credit), within becoming ubiquitous after the mag strip was invented in the 1970s, and really starting to replace checks and cash in the '80s and '90s. Because of this, the US had a very large infrastructure and consumer momentum to continue to use credit cards. Adopting another system requires banks and merchants to all agree on such the system. Without government intervention, that's pretty hard.

Many nations didn't have such systems in place, so they were prime to have their own technology be brought forward. That's why WePay was able to spread in China.

The other huge factor here is that forcing things on companies in the US is extremely difficult. Our constitution and laws make it a lot more difficult for the government to force certain behavior on private businesses. Along with the cultural idea of free enterprise, people don't like the government making decisions for them on how a business should be run.

In India, the Bank of India and the government was able to force UPI down everyone's throat, and companies have no choice on the matter.

Re: Why doesn't Stripe use Stripe Billing?

#187

Post by grensley »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #155
grensley wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Facebook outage last year being a great example of this. They lost basically all internal communications.

Is there a public write-up or blog post about it? It sounds interesting to read about!

Wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Facebook_outage

Their report: https://www.facebook.com/business/news/update-about-the-octo...

Re: Why doesn't Stripe use Stripe Billing?

#188

Post by Foobar8568 »

RockingGoodNite wrote: post #166
sturadnidge wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think people should be down voting you for this comment, but I imagine the reason why is because that's generally not how things work at large companies. Someone in product and/or sales might have made the same argument you have, but in my experience the business response to that argument is something along the line of "you can quantify the cost, but you can't quantify the value (i.e. sales upside) and there'…

>> Or perhaps more correctly, value is value. So, Microsoft's own Dynamics offers no greater value than their competitor SAP, even within ... Microsoft.

Migrating from SAP to MS CRM for Microsoft would be more a billion project than just a few millions.

Re: Why doesn't Stripe use Stripe Billing?

#189

Post by jononor »

RockingGoodNite wrote: post #166
sturadnidge wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think people should be down voting you for this comment, but I imagine the reason why is because that's generally not how things work at large companies. Someone in product and/or sales might have made the same argument you have, but in my experience the business response to that argument is something along the line of "you can quantify the cost, but you can't quantify the value (i.e. sales upside) and there'…

>> Or perhaps more correctly, value is value. So, Microsoft's own Dynamics offers no greater value than their competitor SAP, even within ... Microsoft.

Sometimes decision are not reflection of the merits of the individual options, but of the fundamentals of the challenge. Changing a business platform is an incredibly invasive/disruptive move, with huge costs (money and opportunity) and meager gains. Does not mean that say, Dynamics, is not any good.

Re: Why doesn't Stripe use Stripe Billing?

#190

Post by yati »

throw_nbvc1234 wrote: post #182
nickmooney wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What services have you heard this about?

Was mentioned in an onsite interview i had with them a few years back. Maybe i misunderstood but it seemed that internal teams didn't integrate with the same API as external customers. Not sure the other reply means that the "wrapper" doesn't exist or the wrapper's are just named the same as the underlying service or i just misunderstood the point.

My impression (I work at Google) is that internal interfaces to some of these services have a lot of Google-specific stuff that are hard to map to non-Google requirements.
Post reply on HN