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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?

#21

Post by colesantiago »

seanwilson wrote: post #15

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…

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

I had a look at Paddle (only heard about it just today) and seems to have an advantage with their VAT offering, (I thought Stripe does this already for you)

How do payouts happen with Paddle in your experience? Stripe usually happens in a week for me.

Also can't seem to see pricing on any of their pages.

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

#22

Post by seanwilson »

colesantiago wrote: post #21
seanwilson wrote: post #15

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…

> I use Paddle for taking subscription payments for a paid Chrome extension ( https://www.checkbot.io/ ). I had a look at Paddle (only heard about it just today) and seems to have an advantage with their VAT offering, (I thought Stripe does this already for you) How do payouts happen with Paddle in your experience? Stripe usually happens in a week for me. Also can't seem to see pricing on any of their pages.

Last time I asked Paddle was 5% with $0.50 per transaction.

Fastspring is more expensive with more features, and Gumroad is cheaper with less features where both deal with sales tax like Paddle does.

I'd be curious at an estimate of the accountancy costs for dealing with sales tax yourself. I'm happy to pay for less admin and peace of mind, but obviously there'd be some point where it would be a cheaper to do it yourself.

> How do payouts happen with Paddle in your experience? Stripe usually happens in a week for me.

Reliably once a month at the start of the month. Never had an issue.

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

#23

Post by mtnGoat »

array wrote: post #13
mtnGoat wrote: post #10

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

Can you provide an example of something that should be included but isn’t? My payment processing requirements are fairly standard so I’m genuinely curious.

You pay extra for reporting, you pay extra for fraud checks ( even something as basic as a blacklist, costs a percentage.) Things like that.

Saying I don't want to sell to someone with this email address, shouldn't cost me anything it's a simple check and helps both parties, less fraud is good for them and me. Unless of course they like fraud because extra fees for them?

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

#24

Post by ThePhysicist »

B2C? You probably need a combination of credit cards, Paypal and possible several others depending on your niche / platform (e.g. Apple Pay or Amazon Pay).

B2B? I'd go with Stripe for credit cards and SEPA debit but also offer bank transfer for larger tickets / customers. For our services we offer the latter for all yearly plans as some companies don't want to pay by credit card and prefer getting an invoice that their accounting department can handle. Depending on your location there are various services that can provide you an API for your bank account balance and transfers, you can then match them against the invoices mostly automatically.

There are higher-level services like Chargebee that offer multiple payment gateways and do some of the legwork for you, personally I find Stripe + some homebrew code for invoice generation and bank transfer handling easier, plus it amounts to less personal / sensitive data of your clients being stored on third-party services (if you value that kind of thing).

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

#25

Post by tigroferoce »

enos_feedler wrote: post #12
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 o…

We (Saasform - https://saasform.dev/) are building exactly something like that. Since payments are heavily tied with authentication (and since authentication and payments rarely are part of the core business) our idea is to delegate these two key (yet non-core) features to an external service.

We are currently building our MVP and we plan to release the first part as OSS by the end of the month. Eventually the whole core will be open source and there will a version as a service (a-la GitLab). The first release will be focused on startups to help them to launch faster, in the next versions we will add more growth/enterprise features.

Feel free to drop a mail to dave saasform dev if you have questions, want to contribute or if you want to be among the first users.

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

#26

Post by kmoriarty »

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…

Hope you don't mind me commenting, but I'm Kelly a product manager at Stripe. You are spot on about Stripe missing tax compliance support but we've got a few things in the works to change that, especially for SaaS businesses. Happy to share more what we're working on if you're interested -- kmoriarty@stripe.com.

On the payment method side of things, I'm curious what methods are being requested by buyers that we are missing? We do allow users to accept checks and bank transfers, so just wondering if there is a specific method we're missing (aside from PayPal)? All in all, just want to understand exactly what you are looking for in terms of that last mile support from Stripe!

Checks: https://stripe.com/docs/billing/invoices/paper-check-payment Payment Method Overview (incl. Bank Transfers): https://stripe.com/docs/payments/payment-methods/overview

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

#27

Post by futhey »

kmoriarty wrote: post #26
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…

Hope you don't mind me commenting, but I'm Kelly a product manager at Stripe. You are spot on about Stripe missing tax compliance support but we've got a few things in the works to change that, especially for SaaS businesses. Happy to share more what we're working on if you're interested -- kmoriarty@stripe.com. On the payment method side of things, I'm curious what methods are being requested by buyers that we are m…

Thanks for your thoughtful reply!

> We do allow users to accept checks and bank transfers

Some users can use the check service, but it appears very limited. I've been waiting on the invite list for 1-2 years. In that time I've set up my own workflow for handling checks, but it'll be nice when Stripe can roll that out for everyone, like US bank transfers, which work very well.

But outside the US, bank transfers get complicated, partially because billing & invoicing in multiple currencies is insanely complicated.

Example: we sell our product in dollars (US). Our customer is in Europe (Anywhere in Europe). They don't want to pay using US bank protocols, and even if they do, the fee is $20 per transaction. Stripe technically supports many European bank transfer scenarios, but only if you duplicate your product SKUs and convert them into multiple currencies. Now you have to maintain conversion rates manually across these SKUs as they diverge over time, and SEPA is really, really painful to set up for relatively low volumes in Europe.

Then, you have to learn loads about EU tax compliance, and have a bunch of extra conversations with customers about this. Submit documents back and forth. Revise invoices, and re-create subscriptions manually when invoices need to be tweaked.

For the US, Stripe has been wonderful. But for the last mile, having something like Paddle or Gumroad act as a merchant of record (which is probably outside the scope of what Stripe wants to do in 2021), is the best option for B2B SaaS founders that want to sell globally.

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

#28

Post by futhey »

colesantiago wrote: post #20
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…

Honestly you could call this growing pains. You probably won't have this problem at a scale that matters early enough to worry about it now.

But, eventually, every B2B SaaS hits a bunch of the same payment & compliance growth blockers as they start to grow up in volume and out in reach.

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

#29

Post by enos_feedler »

tigroferoce wrote: post #25
enos_feedler wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

We (Saasform - https://saasform.dev/ ) are building exactly something like that. Since payments are heavily tied with authentication (and since authentication and payments rarely are part of the core business) our idea is to delegate these two key (yet non-core) features to an external service. We are currently building our MVP and we plan to release the first part as OSS by the end of the month. Eventually the whole…

Thanks! I've signed up for the mailing list. Look forward to seeing the release.

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

#30

Post by clintonb »

futhey wrote: post #27
kmoriarty wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hope you don't mind me commenting, but I'm Kelly a product manager at Stripe. You are spot on about Stripe missing tax compliance support but we've got a few things in the works to change that, especially for SaaS businesses. Happy to share more what we're working on if you're interested -- kmoriarty@stripe.com. On the payment method side of things, I'm curious what methods are being requested by buyers that we are m…

Thanks for your thoughtful reply! > We do allow users to accept checks and bank transfers Some users can use the check service, but it appears very limited. I've been waiting on the invite list for 1-2 years. In that time I've set up my own workflow for handling checks, but it'll be nice when Stripe can roll that out for everyone, like US bank transfers, which work very well. But outside the US, bank transfers get co…

I work on Checks at Stripe. I'm sorry we've kept you waiting for so long. Our initial rollout has been primarily targeted toward users most likely to have a high volume of checks usage based on the number and value of invoices issued.

We are now in a better position to accommodate additional users. Feel free to send me your account ID or primary account email, and I can enable the functionality for your account: clintonb@stripe.com.

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