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Cheap Recurring Payments with Stripe and AWS Lambda

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Re: Cheap Recurring Payments with Stripe and AWS Lambda

#41

Post by aquadrop »

jacquesm wrote: post #27
fenesiistvan wrote: post #9

The problem is that Stripe is still not usable in the half of the world, including my country, Romania.

I've lived for some time in Romania and I think I can see both sides of the issue here. Romania has some problems and companies like Stripe have to decide whether it is worth it to them to open up to a country that would in turn most likely (at least initially) yield relatively small volume in real transactions and a disproportionate amount of volume in fraud. From the Romanian point of view this sucks because those…

But if Stripe allows Romania it most probably will be used by local companies for worldwide internet payments, so local fraud and corruption won't be affecting Stripe per se.

Actually, I don't exactly understand what Stripe do to "prepare" for the launch in a country? They are expanding very gradually, and there are payment processing companies which basically blanket-cover almost whole world. For example Stripe still marks Germany, Austria, New Zealand etc as "preview", and they were not available some time ago, but fraud and corruption definitely is not a problem there.

Re: Cheap Recurring Payments with Stripe and AWS Lambda

#42

Post by devdoomari »

hiciu wrote: post #40
oliwarner wrote: post #15

~3%, dirt cheap?! Why are so many of you so happy to throw so much cash away to process money? I know Stripe is lovely to integrate but as a business you have to shop around. In the UK (and EU) card processing is much cheaper. Stripe is closer to 2% but if you shop around, you'll find somebody who'll offer you 0.8-0.9%, give you free terminals and no monthly contract fees. Edit for those asking: Worldpay and Handepay…

re worldpay - they may be cheap, but you get what you pay for. Their backend still does not support SNI for payment callbacks. I had to debug once my client's integration with their hosted payment form (the one under https://mms.cardsaveonlinepayments.com ) - and during debugging I have seen things like this: http://hiciu.org/2016-02-06-010735_1920x1043_scrot.png http://hiciu.org/2016-02-06-010743_1920x1043_scrot.png…

+1 even their website isn't https... (even for their contact-us page and quote page)

Re: Cheap Recurring Payments with Stripe and AWS Lambda

#43

Post by robinjfisher »

Denzel wrote: post #35

This is simple and cool. You'd still need some way to authorize subscribers on your website, no? Therefore, you couldn't create a serverless subscription blog/website... unless I'm missing something.

The example given in the article is a pay-to-subscribe mailing list run on Mailchimp where you can use an API call to add the paying user to the list.

Re: Cheap Recurring Payments with Stripe and AWS Lambda

#44

Post by robinjfisher »

keerthiko wrote: post #34
cpt_snowcrash wrote: post #31

I never got around getting the true value prop of recurring solutions such as chargebee etc when used on top of stripe. Stripe already provides excellent recurring subscription payments api out of the box, so why use any of these services. Am I missing something ?

We transitioned from Stripe to Chargebee importing our Stripe stuff. It was a solid 2 man-months of engineering (of our 4-person company) and we questioned the cost through the process, but it has really paid off. Stripe was a great starting point for us to collect direct payments, but as we grew Chargebee has proven very worthwhile. The main value is central customer and subscription database, which muxes multiple p…

Have you done any formal ROI on the move to Chargebee?

I moved from Chargify to Stripe about a year ago (to save on cost) and the biggest challenge was getting customers to re-enter their card details for Stripe.

I offered a coupon for 50% off a month's subscription to entice them to do so but still resulted in a couple of months of paying both Chargify and Stripe while I chased the errant customers.

Re: Cheap Recurring Payments with Stripe and AWS Lambda

#46

Post by ctcliff »

I maintain a small open source library for managing payments websites that uses this architecture [1]. My Lambda costs have been about $0.04 per transaction.

Also you can provision AWS from the browser using a CloudFormation template and a Launch Stack URL [2].

[1]: https://github.com/christophercliff/flatmarket. [2]: https://github.com/christophercliff/flatmarket#automated-dep...

Re: Cheap Recurring Payments with Stripe and AWS Lambda

#47

Post by keerthiko »

robinjfisher wrote: post #44
keerthiko wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We transitioned from Stripe to Chargebee importing our Stripe stuff. It was a solid 2 man-months of engineering (of our 4-person company) and we questioned the cost through the process, but it has really paid off. Stripe was a great starting point for us to collect direct payments, but as we grew Chargebee has proven very worthwhile. The main value is central customer and subscription database, which muxes multiple p…

Have you done any formal ROI on the move to Chargebee? I moved from Chargify to Stripe about a year ago (to save on cost) and the biggest challenge was getting customers to re-enter their card details for Stripe. I offered a coupon for 50% off a month's subscription to entice them to do so but still resulted in a couple of months of paying both Chargify and Stripe while I chased the errant customers.

Chargebee had a one-time free customer database import process from Stripe, does Chargify/Stripe not support any kind of customer import/transfer?

I can't give numbers for our ROI, but we spend far less time providing payment/subscription support, and pay a flat extra cost to Chargebee for the added abstraction layer they provide so it's easy to evaluate -- worth roughly 100 subscribers/month, and since shifting to Chargebee we gained more than that number within the first month beyond our regular month/month growth.

Re: Cheap Recurring Payments with Stripe and AWS Lambda

#48

Post by mrunkel »

klausjensen wrote: post #26
mrunkel wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is Atlas in this context?

Stripe's offering to set up a company in the US, with bank accounts and everything. https://stripe.com/atlas

Ahh. thanks. I googled for Atlas, but as you can imagine, lots of things came up..

Re: Cheap Recurring Payments with Stripe and AWS Lambda

#49

Post by imron »

oliwarner wrote: post #28
imron wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because people don't start off at scale, and because setting up a merchant bank can be a difficult hassle (more so if you're looking to accept multiple currencies), and because the cost of implementing features provided by stripe exceeds the amount lost in extra fees. Once you hit scale it might be worth switching, but for many smaller sites Stripe is much more viable.

It's hassle. Much less than it used to be. It's also 2-point-whatever percent of all your revenue. The tipping point isn't as far out as you might think. I'm not pretending it's for everybody, again, I'm just shocked that "oh we'll use Stripe because it's easy and cheaper than PayPal" is the group mentality (esp here).

If you're doing less than a hundred thousand a year in revenue, you will likely save in development costs what you would pay in fees (3% x $100,000 = $3,000 = ~week of development costs).

Depending on which Stripe features you make use of and would have to re-implement yourself it may even make Stripe more affordable up to a couple of hundred thousand in revenue.

That makes it very attractive for side projects or bootstrapped companies, and side projects and bootstrapped companies often grow in to larger things, and at that point, changing out the payment processing is low on the list of priorities.

Re: Cheap Recurring Payments with Stripe and AWS Lambda

#50

Post by nitam »

kawsper wrote: post #37
oliwarner wrote: post #15

~3%, dirt cheap?! Why are so many of you so happy to throw so much cash away to process money? I know Stripe is lovely to integrate but as a business you have to shop around. In the UK (and EU) card processing is much cheaper. Stripe is closer to 2% but if you shop around, you'll find somebody who'll offer you 0.8-0.9%, give you free terminals and no monthly contract fees. Edit for those asking: Worldpay and Handepay…

Currently it is legal for companies in the EU to ask the customer to pay the processing fees, some call it surcharging. EU seems to want to get rid of this practice, I wonder if it becomes a company expense, that we will see companies caring more about the processing fees.

how can you get rid of it? I can always increase the price.
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