Stripe raises $600M at nearly $36B valuation • Hacker News Board

Re: Stripe raises $600M at nearly $36B valuation

#461

Post by mikeappell » Tue, Apr 21, 2020, 6:42 PM UTC

pc wrote: post #283

mikeappell wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - There seemed to be 3 or so quickstarts/tutorials for the same developer flow, at varying levels of detail (good), but they all had similar names and were difficult to distinguish from each other. My impression was that they were built on top of each other (i.e. one was X years old, another one X-2, etc.), but the old ones weren't removed? Unsure. Second this. Stripe's documentation is generally great, but when lo…

We just revamped our Connect docs... would love to hear any thoughts you have on the revised version. (Feel free to email me directly -- patrick@stripe.com -- and I'll forward your thoughts to the team.)

Oh hey, just saw your response =)

Not something I'm likely to be looking at in the nearish future, but the next time I need to do some refactoring/rolling out a new Stripe feature, I'll definitely drop you a line with my thoughts. Thanks for the heads up!

Re: Stripe raises $600M at nearly $36B valuation

#462

Post by tallytarik » Wed, Apr 22, 2020, 6:29 AM UTC

plantain wrote: post #136

pc wrote: post #75

Stripe cofounder here. This isn't really new -- it's an extension of our last round ( https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/19/fintech-start-up-stripe-notc... ). That said, we've seen a big spike in signups over the past few weeks. If any HN readers have integrated recently and have feedback, we're always eager to hear it. Feel free to email me at patrick@stripe.com and I'll route to the right team(s). As always, thank you to…

My top issues running my business on Stripe: 1) Many countries still only allow depositing a single currency (i.e. Aus/AUD), doubling the cost of transaction due to the currency conversion, even tripling when we have to convert it back to pay our bills. I always get told either "soon", or "not possible due to the law", despite competitors doing it. 2) If we were an EU company, we'd get charged 1.4%+25c on transaction…

Absolutely agree with #1. I've had a similar experience - I run a business with Stripe, also in Australia.

We charge in USD because we serve primarily US customers.

I pay for the business expenses in USD.

I've opened a US/USD bank account with Transferwise.

But I can't use it with Stripe [1]. Their only choice is to have them convert our USD earnings to AUD and pay out to an AUD bank account.

So when I pay those business expenses, I'm either:

a) paying on an Australian debit or credit card, which charge us another 3% for every international transaction (3% seems to be the standard rate across all of our banks here), or

b) carefully managing our cash flow to transfer AUD to our Transferwise account, use TW to exchange to USD, and then pay with our TW card.

We did (a) for a while, now trying (b), but I'd love to see (c): Stripe pays our USD earnings to our USD bank account.

[1] Funnily/strangely enough, I can actually ADD the USD bank account to our Stripe account. It just sits there, lonely, with a 0.00 USD balance. It took reading through the docs to realise that USD payouts are not supported for Australian Stripe accounts.

Re: Stripe raises $600M at nearly $36B valuation

#463

Post by Symbiote » Tue, Apr 28, 2020, 10:06 AM UTC

jackson1442 wrote: post #226

pc wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just very high level for those of us who only know "they charge a flat fee and a percent which makes microtransactions hard". That's pretty much the story :-). And so the questions are then whether we subsidize the transactions, batch them (as you say, though that makes refunds and statement descriptors tricky), get card networks to change their policies, or somehow shift how the payments are made (e.g. encouraging…

I'm honestly a bit surprised credit card companies haven't been more open to the option of lowering the cost of microtransactions, since that seems to be what the Internet's moving towards as a whole.

The EU had to legislate to get the fees low enough that microtransactions might possibly be reasonable.

Visa etc are now only allowed to charge a percentage, 0.2-0.3%, but the intermediate (Stripe etc) can still add a flat-rate fee.