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Stripe Data vs. Open‐Source Alternatives: A MRR Example

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Re: Stripe Data vs. Open‐Source Alternatives: A MRR Example

#61

Post by [deleted] »

bastawhiz wrote: post #60
chucky123 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope, b2b saas. We charge a decent amount. Scroll down Stripe's pricing page, they will charge you for literally everything. We have annual pricing and that definitely results in lower fees and other stuff. But only a small percentage of our users are on the annual plan.

I used to work at Stripe and I'm very familiar with the pricing. I'm simply perplexed at how you can possibly be paying them up to 7% if your payments are B2B-sized. BNPL acceptance is the only thing that even comes close to that. You'd need to load up on nearly every single metered feature (billing, Tax, chargeback protection, revenue recognition, radar for teams, etc) to pay that much with sticker pricing.

[deleted]

Re: Stripe Data vs. Open‐Source Alternatives: A MRR Example

#62

Post by Zenzero »

bastawhiz wrote: post #56

There's no formal definition of MRR. Do you count transactions refunded as fraud after the fact? What about transactions that were partially refunded by your support team? What month do transactions that take more than one day to settle fall in? Of course that needs to be timezone-adjusted as well. What about the case where recurring transactions fall on the 30th and 31st of each month? They'll be processed on the la…

Much of this would be solved if you specified whether you used cash or accrual basis

Re: Stripe Data vs. Open‐Source Alternatives: A MRR Example

#63

Post by asdfqwertzxcv »

benmcredmond wrote: post #39

If this is something you're struggling with... It's one of the core use-cases we're solving for at Equals ( https://equals.com ). We sync your Stripe data to a data warehouse and give you an MRR by customer by day table. You can use this table in our data connected spreadsheet to report on your business.

Would equals be simple enough for a staff member with limited accounting and tech background who has been putting simple revenue, churn, product trend reports together by hand using our stripe data? If so, how can we reach out to schedule a meeting to discuss?

Re: Stripe Data vs. Open‐Source Alternatives: A MRR Example

#64

Post by ankit77 »

chucky123 wrote: post #28
samdung wrote: post #22

We don't bill much with Stripe but have been using it for a very long time. At this point i have to say that Stripe is just extracting it's tax. Anything you do on Stripe is taxed. If you want to get an invoice paid that is charged 0.4% and then you have to pay $2 just to generate an invoice to provide proof of transaction to your customer. And then recurring billing charges went up to 0.7% (from 0.5%) without any re…

100%. Stripe is a blackhole. For my current project, I pay nearly 5-7% on each transaction to Stripe. For my next project, I'm implementing custom billing and using Stripe just as a payment processor.

Check out getopenpay.com

I ran into the same issues / frustrations as you when I bootstrapped my previous business to 30M ARR. I hated paying the "Stripe tax" and having vendor lock in with Stripe

Feel free to reach out to us on the website and we'll take care of you with free subscription management for a year

Re: Stripe Data vs. Open‐Source Alternatives: A MRR Example

#65

Post by ankit77 »

chucky123 wrote: post #33
moralestapia wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you (and GP, and others in the thread) suggest alternatives? I'm about to work on payments for a new product, would like to try something new!

i don't use a 3rd party billing solution. I straight up created my own. If you have a single type of pricing(eg, variable, or tiered) its very easy rolling your own. The issues happen when you change from variable to tiered(or vice versa), change from anniversary to calendary dates, add coupons, per user custom pricing, credits, etc etc. I don't recommend building your own if you aren't familiar with Stripe or any ot…

I started OpenPay (getopenpay.com) as an alternative to Stripe. We're giving subscription management for free to the HN community for a year

We support all the edge cases you mentioned around variable/tiered pricing, coupons, etc all part of our solution

Re: Stripe Data vs. Open‐Source Alternatives: A MRR Example

#66

Post by ankit77 »

moralestapia wrote: post #32
chucky123 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100%. Stripe is a blackhole. For my current project, I pay nearly 5-7% on each transaction to Stripe. For my next project, I'm implementing custom billing and using Stripe just as a payment processor.

Can you (and GP, and others in the thread) suggest alternatives? I'm about to work on payments for a new product, would like to try something new!

I'm the founder of OpenPay (getopenpay.com) and a lot of Stripe customers migrated to us as an alternative. We give you all the functionality that Stripe provides without the "Stripe tax"

Feel free to reach out to us and we'll hook you up

Re: Stripe Data vs. Open‐Source Alternatives: A MRR Example

#67

Post by ankit77 »

internetter wrote: post #43
moralestapia wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you (and GP, and others in the thread) suggest alternatives? I'm about to work on payments for a new product, would like to try something new!

I'm seriously considering https://www.paddle.com/ . For 5% + $0.5, they promise that you'll never need to worry about - Chargebacks - Global tax compliance - Billing support - Fraud - Subscription management Their API is... worse... and it is expensive... but mathing it out it is like 1% for all that peace of mind. Feels worth it.

Check out my company OpenPay (getopenpay.com)

I previously bootstrapped a business to 30M ARR and was sick of paying the "subscription tax"

We give you all the tools you need to build and run your subscription business without having to integrate a dozen different tools together and tear your hair out (and also break the bank). Feel free to reach out to us via the contact form–we're giving people on HN one year free

Re: Stripe Data vs. Open‐Source Alternatives: A MRR Example

#68

Post by evolve2k »

ledgerdev wrote: post #59
evolve2k wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lago doesn’t store card data. You still use a Payment Processor like Stripe to process one-off payments. But the Subscription management and data related to subscriptions moves into Lago, in short you save on the fee you pay Stripe to manage subscriptions (Called Stripe Payments), it’s aprx 2% of the charge. Who has subscriptions and when they are charged is now handled in your Lago code. You can also then mix in oth…

So lago is storing token issued by processor, then using that token to trigger payments?

Yes.

Re: Stripe Data vs. Open‐Source Alternatives: A MRR Example

#69

Post by jjeaff »

prettygood wrote: post #44
sb8244 wrote: post #21

Stripe's MRR number is NOT correct for my application (shows as higher by 1-2%). I have an external script over their API that calculates MRR, and every single tool that calculates MRR has had a different number . It's actually a huge PITA, although my custom script works well enough.

We had the same issue, but it was over by 10-20% in our case. Discussed this with them multiple times, and the last response I got was: "I've checked in with our engineering teams, and we unfortunately don't yet have a fix or timeline to share here, though we have made additional progress on scoping a path forward. It's extremely complex on our end, as existing data models don't have the required information in place…

My interpretation of backfilling here is that they need to architect the data in a different way to be able to have all the information needed to calculate the MRR correctly. Then once the data is modelled how they need it, they have to backfill the new model. Basically like your export to csv step. I'm sure the data that fills your csv export is coming in from a dozen different tables and sources.

Re: Stripe Data vs. Open‐Source Alternatives: A MRR Example

#70

Post by jjeaff »

chucky123 wrote: post #29
Palmik wrote: post #24

The article is interesting, but it's not clear how Lago fixes the issue. As far as I know, Lago starts in the low thousands per month. If you go with the self hosted route, you might also just process Stripe's API (backfill using API or data export, use webhooks to keep it up to date). It's actually much easier than onboarding with Lago I would say.

Exactly, Lago seems like its riding the open source wave. Nobody reasonable is going to self host this.

I see no reason why one wouldn't self host this. Subscription and billing data is such a crucial part of any business, I'm surprised more don't handle it internally.
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