Stripe Billing • Hacker News Board

Re: Stripe Billing

#71

Post by tarstarr » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 6:24 PM UTC

brianwawok wrote: post #7

I see a new 0.4% to 0.7% fee, that is enough to make me start shopping competitors on Monday. The stripe processing fee is already high. It seems that all I get is some hosted invoice stuff.. which I could build in a weekend and not have to pay a fee on? Thinking about it, a medium sized SaaS company billing 15 million a year. 14,000,000 *.004 = 56k a year? For the same product they already had? Obviously it is cool…

(PM for Stripe Billing here) It’s a good question, and one that we thought a lot about before launching the product. At Stripe, we are particularly interested in making startups (especially recurring billing startups, in the case of this product) successful on Stripe. It’s one of our most important goals.

For all businesses -- not just startups -- we waive Stripe Billing fees for your first $1M in recurring billing volume so that you’re not worried about fees when you’re in the early days of growing your business. We also hope there’s much more additional value from the full set of Stripe Billing features that are included in this price -- the increase in revenue you get from our recovery product, the savings in manual operations that you get from automatic invoice reconciliation, and the flexibility in building new business models that you get from improvements we made to the core billing engine (better upgrades, prorations, metered billing & more.) And, we’ll continue to invest in building more features and creating the best end-to-end billing system for fast-growing businesses.

If you’re an existing Stripe Subscriptions user, there’s no change to your pricing or your integration: you can continue as you were. We’ve sent an email to existing users on how this affects you -- please let me know if you still have questions! (tl;dr there’s no changes to your existing pricing.)

If you ever have a question on pricing or the product, I’m happy to talk about it any time. I’m tara@stripe.com.

Re: Stripe Billing

#72

Post by jonknee » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 6:25 PM UTC

nhangen wrote: post #55

jonknee wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or you can continue to improve your actual product while Stripe takes care of the rote billing issues. That's essentially Stripe's whole pitch, you could do everything they do on your own, but it's expensive and not central to your business.

Easier said than done when your product requires that you integrate with dozens of gateways.

You could say the same thing about invoicing!

Re: Stripe Billing

#73

Post by nhangen » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 6:25 PM UTC

tarstarr wrote: post #62

nhangen wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But fees will change right?

tl;dr there's no change to pricing for existing users. There's a note on pricing in the email to existing users (but let us know if you have any questions!)

The only thing I see is that I'm given the starter plan, which means .04% surcharge after 1 million in sales.

Re: Stripe Billing

#74

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 6:25 PM UTC

mythz wrote: post #66

pbarnes_1 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is they already had this yesterday. It's literally a bunch of 'value add' features maybe you'll use for a 0.4% increase in fees you didn't ask for. Let me opt in to the new stuff.

Yeah the development of existing functionality is a sunk cost that should be optimized and depreciate in cost over time with additional volume, not incur additional charges after you're already invested the integration effort to lock yourself in to their gateway. Here they've auto-enrolled us into a new pricing scheme we didn't want or asked for.

[deleted]

Re: Stripe Billing

#75

Post by acabal » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 6:26 PM UTC

anthony_franco wrote: post #69

acabal wrote: post #61

Yikes, I've been using Stripe subscriptions happily for a few years and now I'm upset to see they're going to be charging a fee. It's unclear if the fee starts at $1MM total revenue or $1MM/year. $1MM/total would hurt a lot of the small lifestyle businesses for no gain in service--we already had subscriptions built in to the cost and we don't need invoicing or any of the other new-fangled stuff :( Paypal has free rec…

Did they email the announcement to you? If you already used Stripe subscriptions in the past, you'll be grandfathered in for free. This is the relevant line: "Since you used Stripe Subscriptions in the past year, the Stripe Billing Starter plan is included in your current pricing."

Yeah, but the Starter Plan starts charging an additional fee after $1MM (yearly? total?) revenue. So it's not grandfathering in at all, we just get shunted to the temporarily-free plan that everyone else has to start on.

Edit: Since my posting this Stripe has clarified that existing customers get the Starter package at no further cost, we we are grandfathered in.

Re: Stripe Billing

#76

Post by dmerfield » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 6:26 PM UTC

tarstarr wrote: post #62

nhangen wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But fees will change right?

tl;dr there's no change to pricing for existing users. There's a note on pricing in the email to existing users (but let us know if you have any questions!)

Glad to hear it but that's not what my email said. Here's the only mention of pricing in the email I received:

> Since you used Stripe Subscriptions in the past year, the Stripe Billing Starter plan is included in your current pricing.

The Stripe billing starter plan says it's free for the first $1m, 0.4% surcharge after that. Am I missing something?

Re: Stripe Billing

#77

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 6:27 PM UTC

anthony_franco wrote: post #69

acabal wrote: post #61

Yikes, I've been using Stripe subscriptions happily for a few years and now I'm upset to see they're going to be charging a fee. It's unclear if the fee starts at $1MM total revenue or $1MM/year. $1MM/total would hurt a lot of the small lifestyle businesses for no gain in service--we already had subscriptions built in to the cost and we don't need invoicing or any of the other new-fangled stuff :( Paypal has free rec…

Did they email the announcement to you? If you already used Stripe subscriptions in the past, you'll be grandfathered in for free. This is the relevant line: "Since you used Stripe Subscriptions in the past year, the Stripe Billing Starter plan is included in your current pricing."

[deleted]

Re: Stripe Billing

#78

Post by tarstarr » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 6:28 PM UTC

aeharding wrote: post #58

nhangen wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't it my job as a Stripe Customer to build that functionality into my own app so that I can manage it in the way that works best for my customers?

I also am confused. I've made sure that Stripe will not send any emails directly to my customers (disabling emails for successful payments, refunds) since I integrated with Stripe's webhooks for my own custom emails. Is there now some other option that I have to turn off for CC update emails?

(PM on Stripe Billing here) All emails from Stripe to customers (like credit card update emails to your customer, etc.) are off by default. This behavior is the same as all of our other emails to your customers: if you prefer to listen to webhooks & send your own, that's great!

Re: Stripe Billing

#79

Post by _kyran » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 6:28 PM UTC

encoderer wrote: post #56

People are focusing a lot on invoicing but the real power here is that you can create multi-part and tiered billing schemes now. Imagine something like "$100 a month and $10 per user" -- that was not possible using Stripe subscriptions without your customer getting two invoices. Honestly, it was laughably bad.

It was possible, using one off charges with a webhook.

Re: Stripe Billing

#80

Post by foobarbazetc » Thu, Apr 05, 2018, 6:29 PM UTC

anthony_franco wrote: post #69

acabal wrote: post #61

Yikes, I've been using Stripe subscriptions happily for a few years and now I'm upset to see they're going to be charging a fee. It's unclear if the fee starts at $1MM total revenue or $1MM/year. $1MM/total would hurt a lot of the small lifestyle businesses for no gain in service--we already had subscriptions built in to the cost and we don't need invoicing or any of the other new-fangled stuff :( Paypal has free rec…

Did they email the announcement to you? If you already used Stripe subscriptions in the past, you'll be grandfathered in for free. This is the relevant line: "Since you used Stripe Subscriptions in the past year, the Stripe Billing Starter plan is included in your current pricing."

Everyone is on the starter plan though. That makes no sense.