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Did you look into Braintree? If so, why did you choose Stripe over Braintree? The reason I ask is because I recently looked into this and found Braintree to hav

Did you look into Braintree? If so, why did you choose Stripe over Braintree? The reason I ask is because I recently looked into this and found Braintree to have much better service so far. I'm wondering if there is something about Stripe that I'm not taking into account, or if they are just growing too fast and not giving new customers as good service.

jcr 11y ago
Well, Stripe is a YC-funded company, so around here on HN, you may notice a strong bias in their favor, myself included. With that said, I'll give you my own little positive Stripe story. When Stripe was just barely starting out in YC (i.e. just announced but before demo day), I noticed a few minor typos in their docs. I got on the Stripe IRC channel, and asked where they wanted the diff sent, and Patrick Collison (founder) told me to just mail it to support@ since he'd be getting it anyhow. Patch sent, good deed done, and I'm all finished... or so I thought. Afterwards, they sent me a Stripe t-shirt just to say thanks. Stripe is more than just developer-centric and easy to use, the people running the show are a class act.
toomuchtodo 11y ago
I'd be interested in hearing about where Stripe's service was lacking.
- regecks 11y ago
  Their fraud prevention is practically non existent and they won't lift a finger to help you. I recently had to layer minFraud on top of Stripe because so many (very obviously) stolen cards were being let through.
- ChrisDutrow 11y ago
  I speculate that they have grown very fast and have changed from a small firm that provides good service to a large firm that is capitalizing as much as they can from their situation. With paypal and Braintree, I was able to easily get someone on the phone. Even though Braintree has been acquired by Paypal, Paypal had the best service, Braintree had issues with their phone system and the sales people were not as knowledgeable or helpful - this I did not expect from Paypal. The person from Stripe explained that he could not talk to me on the phone (only e-mail) because they are growing so fast. Growing fast is a great thing for the people who own and invested in Stripe, but it is bad for me as the customer because it means I will get a more inferior experience while they catch up with their growth. (Even once their growth is complete, its hard to say what kind of company it will have turned into) If I'm going to run over 100k a year in sales through a company, I think it is very reasonable to expect to get someone on the phone. Also, this is a very important thing for our company. Its risky and unwise to do this much business with a company that I cannot get on the phone. The next issue I had with Stripe is that they didn't have much interest in working with my small company. My first hint of this was their contact form. The lowest tier I could select on our monthly credit card revenue was "<75k a month". So I wasn't surprised when the rep explained to me that I couldn't get a rate below 2.9% until we did 80k a month in sales. We are a small company that does about 9k a month credit card sales. Paypal was willing to give us 2.5% because we did more than 3k a month, and if we went up to 10k a month, they would automatically reduce our rate again. Braintree quoted 2.4% based on our sales volume.
  - compumike 11y ago
    At $9K/month, the difference between 2.9% and 2.5% rates is 0.004 * 9000 = $36/month. If using Stripe's super-friendly APIs (and management portal) isn't worth $36/month to you compared to PayPal's APIs, that's certainly your choice. The "widest" gap will be if you grow to doing just under Stripe's $80K/month cutoff for their first tier of rate discounts, paying them 2.9% while you'd be at 2.2% with PayPal. Here the difference is at most 0.007 * 80000 = $560/month. At that point, how much developer time is it worth investing for you to "recover" 0.7% of revenue? Or is there some better use of that valuable time to grow your business by 0.7% -- at which time you have access to more favorable rates from Stripe? (Disclaimer: happily abandoned PayPal's API several years ago, using Stripe happily since then! Maybe PayPal has improved, I don't know.)
    - ChrisDutrow 11y ago
      You are right that extra developer time wouldn't be worth the savings. The problem is that they communicated to me that my business is not worth very much to them. This is a precarious situation for my company to be in because our merchant processor is a key part of our business. My experience as an entrepreneur has taught me that as a general rule, its not a good idea to work with companies that don't care about you as a customer or for which you are not a target customer. The reason this is not a good idea is because it significantly increases the risk that I will run into unanticipated problems that they will be unlikely to fix. Stripe basically told me that I am not their target customer and that they don't care about me unless my business is 10x the size it is now. Based on their contact form, I was a little surprised that they were willing to take me as a customer at all. Perhaps a good analogy is the big bank vs credit union situation. If I was a very large business, I would have a good experience working with a large, national bank. But (I think) statistically speaking, individual consumers are more likely to be happy with smaller credit unions where they are worth more as a customer.
- Silhouette 11y ago
  Unfortunately it seems to be a general issue now. Stripe used to be attractive, particularly for smaller and/or newer businesses, because of the rapid set-up and hands-off approach, the developer-friendly API, their famously well-presented and well-maintained documentation, immediate responses by in-the-loop staff to support questions, and generally a "we get it" kind of attitude that felt like working with a peer who understands your concerns. Sadly, in recent times those seem to have given way to an ever-changing and sometimes breaking API, quite often incorrect or incomplete documentation, almost copy-and-paste half-responses sometimes arriving days after the original mail (or not), and generally an "if you're going through these channels, you probably aren't that important" kind of vibe. The thing is, without those developer-friendly, real-person characteristics, what is left for a small business is mostly just another payments service with higher than average fees, a crazy high failed transaction rate in our experience (YMMV), and below par anti-fraud and security options. (Edit: They also seem to have had a lot of minor outages around their API recently, which don't always seem to be reflected in their pretty mostly-green status display.) There is a lot more competition in the payments space than there was even just a few years ago, both for processing services and for the payment methods themselves, and others do some or all of these things better today. It seems clear at this point that Stripe have become victims of their own well-deserved success, and it looks like their focus has shifted to larger and presumably more lucrative businesses rather than the start-ups and side businesses where they established their reputation in the early days. That's an entirely understandable business move on their part, and I'm not going to criticise them for running a business like a business. However, objectively it also means they're no longer attractive for the smaller businesses in the way they once were.
  - ChrisDutrow 11y ago
    I totally agree with you on all points. I think its really interesting how businesses have lifecyle patterns, where business build up resources like "goodwill" over periods of years, then management changes and they go into a phase of higher profits where they burn off goodwill. (I think some executives enter into their positions intending to burn off previously accumulated goodwill and funnel the profits into their bonuses). Right now, Stripe is burning off some of their goodwill, but (based on what little I know), I don't really see an alternative for them that doesn't involve just turning away customers. It would be nice (but a total fantasy) to be able to measure how much the lost goodwill is actually costing over the long term vs. profit from the increase in company size now.
- akhatri_aus 11y ago
  Stripe takes 7 days from payment to your bank account. Nice UX but lacking under the hood compared to Braintree.
univerio 11y ago
Stripe has a much, much better API. I've used both, and the code I've had to write to integrate with Braintree is about 3x as much as the code I've had to write for Stripe.
chrisgoman 11y ago
Braintree may have better service but day-to-day stuff (like the UI and how everything generally "works") is much more inferior than Stripe

jcr 11y ago

Well, Stripe is a YC-funded company, so around here on HN, you may notice a strong bias in their favor, myself included. With that said, I'll give you my own little positive Stripe story. When Stripe was just barely starting out in YC (i.e. just announced but before demo day), I noticed a few minor typos in their docs. I got on the Stripe IRC channel, and asked where they wanted the diff sent, and Patrick Collison (founder) told me to just mail it to support@ since he'd be getting it anyhow. Patch sent, good deed done, and I'm all finished... or so I thought. Afterwards, they sent me a Stripe t-shirt just to say thanks. Stripe is more than just developer-centric and easy to use, the people running the show are a class act.

toomuchtodo 11y ago

I'd be interested in hearing about where Stripe's service was lacking.

regecks 11y ago
Their fraud prevention is practically non existent and they won't lift a finger to help you. I recently had to layer minFraud on top of Stripe because so many (very obviously) stolen cards were being let through.
ChrisDutrow 11y ago
I speculate that they have grown very fast and have changed from a small firm that provides good service to a large firm that is capitalizing as much as they can from their situation. With paypal and Braintree, I was able to easily get someone on the phone. Even though Braintree has been acquired by Paypal, Paypal had the best service, Braintree had issues with their phone system and the sales people were not as knowledgeable or helpful - this I did not expect from Paypal. The person from Stripe explained that he could not talk to me on the phone (only e-mail) because they are growing so fast. Growing fast is a great thing for the people who own and invested in Stripe, but it is bad for me as the customer because it means I will get a more inferior experience while they catch up with their growth. (Even once their growth is complete, its hard to say what kind of company it will have turned into) If I'm going to run over 100k a year in sales through a company, I think it is very reasonable to expect to get someone on the phone. Also, this is a very important thing for our company. Its risky and unwise to do this much business with a company that I cannot get on the phone. The next issue I had with Stripe is that they didn't have much interest in working with my small company. My first hint of this was their contact form. The lowest tier I could select on our monthly credit card revenue was "<75k a month". So I wasn't surprised when the rep explained to me that I couldn't get a rate below 2.9% until we did 80k a month in sales. We are a small company that does about 9k a month credit card sales. Paypal was willing to give us 2.5% because we did more than 3k a month, and if we went up to 10k a month, they would automatically reduce our rate again. Braintree quoted 2.4% based on our sales volume.
- compumike 11y ago
  At $9K/month, the difference between 2.9% and 2.5% rates is 0.004 * 9000 = $36/month. If using Stripe's super-friendly APIs (and management portal) isn't worth $36/month to you compared to PayPal's APIs, that's certainly your choice. The "widest" gap will be if you grow to doing just under Stripe's $80K/month cutoff for their first tier of rate discounts, paying them 2.9% while you'd be at 2.2% with PayPal. Here the difference is at most 0.007 * 80000 = $560/month. At that point, how much developer time is it worth investing for you to "recover" 0.7% of revenue? Or is there some better use of that valuable time to grow your business by 0.7% -- at which time you have access to more favorable rates from Stripe? (Disclaimer: happily abandoned PayPal's API several years ago, using Stripe happily since then! Maybe PayPal has improved, I don't know.)
  - ChrisDutrow 11y ago
    You are right that extra developer time wouldn't be worth the savings. The problem is that they communicated to me that my business is not worth very much to them. This is a precarious situation for my company to be in because our merchant processor is a key part of our business. My experience as an entrepreneur has taught me that as a general rule, its not a good idea to work with companies that don't care about you as a customer or for which you are not a target customer. The reason this is not a good idea is because it significantly increases the risk that I will run into unanticipated problems that they will be unlikely to fix. Stripe basically told me that I am not their target customer and that they don't care about me unless my business is 10x the size it is now. Based on their contact form, I was a little surprised that they were willing to take me as a customer at all. Perhaps a good analogy is the big bank vs credit union situation. If I was a very large business, I would have a good experience working with a large, national bank. But (I think) statistically speaking, individual consumers are more likely to be happy with smaller credit unions where they are worth more as a customer.
Silhouette 11y ago
Unfortunately it seems to be a general issue now. Stripe used to be attractive, particularly for smaller and/or newer businesses, because of the rapid set-up and hands-off approach, the developer-friendly API, their famously well-presented and well-maintained documentation, immediate responses by in-the-loop staff to support questions, and generally a "we get it" kind of attitude that felt like working with a peer who understands your concerns. Sadly, in recent times those seem to have given way to an ever-changing and sometimes breaking API, quite often incorrect or incomplete documentation, almost copy-and-paste half-responses sometimes arriving days after the original mail (or not), and generally an "if you're going through these channels, you probably aren't that important" kind of vibe. The thing is, without those developer-friendly, real-person characteristics, what is left for a small business is mostly just another payments service with higher than average fees, a crazy high failed transaction rate in our experience (YMMV), and below par anti-fraud and security options. (Edit: They also seem to have had a lot of minor outages around their API recently, which don't always seem to be reflected in their pretty mostly-green status display.) There is a lot more competition in the payments space than there was even just a few years ago, both for processing services and for the payment methods themselves, and others do some or all of these things better today. It seems clear at this point that Stripe have become victims of their own well-deserved success, and it looks like their focus has shifted to larger and presumably more lucrative businesses rather than the start-ups and side businesses where they established their reputation in the early days. That's an entirely understandable business move on their part, and I'm not going to criticise them for running a business like a business. However, objectively it also means they're no longer attractive for the smaller businesses in the way they once were.
- ChrisDutrow 11y ago
  I totally agree with you on all points. I think its really interesting how businesses have lifecyle patterns, where business build up resources like "goodwill" over periods of years, then management changes and they go into a phase of higher profits where they burn off goodwill. (I think some executives enter into their positions intending to burn off previously accumulated goodwill and funnel the profits into their bonuses). Right now, Stripe is burning off some of their goodwill, but (based on what little I know), I don't really see an alternative for them that doesn't involve just turning away customers. It would be nice (but a total fantasy) to be able to measure how much the lost goodwill is actually costing over the long term vs. profit from the increase in company size now.
akhatri_aus 11y ago
Stripe takes 7 days from payment to your bank account. Nice UX but lacking under the hood compared to Braintree.

univerio 11y ago

Stripe has a much, much better API. I've used both, and the code I've had to write to integrate with Braintree is about 3x as much as the code I've had to write for Stripe.

chrisgoman 11y ago

Braintree may have better service but day-to-day stuff (like the UI and how everything generally "works") is much more inferior than Stripe