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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 ca

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.

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.