4 ms·

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

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.

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.