24 ms·

Stripe Billing

620 points by craigkerstiens 9y ago

lossolo 9y ago
Can anyone explain me why Stripe is so hyped on HN ? It's the most expensive card processing service I know. I am using one where I pay 1.9% for all my clients and another for EU clients where I pay only 1.7%. I don't see anything in their offer that is worth paying additional 1.2% of my business to card payment processor.
- jacquesm 9y ago
  It's YC backed and run by two very popular HN'ers, the Collison brothers. https://www.startupgrind.com/blog/the-collison-brothers-and-story-behind-the-founding-of-stripe/ https://www.startupgrind.com/blog/the-collison-brothers-and-... Also, payments is something that every real start-up will hit sooner or later.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- burlesona 9y ago
  What are you using?
- cristinacordova 9y ago
  (Stripe here) Stripe's pricing varies depending on the country you're doing business from. If useful, you can see our pricing for businesses in the UK here, which starts at 1.4% + 20p for European cards: https://stripe.com/gb/pricing https://stripe.com/gb/pricing
  - lossolo 9y ago
    I am not from UK but I live in EU. I can't use Stripe at all: "Once Stripe is supported in your country, you’ll be able to accept payments from customers anywhere in the world."
    - cristinacordova 9y ago
      We operate in 25 countries today and our pricing varies by country. We're not everywhere yet, but we're working on it: https://stripe.com/global https://stripe.com/global
- lioeters 9y ago
  "another for EU clients where I pay only 1.7%" May I ask which payment processor you're using in the EU?
  - lossolo 9y ago
    Cardinity. Comparison with Stripe here: https://cardinity.com/stripe-alternative https://cardinity.com/stripe-alternative
    - lioeters 9y ago
      Thank you for the information!
- skinnymuch 9y ago
  What are you using for just 1.9%? No flat fee on top of that?
- conado 9y ago
  I work at Accumulus which has a recurring billing platform that de-couples payment processors from recurring billing, i.e. invoicing, price plans, customer management and notifications, etc. The thing is that you don't want to be locked into a particular payment processor long term. Convenience sells, but be mindful of lock-in. As companies grow, they get better rates with different merchant account providers. As a company, you want maximum flexibility and negotiation ability to take your business to those who give you the best value, globally. We are putting together an offer specifically for Stripe users who want to avoid lock-in and save money long term. If you are interested, you can get on the list here https://accumulus.com/it-is-your-revenue https://accumulus.com/it-is-your-revenue
  - keithnz 9y ago
    but now how do we eliminate lock in to billing platforms which also have their own rates that vary with provider?
- Silhouette 9y ago
  Can anyone explain me why Stripe is so hyped on HN ? When Stripe launched, the alternatives for a new or small business that wanted to charge cards online were basically traditional merchant account and payment gateway integration (terrible developer experience, excruciating long process, often borderline abusive conditions for merchants) or PayPal (terrible developer experience, faster experience for as long as it lasted, countless nightmare stories of frozen funds etc.). Stripe came along and let you add that functionality within a few hours, and it did so while also providing excellent and highly developer-friendly documentation and support, which obviously plays very well to the typical HN reader. It wasn't about slightly higher fees vs. slightly lower fees, it was about whether it was possible and worth doing at all. Stripe today is not as good as Stripe in the early days for many reasons, but it's still better than almost anyone else I've used on all of those scores. Presumably I'm not the only one on HN who has had that experience. It's reassuring that there are several more businesses now starting up in this area, but I haven't yet seen anyone significantly better that didn't also seem to have at least one significant drawback for any business I'm involved with that uses Stripe today.
- x13 9y ago
  Stripe received seed funding from Y Combinator. http://www.ycombinator.com/ http://www.ycombinator.com/ - second quote, at the bottom This website, Hacker News, is essentially the community site for companies emerging from Y Combinator. (Hence the Y icon in the upper left corner of the page.) https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html if it helps, all YC graduates are hyped... on the YC 'news' site.
EatonZ 9y ago
Looks like a nice improvement. There's some very bizzare design decisions with Subscriptions, so hopefully this will start making things more flexible.
PerfectElement 9y ago
I have 1000+ active customer subscriptions on Stripe. Does it mean that my fees have just increased 0.4%?
nhangen 9y ago
Current Stripe customer that is now very confused.
- raiyu 9y ago
  It's basically an automated recurring billing service that you can use whether you run a static monthly subscription service ($9/mo per user), or if you are using a metered approach, such as $0.02 cents per SMS, and then do that on a recurring basis. So if you think about the 3 or so standard business models for SaaS, per user, per usage, or per tier (standard, pro, advanced) - this provides for all of that in an automated fashion.
  - nhangen 9y ago
    Stripe is supposed to be a back-end API, not a front-end API. I don't want them taking over my payflows and confusing users.
    - scrollaway 9y ago
      So don't use it? shrugs
  - Touche 9y ago
    Right, Subscriptions only has, IIRC, per-tier type of pricing. I need per-usage for my product, and was doing manual Stripe payments. But that meant if I wanted to change the pricing I would need to keep track of what customer was at what price point on my end. I'm interested to see if Billing is flexible enough to handle my use-case.
klinskyc 9y ago
How does Stripe auto-recovery compare to a service like Stunning? Does it make it redundant?
- tarstarr 9y ago
  (PM of Billing from Stripe here) Tools like Stunning, and the many other extensions that work with Stripe, are very complementary to Stripe Billing. As you’d expect from Stripe, we’ve taken an API-first approach, so that our partners can actually take advantage of our recovery tools when building their solutions. We expect that particular businesses will want to use both!
  - digitalbase 9y ago
    @tarstarr can you email invoices? Also do you have multi currency subscriptions? Or do i need to create a pro_monthly_euro, expert_yearly_dollar subscription ?
    - tarstarr 9y ago
      Hey! Yes you can email invoices to your users (finally!) We heard that feature request so many times. :) Re: multicurrency subs -- we thought about this quite a bit. At the moment you'd need to create a plan per currency, with our reasoning being that you'd want to control the FX rates on your own (and setting a price internationally is a very intentional decision.) That said, how can we make this easier? This launch is a start of our investment in this space, really interested in feature requests.
      - throwawayf9axI 9y ago
        Would be great if the "Pay in Full" button on the invoices used the same color that is set under Business Settings > Customer Emails > Customize Design.
      - dannyw 9y ago
        A way to create and associate variants of a plan for FX would be cool. Kinda like bronze_plan:eur, etc.
tnorthcutt 9y ago
Free for the first $1 million of recurring charges. After that, 0.4% on recurring charges Does this mean recurring charges don't carry Stripe's standard 2.9% + $0.30 charge? Or is the free at first/then 0.4% _on top of_ the 2.9% + $0.30 charge?
- gargarplex 9y ago
  That's better than Recurly. They take 1% plus $99/month or $299/month if you want accounting software integration. And there's no free tier. I'm game.
  - brianwawok 9y ago
    Stripe already did recurring billing without a 1% though
    - gargarplex 9y ago
      Yeah, but now Stripe is adding in features like email invoices, presumably the ability to for customers to update payment info, etc. I don't know how much exactly has been added incrementally and how much is available in this release, but I'm optimistic that soon I will be able to phase Recurly out of our stack...If someone from Stripe wants to build a Recurly -> Stripe migration toolset, I'd love that!
      - digitalbase 9y ago
        As we speak, we are writing code to move from stripe to recurly/adyen. The analytics/easy plan mgmt and email invoicing in recurly is something stripe doesn't have. Would you advise against that ?
        gargarplex 9y ago
        No, I would not advise against that. There is a reason I pay the (annoying) 1% + $99/$299 fee to Recurly. I was hoping that this signaled that Stripe was beginning to integrate that valuable featureset into the Stripe platform.
brianwawok 9y ago
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 if you want metering and the advanced features, but I wonder if there is a way to opt out and use the old simple stripe without the new fee - or if this is to push those users into braintree / etc?
- taurath 9y ago
  I think they're hoping that the reduced churn rate will make up for the added fees. A "whoops please update your card" email gives people the opportunity to decide whether a sub is valuable, while a quiet background payment tends to be less noticed.
  - nhangen 9y ago
    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?
    - jonknee 9y ago
      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.
      - nhangen 9y ago
        Easier said than done when your product requires that you integrate with dozens of gateways.
        jonknee 9y ago
mythz 9y ago
Just received an Email saying this "replaces Stripe Subscriptions", what does that mean exactly? e.g. what happens with our existing Customers and their active subscriptions? IMO this is a poor communication and confusing announcement with lots of open/unanswered questions for existing Customers, which is unlike what I've come to expect from Stripe.
- tarstarr 9y ago
  (PM for Stripe Billing here!) If you’re an existing user of Stripe Subscriptions, you can continue as you were! Your existing integration will still work as before and your customers won’t be impacted. That said, you’ll also get access to all of the new tools as well -- would love for you to try them (and see if it improves your experience!) If you go to the Dashboard, we walk you through what changed in detail -- let me know if that helps, or feel free to send me an email at any point: tara@stripe.com
  - nhangen 9y ago
    But fees will change right?
    - tarstarr 9y ago
      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!)
      - nhangen 9y ago
        The only thing I see is that I'm given the starter plan, which means .04% surcharge after 1 million in sales.
      - dmerfield 9y ago
        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?
mstefff 9y ago
How is this any different than the subscriptions they previously offered? And what do services like Recurly do that Stripe subscriptions don't? And when is Stripe going to automatically handle sales tax?
- whitepoplar 9y ago
  This. Also, how does it compare to something like Chargebee?
- jotto 9y ago
  Previously they only offered tiered billing (e.g.: gold, silver, bronze plans), further, the API for that was structured so you're billing for the next month. This announcement suggests "usage-based", which is how AWS and Google Cloud bill you: for how much you used during the previous billing period.
- mstefff 9y ago
  I still have not found a single subscription solution that seamlessly handles adding sales tax and properly reporting it. Stripe does not. Recurly does not. TaxJar does not work with subscriptions. Avalara does not work with subscriptions... What are people doing?
  - jared_buckner 9y ago
    Same problem here. We use Avalara and just manage the subscription piece ourselves, i.e submit the transaction once we receive the webhook from Stripe.
  - Silhouette 9y ago
    What are people doing? With my UK small business hat on: Sometimes, it is just easier and cheaper to build it yourself than to rely on an outsourced service that doesn't do exactly what you need. We have a database table of VAT rates per country with starting dates when they come into effect. All customer accounts are tied to a specific country, so all payments or subscriptions for an account can look up the current rate from the database and apply tax as necessary. All successful payments (one-off or recurring) are recorded in our DB, triggered by webhooks from the various payment services we use. The DB records include all the tax information that applied at the time of the payment, including things like country and proof-of-location as required under EU VAT rules, and also including generating a sequential ID for each payment to comply with the rules there. This is also the point at which we do any necessary currency conversion calculations, and we then generate and send customers an email automatically with all the same details. A little scripting looks up the necessary sales and tax figures from the database for the various VAT returns we are required to file for UK and for other EU customers. The significant limitations are mostly around keeping that VAT rates table up-to-date (I know of no acceptable automated method for doing this, so we just have to review the information manually at frequent intervals) and around handling money repaid (refunds, or if we do ever get a chargeback or similar). As far as I'm aware, none of the automated services is even close to getting these things right either, so we're still no worse off having to do a few things by hand in these relatively rare situations. Setting that lot up was a decent chunk of work, particularly all the hassle around EU VAT, which we had to retrofit in at least one case I can recall. However, it's certainly achievable for an average developer within a few days.
aidos 9y ago
Having used Chargebee for a long time I would say that this problem space is much larger than it first appears. There are a lot of boxes to tick before a solution like this does all the stuff you’ll need it to (but have no idea about).
- k__ 9y ago
  haha, I already wanted to ask if this is a viable alternative to chargebee
- cmer 9y ago
  I'm in the midst of integrating Chargebee. Do you feel like this new offering is a good replacement for Chargebee? I don't know what I don't know yet.
  - aidos 9y ago
    Nothing is a good replacement for Chargebee - stay the course there! Don't get me wrong. I love Stripe, and we use it for handling all the payments. Over time I'm sure this billing offering will grow in functionality but it's unlikely to even get close to feature parity with Chargebee. Many days from now you're going to have this internal monologue while in Chargebee; "Noooo, I have to do this really weird thing with promotional credits and coupons and pro-rating and adjusting subscriptions all at the same time and there's no way... oh, wait, that all works. And it showed me everything that was going to happen on screen before hand so I could double check. Just. Amazing."
brianbreslin 9y ago
What companies does this hurt? Recurly? Zuora (which recently had an IPO)? Chargify? The truly interesting feature to me is the credit card recapture part which updates automatically cards that are re-issued.
- philfreo 9y ago
  Was thinking the same thing. I think it will hurt smaller players like Recurly/Chargify/Chargebee. Not sure if Zuora is in the same camp or not, but probably at least partially? They actually have an IPO coming up: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1423774/000119312518104015/d481302ds1a.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1423774/000119312518...
- shazow 9y ago
  https://stripe.com/works-with/categories/recurring-payments https://stripe.com/works-with/categories/recurring-payments is a nice list.
- TimothyBJacobs 9y ago
  Hasn't Stripe supported updating card expirations for a while now?
  - scrollaway 9y ago
    It does. https://stripe.com/blog/smarter-saved-cards https://stripe.com/blog/smarter-saved-cards
- mbesto 9y ago
  Zuora customers are likely at the "enterprise" level and wouldn't consider switching, at least in the short term. Chargebee, Chargify, and Recurly might have some issues ahead of them on the other hand...
citizens 9y ago
Looks buggy to me. I created a test invoice and specified that it should be payable at a later date and only via ACH. I checked the preview link and the only option to pay was by credit card. I sent the invoice anyway and the test user's credit card was immediately charged.
- chrisper 9y ago
  Are you sure it's a charge and not a hold?
  - citizens 9y ago
    It was a (failed) charge.
- seddona 9y ago
  same here
- kurrik 9y ago
  (Engineering Manager at Stripe Billing) Ah - sorry about that, a last minute fix caused a bug. This is now fixed in production. Thank you so much for reporting!
  - citizens 9y ago
    Thanks for the update. Am I understanding the ACH payment flow correctly: 1) Send a user an invoice 2) The user copies the auto-generated bank details and manually initiates a transfer from their bank?
    - kurrik 9y ago
      That's correct - if you want to learn more specifics, we wrote a guide which is available at https://stripe.com/docs/billing/invoices/reconciliation https://stripe.com/docs/billing/invoices/reconciliation
      - 9y ago
TheSoftwareGuy 9y ago
>We're also introducing a new feature: smart retry logic. It’s powered by the same machine learning infrastructure behind Stripe Radar. Our algorithms train on data across the billions of payments in the Stripe network to predict the right way to retry failed payments. As someone who is completely oblivious to how payments work behind the scenes (for the most part) could someone please explain how this became necessary?
- lbearl 9y ago
  That's a good question. AFAIK Stripe already had their magical Dunning rules for retries, which were supposedly already optimized via machine learning. I'm curious if this is substantially different from that.
- tschwimmer 9y ago
  I used to work on billing and a bit of payments stuff for a large SaaS company, so I have some experience with this. When you charge a credit or debit card, send a bunch of messages that end up going to an organization called a payment processor. Payment processors do stuff like make sure your account has enough money/remaining credit and also have fraud checks and other security features. Sometimes, the payment processor rejects a payment because of insufficient funds, suspected fraud, their system being down or a malformed request. Unfortunately, a lot of this stuff is pretty archaic and there are a few layers between your servers and the processor, so it's very hard to debug. On your end, you could simply retry payments if they get rejected, but that might lead to a set of ping pong failures that might even trip fraud alerts to the customer. You can also have retry logic that uses an exponential backoff, just like any other request. That's a reasonable strategy, but you can probably do better.If you're a big company, involuntary credit card churn is actually a pretty sizeable source of churn for you. 99% transaction completion rate sounds pretty good until you realize it means a guaranteed 1% churn rate (assuming people don't sign up again), which is not insignificant. You really want to get this as low as possible. Enter Stripe: Stripe has handled a very very large number of payments, and they probably have really comprehensive data about failure rates. This allows them to identify patterns and come up with some rules around retries. A simple (fully hypothetical) example is: If a transaction is declined for insufficient funds, retry again on the 15th and the last day of the month (usually when people get paid). These rules can get really complicated. We had some rules that were as complex as "If the cardholder is in Spain, and the card is Amex, retry in three days before 5pm if it's a weekday, otherwise wait until Tuesday." Overall, this is a pretty nice feature for large customers with high transaction volumes. We did the data analysis/rule generation ourselves and hand rolled the retry logic in our system, but offering it as a built-in service is a convenient (albiet probably expensive) perk.
drinchev 9y ago
I think most difficult problem is still proper accounting. I'm with a client right now, based in Europe and we had >really good time< integrating Recurly with Stripe and use it as their payment provider, but we got stuck when we figured out that there was a need to hire an accountant to handle the cancelations for us. Having a service like Cleverbridge [1] / Avangate [2], where they end-up having someone to manage this for them for a bigger % of the sale, was the better deal. Not sure how the startup-scene will solve this, but it's actually still really hard to do this properly. My best solution would be to have Stripe doing whole-sale solution, where they invoice customers and you simply invoice them each month. It just takes too much efforts to do this >legally< in Europe if you are on your own. 1 : https://www.cleverbridge.com/corporate/ https://www.cleverbridge.com/corporate/ 2 : http://www.avangate.com http://www.avangate.com
- tarstarr 9y ago
  (Stripe PM here) We're actually working on exactly this problem right now. :) More to come in the next couple months, if you're interested in beta testing let me know! (tara@stripe.com)
- jacquesm 9y ago
  And that's before you get into VAT-MOSS and all that jazz. That's the real issue if your payment gateway doesn't do a perfect job of it, even better if you have to issue refunds.
aeharding 9y ago
First $1 million for the lifetime of the account I assume, not per year? Seems odd that they announce a fee increase without any notice to existing customers. Also I found their wording very confusing - I had a few seconds that I was very worried I'd have to migrate something or other. Poor communication wording on Stripe's part. C'mon, guys.
thedangler 9y ago
Sweet another service I can't use because I'm Canadian, but wont get access to their Atlas program because I don't qualify. I'll have to take another approach.
- pokoleo 9y ago
  (I work at Stripe and am also Canadian!) It looks like you might have applied for Stripe Atlas when we were in a small private beta and we’ve greatly expanded the businesses we can support. Please feel free to apply to Atlas again, or you can email me us at atlas@stripe.com.
  - thedangler 9y ago
    Thank you, I sent an email with some questions. Thanks
encoderer 9y ago
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.
- _kyran 9y ago
  It was possible, using one off charges with a webhook.
- buttscicles 9y ago
  Yeah, people seem to have missed the forest for the trees here. Being able to iterate on billing easily seems the killer feature here, to me. I would like to see exactly how it works.
ninjalupo 9y ago
If anyone from Stripe is here, question: We currently use Chargebee for all our subscription and Stripe to actually process the payments. With Chargebee V3 [1] we've just dropped in their js and then we get an overlay/pop-up for both subscription and then subscription management, like editing subscription, invoicing etc. Is this a replacement for Chargebee on the integration and coding side that we get without work? [2] We'd like to reduce the number of services we integrate with and if Stripe Billing provides this, then we would like to directly use it. [1] https://www.chargebee.com/docs/checkout-v3.html https://www.chargebee.com/docs/checkout-v3.html [2] https://www.chargebee.com/docs/assets/screenshots/images/chargebee-checkout-portal-v3/why-checkout.png https://www.chargebee.com/docs/assets/screenshots/images/cha...
- StefanPretty 9y ago
  As far as I can tell this is just dashboard and api only. But I guess they're moving towards that. Ironic as the connect partners that helped them grow are now having their toes be stepped on. Not a nice way to play. Burn the community who helped you get there in the first place. Turn and burn it seems
  - ninjalupo 9y ago
    It seems on par with many platforms in the past. Twitter, FB, Paypal etc. See what was built on top, see what is succeeding and they add that to the offering.
    - StefanPretty 9y ago
      Yeah makes sense. I’m mostly upset they’re charging for it. We offer way more than what Stripe offers our customers. Not worried about that.
  - philfreo 9y ago
    You can't expect that Stripe doesn't expand their feature set. Seeing that there are hundreds of services built around stripe (https://stripe.com/works-with/types/stripe-extensions https://stripe.com/works-with/types/stripe-extensions) it's really expected that some of them will be cannibalized eventually. Subscription billing has been in Stripe for many years... it's just been very weak until now. Totally makes sense for them to work on this and if you built a subscription billing company on top of Stripe you should have known it was only a matter of time before theirs got better.
acabal 9y ago
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 recurring billing. Sure it's a pain to set up but once you've built it in it works pretty damn well with little to no maintenance. If you do even a smallish amount of business through them you can set up daily sweeps into your bank account to stave off the famous Paypal "random freezing of funds" nonsense.
- anthony_franco 9y ago
  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."
  - acabal 9y ago
    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.
    - tarstarr 9y ago
      (PM from Stripe) If you're an existing user of Stripe Subscriptions, you get Stripe Billing features included in your current price. (To be clear, there's no extra fees for existing users.)
      - rectang 9y ago
        No extra fees for the first million, or no extra fees period?
nodesocket 9y ago
Under invoices there are two new documents "Invoice PDF" and "Receipt PDF" which are different from the standard e-mail receipts. Are these documents emailed to the customer automatically? Is there a way to control this?
universenz 9y ago
Well, this is all a bit cheeky. Backed Stripe for so long now, kinda lost touch with the options. What are some other decent recurring payment processors that support Asia Pacific, specifically Australia/New Zealand?
- _kyran 9y ago
  Pin Payments for a local solution or Braintree?
- welder 9y ago
  Braintree, which has a similar API to Stripe.
pg_bot 9y ago
This is extremely disappointing. For my business this means an additional 0.4%-0.7% fee added onto a service I currently use for free justified by features that I cannot use for compliance purposes. This new invoicing process does not qualify as an exempt financial service for a covered entity. (see subsection 1179 of HIPAA) So unless they are now willing to sign a business associates agreement I just got a price hike for a feature that would cause fines so large they would close my business. This is going to be a PR nightmare for stripe. They have destroyed all of their goodwill, and now I will have to start considering competitors. If anyone from Stripe is here in the comments I would love to chat (email is in profile)
- degenerate 9y ago
  I don't do $1MM in business but I'll definitely shop around once I get close. Prior to this announcement I wouldn't think twice about staying with Stripe forever. This is the first time I've ever thought, hmm, who else can I use?
  - intheon 9y ago
    Same here. I just took a look at Braintree and it has convinced me.
- tarstarr 9y ago
  (PM from Stripe) If you're an existing user, there's no extra fees, even if you are past the $1M lifetime threshold. For existing Stripe Subscriptions users, Stripe Billing is included in your current price. (You should have received an email about this earlier today, but you can always ping me (tara@stripe.com))
  - pg_bot 9y ago
    Tara as a forewarning gmail marked your message as spam in my inbox. I would expect a lot of people to have the same experience. Second the messaging is not clear if you are indeed offering a grandfather clause for existing customers you need to state that clearly. Using the term "included" is ambiguous and I interpreted it in the same manner as a tip being included on a check. (meaning we've already added it, not that we didn't charge you)
pc 9y ago
Stripe cofounder here. For anyone wondering about pricing, here's our approach. - For new Stripe customers, this is free up to the first (lifetime) $1M of payments. - For existing customers, there's no pricing change. You just get more functionality than before for free. This is what we generally try to do: we want Stripe to continually become better value for you over time, as you get more functionality for the same price. - What we've seen over Stripe's history is that customers handling large amounts of revenue have been forced to pay substantial amounts for expensive third-party systems. So, we've decided to build something that we think will be better and cheaper -- and that will, over time, increase the net revenue of businesses built on Stripe. I'm sorry about any confusion in our communication around this!
- whitepoplar 9y ago
  Does "existing customers" mean someone (like me) who has a Stripe account set up, but who hasn't (yet) started accepting payments? Am I grandfathered in?
  - tarstarr 9y ago
    We'll make sure you're taken care of here. (If you're just running test subscription charges right now, you're still grandfathered. You can ping me any time if you have questions.)
    - dbenjamin 9y ago
      Any luck if we weren't quite running test charges yet? Just wanted to use the subscription abilities.
  - sjs382 9y ago
    The email sent by Stripe says "Since you used Stripe Subscriptions in the past year, the Stripe Billing Starter plan is included in your current pricing." So... based on that, it seems that "existing customers" means "customers that have actually used the product we're replacing". I think we'd all appreciate a confirmation or clarification, though. :)
whitepoplar 9y ago
Will Stripe include free Billing for companies that have negotiated a volume discount?
- tarstarr 9y ago
  Yes, if you're an existing user, no matter your current rate, you'll get Billing for free at your current price.
joshpadnick 9y ago
Somewhat off-topic question, but how do others handle the need to create an invoice that corresponds to a Stripe charge? We've been using Stripe Subscriptions (I guess, now Stripe Billing) to auto-charge customers, and we separately define recurring invoices in QuickBooks Online. It's a clumsy process, but I'm assuming all Stripes Billing users have to solve it. Is there a better way to handle?
- stevoski 9y ago
  We use Quaderno to generate invoices for our Stripe charges. Quaderno integrates well with Stripe.
dboreham 9y ago
This thread highlights the following lesson: When communicating important and potentially difficult to understand information: have some non-insiders read the text and ask them what they think it means.
sakabaro 9y ago
That’s really awesome. Chargebee is spammy in my experience. Bad kind of spam. Glad Stripe is replacing them.
- wane_linning 9y ago
  care explaining how?
fooey 9y ago
I wish this had existed a year ago when we shifted from primarily doing everything through Stripe to Chargify for metered billing, invoicing and dunning.
fiatjaf 9y ago
Stripe now begins to turn into Paypal. Soon: 4 versions of APIs working simultaneously, with a different mix of missing features in each one of them, and no docs.
- scrollaway 9y ago
  Bit quick on the slippery slope are you? Whatever makes you say something so absurd?
simonw 9y ago
OK, this is brilliant: "Behind the scenes, Stripe now generates a unique virtual bank account number for each of your customers, which keeps your company’s banking details private. Any payments received appear in your Stripe balance and invoices are automatically reconciled and marked as closed."
Remnant44 9y ago
Does this support international wire transfers as an invoice payment method? If so, that's a killer feature for us, as US-based customers have other options including simply mailing a check; it is our international customers exclusively who are interested in wire transfer...
tschellenbach 9y ago
I'm so excited about this. We were looking into Recurly, but the migration from Stripe to them seemed like a huge hassle. Not sure yet, but it looks like this will allow us to unify all billing in 1 place, without a large dev or monthly cost. #awesome
rodh257 9y ago
I'd love something like this that handled in-app purchased subscriptions. There's a bunch of annoying parts of dealing with the app store SDK's & verifying transactions, handling refunds etc. We have a combination of online credit card purchases and in-app ones, it seems like there's an opening for some tool to handle the in-app part as well.
trotzke 9y ago
CEO of Cheddar here. I think this is a big step in the right direction for Stripe (unclear pricing aside). We’ve been thinking about usage based billing for a long time now. We built a bunch of apps using Stripe and found there was a lot missing if you wanted to track activity and bill for it, as well as with reporting and revenue optimization. Having not dug into the platform too far, this definitely looks like it could fill some gaps. I will say I’m not a fan of taking a percentage for billing on top of taking a percentage on payments, though. There is risk involved for payments (chargebacks, fraud, etc), but billing is transactional. A percent there feels like a money grab to me. The only other problem I see with this is that it all seems a bit convoluted. I get that it has to be tacked on to their existing platform. But we’ve found that the secret to an awesome usage based billing system was to track activity in real time, then apply automated billing to that tracked activity. It’s a different approach and we’re working on polishing that up and bringing it to market over the next few months. Would love to hear more about how folks are thinking about consumption and usage based billing and pricing. I think it’s the next big wave in Internet monetization, so it’s important to get right.
- tarstarr 9y ago
  Appreciate the kind words! To the point on pricing: believe in revenue-based business models because it's the clearest way to align our incentives with those of our customers. We want to be forced to find ways to generate more revenue, via smart recovery, better invoice payment methods, more payment method support, etc. Our fees are actually significantly less expensive than those of our competitors, and we only make money when our users make money here (instead of charging a flat fee, which can penalize companies that are bootstrapping.) Excited to check out Cheddar when it launches!
shekyboy 9y ago
Billing (recurring or one time) is a transactional activity and should be monetized as such. There should be a per invoice or per customer type of rate. This whole % of revenue seems crazy to me. There is no inherent risk involved like payment processing. You can get paid no matter what in a tx model... Based on what I see in the market with other billing/subscription providers, they all do the same thing (rev share). Since these businesses are not the payment gateway they try to do a revenue grab with the % share. I hoped Stripe would be able to disrupt this by already being positioned as a payment gateway and offer this on top in a transactional model.... Hope they rethink this strategy. And no first $1MM isnt going to cut it. Any serious business will see this as a growth challenge. Backend billing flows are challenging to build and once you are committed to this you are locked in for quite sometime from the roadmap perspective.
- tarstarr 9y ago
  Thanks for the feedback. To your risk point -- there is often risk involved, as businesses that have worked with large ACH payments know. More broadly, we believe in revenue-based business models because it's the clearest way to align our incentives with those of our customers. We want to be forced to find ways to generate more revenue, via smart recovery, better invoice payment methods, more payment method support, etc.
  - shekyboy 9y ago
    Maybe you can provide clarity on ACH risk. Seems like businesses have most of the risk there.. and not the billing system (keeping the gateway out of this). Secondly, transaction/user based models are also aligned with customer incentives. With growth, customers will execute more transactions on the system. Frankly, Smart recovery is an area where I can see you can ask for % share. Other features like payment methods etc sound transactional again. Finally, Stripe has a payment gateway business already. This will ensure growth on that side of the business. Optically this seems like a revenue grab. You have the opportunity to disrupt the ecosystem. Thanks for responding to my comment. Appreciate the interaction.
    - 9y ago
hartator 9y ago
Not sure how I feel about it. One of my existing plan got duplicated for some reason.
chromaton 9y ago
I've been waiting for the invoicing piece for a long time. We currently use PayPal invoices (and will probably continue to do so), but for those customers who can't use PayPal, this is fantastic! We've been using Plasso's payment form service, but they just changed how that works, so this came along at exactly the right time.
usaphp 9y ago
A really cool touch is that those animated examples of pricing and other elements are actually animated html elements, not GIFs or video files. Again really slick touch from designers at Stripe.
joking 9y ago
I understand how handy are solutions like stripe, but at least in Europe you can have a payment gateway from your bank just like they can give you a handheld device, and the rates are way cheaper, I just looked one which is 0.50%, six time less than stripe.
- gamzer 9y ago
  Can you name some payment gateways from banks? I would like to read up on this.
StefanPretty 9y ago
As a connect platform partner this is a bit of a blow as this impacts our customer acquisition funnel, we drive customers to Stripe and then they use us. I have been talking with Tara who has been very helpful on this matter but wanted to pitch in here. I think from a connect platform partner stand point it comes across as a bit inconsiderate almost. I have already seen some people immediately put off considering using Stripe now due to the additional fees and complexity. It just doesn't seem to sit well. The Subscriptions API was the main reason for Stripe's success and now it's being charged for, why not charge for the dashboard usage and leave the api users alone?
TheForumTroll 9y ago
Woaah there! 2.9% + $0.30?! I just changed my provider because their 1.45% (+ $0!) was way too expensive compared to the competition. Do Stripe provide a bag of gold at every Christmas?!
- epa 9y ago
  Where were you getting 1.45% fixed, and where did you get a cheaper rate (for USD transactions).
- markwcollins 9y ago
  Was this from another country? 1.45% is extremely low for a USA merchant. Stripe has different rates in each country, as do all card processors.
enraged_camel 9y ago
Still no way to cleanly pause/unpause subscriptions? Why not?
CoachRufus87 9y ago
Billing systems are hard. Building a system to serve as the billing system for N clients? Wow. Kudos to all involved.
artur_makly 9y ago
how does this compare to ChargeBee?
SuperGoodJared 9y ago
This seems like an excellent move for Stripe. Lowering the barrier to entry for anyone trying to get into the SaaS (or really Anything-aaS) field by making recurring billing easier strikes me a great move for their bottom line.
tjholowaychuk 9y ago
This is awesome, congrats! I'd love to be able to send invoice emails, and/or retrieve links for invoice PDFs and list those in your application for download (or re-sending of email). Seems a bit bizarre as the infrastructure for emails, and generation of the PDFs are clearly in place, just missing the bits to tie those two together.
wakeless 9y ago
How does this work in the case where the majority of your customers currently pay by direct-debit/cheque? This is certainly the case for us, but we have long been looking for a affordable solution to have them managed with some sort of managed subscription engine
intrasight 9y ago
I see interest here in the new invoicing feature. My question is, if your accounting system can send electronic invoices (Quickbooks does), why do you need Stripe? Especially if it's more expensive?
deleted 9y ago
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zwendkos 9y ago
Skeptical a bit about "usage-based" billing and interested to hear others' thoughts. Isn't a major profit-driver for many subscription-based businesses the breakage?
inertial 9y ago
Awesome job on making it easy to add usage based plans. I've found Stripe's customer service to be a notch above the rest. Request to folks at Stripe ( @pc / @tarstarr ) : Please do something to protect small business owners against fraudulent payments (i.e. with stolen cards). Even if they follow all recommended practices by Stripe, it's very likely that there are a handful of stolen cards that will fly under the radar and hit them negatively. I'd say if the merchant is not at fault due to a stolen card being used on their site, they should not get penalized for it. The chargeback fee is one thing, the worse part is the dispute rate going up. This threatens the existence of any business if their account is suspended by Stripe.
disillusioned 9y ago
So... "Subscriptions" is now 3.3% + 30c for new clients, for a bunch of features that used to be 2.9% + 30c, along with different billing models, "smart recovery," and automatic card updater (which I swear was already a feature they'd implemented.) This feels like a very backdoor way to raise their rates for their subscription service because they felt like they were undercharging and they need more margin, and masking it with a couple of features that they're claiming can help make it worth it. (And sure, first $1M free, but still.) I kind of wish there was a "standard" tier that kept it at the normal rate and maintained parity with the features we had yesterday for 2.9%...
laurentb 9y ago
can anyone comment on support for purchase orders which a lot of companies use to recognise or initiate a purchase? it seems to still be the only thing that needs to be manual in that process....
robbiemitchell 9y ago
Everyone here is complaining about price, so let me offer a counterpoint. My understanding is that 2.9% + 30 cents is barely above what you would expect the credit card networks themselves to be charging Stripe. The margins are razor thin. If you have beef with this percentage of your revenue being taken, it's with the credit cards. Adding a .4% fee on top is likely cheaper than using a separate service on top, like Chargify/Recurly/Chargebee. (Sure, if you had already built your own stuff on top of Stripe, you don't see this tradeoff as real. But all of those are legitimate businesses, suggesting there's a huge market out there of people who don't prioritize eng time like you.) .4% isn't nothing, but put it in context of a functioning SaaS business with product priorities, especially when you think about expensive it is to hire software engineering talent. It's going to be a fraction of a fully loaded engineer's time that is probably best dedicated to other parts of the business. (Fully loaded = take a salary, add 30% for taxes and benefits, plus ammortized recruiting fees.) A one-time or occasional integration project frees up engineering to focus on other stuff and enables other teams to work on their own.
flibble 9y ago
If I may take advantage of the numerous highly knowledgeable people in the industry here — has anyone recommendations for accepting payments from the UAE? We use Stripe to receive card payments there in AED and then need to pay this money out again in AED. As Stripe don’t settle in AED the funds get converted to USD and then we have to convert them to AED again to pay out. Stripe charge 2% conversion fee over market rates to convert the funds. What’s most annoying is AED is pegged to USD and there’s no conversion risk, yet Stripe charge the conversion fee anyway. So we pay 2.9% or 3.4% (can’t remember which it is off the top of my head) international card fee, 2% Fx to USD and another few % back to AED :-€

Can anyone explain me why Stripe is so hyped on HN ? It's the most expensive card processing service I know. I am using one where I pay 1.9% for all my clients and another for EU clients where I pay only 1.7%. I don't see anything in their offer that is worth paying additional 1.2% of my business to card payment processor.

jacquesm 9y ago
It's YC backed and run by two very popular HN'ers, the Collison brothers. https://www.startupgrind.com/blog/the-collison-brothers-and-story-behind-the-founding-of-stripe/ https://www.startupgrind.com/blog/the-collison-brothers-and-... Also, payments is something that every real start-up will hit sooner or later.
deleted 9y ago
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burlesona 9y ago
What are you using?
cristinacordova 9y ago
(Stripe here) Stripe's pricing varies depending on the country you're doing business from. If useful, you can see our pricing for businesses in the UK here, which starts at 1.4% + 20p for European cards: https://stripe.com/gb/pricing https://stripe.com/gb/pricing
- lossolo 9y ago
  I am not from UK but I live in EU. I can't use Stripe at all: "Once Stripe is supported in your country, you’ll be able to accept payments from customers anywhere in the world."
  - cristinacordova 9y ago
    We operate in 25 countries today and our pricing varies by country. We're not everywhere yet, but we're working on it: https://stripe.com/global https://stripe.com/global
lioeters 9y ago
"another for EU clients where I pay only 1.7%" May I ask which payment processor you're using in the EU?
- lossolo 9y ago
  Cardinity. Comparison with Stripe here: https://cardinity.com/stripe-alternative https://cardinity.com/stripe-alternative
  - lioeters 9y ago
    Thank you for the information!
skinnymuch 9y ago
What are you using for just 1.9%? No flat fee on top of that?
conado 9y ago
I work at Accumulus which has a recurring billing platform that de-couples payment processors from recurring billing, i.e. invoicing, price plans, customer management and notifications, etc. The thing is that you don't want to be locked into a particular payment processor long term. Convenience sells, but be mindful of lock-in. As companies grow, they get better rates with different merchant account providers. As a company, you want maximum flexibility and negotiation ability to take your business to those who give you the best value, globally. We are putting together an offer specifically for Stripe users who want to avoid lock-in and save money long term. If you are interested, you can get on the list here https://accumulus.com/it-is-your-revenue https://accumulus.com/it-is-your-revenue
- keithnz 9y ago
  but now how do we eliminate lock in to billing platforms which also have their own rates that vary with provider?
Silhouette 9y ago
Can anyone explain me why Stripe is so hyped on HN ? When Stripe launched, the alternatives for a new or small business that wanted to charge cards online were basically traditional merchant account and payment gateway integration (terrible developer experience, excruciating long process, often borderline abusive conditions for merchants) or PayPal (terrible developer experience, faster experience for as long as it lasted, countless nightmare stories of frozen funds etc.). Stripe came along and let you add that functionality within a few hours, and it did so while also providing excellent and highly developer-friendly documentation and support, which obviously plays very well to the typical HN reader. It wasn't about slightly higher fees vs. slightly lower fees, it was about whether it was possible and worth doing at all. Stripe today is not as good as Stripe in the early days for many reasons, but it's still better than almost anyone else I've used on all of those scores. Presumably I'm not the only one on HN who has had that experience. It's reassuring that there are several more businesses now starting up in this area, but I haven't yet seen anyone significantly better that didn't also seem to have at least one significant drawback for any business I'm involved with that uses Stripe today.
x13 9y ago
Stripe received seed funding from Y Combinator. http://www.ycombinator.com/ http://www.ycombinator.com/ - second quote, at the bottom This website, Hacker News, is essentially the community site for companies emerging from Y Combinator. (Hence the Y icon in the upper left corner of the page.) https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html if it helps, all YC graduates are hyped... on the YC 'news' site.

EatonZ 9y ago

Looks like a nice improvement. There's some very bizzare design decisions with Subscriptions, so hopefully this will start making things more flexible.

PerfectElement 9y ago

I have 1000+ active customer subscriptions on Stripe. Does it mean that my fees have just increased 0.4%?

nhangen 9y ago

Current Stripe customer that is now very confused.

raiyu 9y ago
It's basically an automated recurring billing service that you can use whether you run a static monthly subscription service ($9/mo per user), or if you are using a metered approach, such as $0.02 cents per SMS, and then do that on a recurring basis. So if you think about the 3 or so standard business models for SaaS, per user, per usage, or per tier (standard, pro, advanced) - this provides for all of that in an automated fashion.
- nhangen 9y ago
  Stripe is supposed to be a back-end API, not a front-end API. I don't want them taking over my payflows and confusing users.
  - scrollaway 9y ago
    So don't use it? shrugs
- Touche 9y ago
  Right, Subscriptions only has, IIRC, per-tier type of pricing. I need per-usage for my product, and was doing manual Stripe payments. But that meant if I wanted to change the pricing I would need to keep track of what customer was at what price point on my end. I'm interested to see if Billing is flexible enough to handle my use-case.

klinskyc 9y ago

How does Stripe auto-recovery compare to a service like Stunning? Does it make it redundant?

tarstarr 9y ago
(PM of Billing from Stripe here) Tools like Stunning, and the many other extensions that work with Stripe, are very complementary to Stripe Billing. As you’d expect from Stripe, we’ve taken an API-first approach, so that our partners can actually take advantage of our recovery tools when building their solutions. We expect that particular businesses will want to use both!
- digitalbase 9y ago
  @tarstarr can you email invoices? Also do you have multi currency subscriptions? Or do i need to create a pro_monthly_euro, expert_yearly_dollar subscription ?
  - tarstarr 9y ago
    Hey! Yes you can email invoices to your users (finally!) We heard that feature request so many times. :) Re: multicurrency subs -- we thought about this quite a bit. At the moment you'd need to create a plan per currency, with our reasoning being that you'd want to control the FX rates on your own (and setting a price internationally is a very intentional decision.) That said, how can we make this easier? This launch is a start of our investment in this space, really interested in feature requests.
    - throwawayf9axI 9y ago
      Would be great if the "Pay in Full" button on the invoices used the same color that is set under Business Settings > Customer Emails > Customize Design.
    - dannyw 9y ago
      A way to create and associate variants of a plan for FX would be cool. Kinda like bronze_plan:eur, etc.

tnorthcutt 9y ago

Free for the first $1 million of recurring charges. After that, 0.4% on recurring charges Does this mean recurring charges don't carry Stripe's standard 2.9% + $0.30 charge? Or is the free at first/then 0.4% _on top of_ the 2.9% + $0.30 charge?

gargarplex 9y ago
That's better than Recurly. They take 1% plus $99/month or $299/month if you want accounting software integration. And there's no free tier. I'm game.
- brianwawok 9y ago
  Stripe already did recurring billing without a 1% though
  - gargarplex 9y ago
    Yeah, but now Stripe is adding in features like email invoices, presumably the ability to for customers to update payment info, etc. I don't know how much exactly has been added incrementally and how much is available in this release, but I'm optimistic that soon I will be able to phase Recurly out of our stack...If someone from Stripe wants to build a Recurly -> Stripe migration toolset, I'd love that!
    - digitalbase 9y ago
      As we speak, we are writing code to move from stripe to recurly/adyen. The analytics/easy plan mgmt and email invoicing in recurly is something stripe doesn't have. Would you advise against that ?
      - gargarplex 9y ago
        No, I would not advise against that. There is a reason I pay the (annoying) 1% + $99/$299 fee to Recurly. I was hoping that this signaled that Stripe was beginning to integrate that valuable featureset into the Stripe platform.

brianwawok 9y ago

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 if you want metering and the advanced features, but I wonder if there is a way to opt out and use the old simple stripe without the new fee - or if this is to push those users into braintree / etc?

taurath 9y ago
I think they're hoping that the reduced churn rate will make up for the added fees. A "whoops please update your card" email gives people the opportunity to decide whether a sub is valuable, while a quiet background payment tends to be less noticed.
- nhangen 9y ago
  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?
  - jonknee 9y ago
    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.
    - nhangen 9y ago
      Easier said than done when your product requires that you integrate with dozens of gateways.
      - jonknee 9y ago

mythz 9y ago

Just received an Email saying this "replaces Stripe Subscriptions", what does that mean exactly? e.g. what happens with our existing Customers and their active subscriptions? IMO this is a poor communication and confusing announcement with lots of open/unanswered questions for existing Customers, which is unlike what I've come to expect from Stripe.

tarstarr 9y ago
(PM for Stripe Billing here!) If you’re an existing user of Stripe Subscriptions, you can continue as you were! Your existing integration will still work as before and your customers won’t be impacted. That said, you’ll also get access to all of the new tools as well -- would love for you to try them (and see if it improves your experience!) If you go to the Dashboard, we walk you through what changed in detail -- let me know if that helps, or feel free to send me an email at any point: tara@stripe.com
- nhangen 9y ago
  But fees will change right?
  - tarstarr 9y ago
    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!)
    - nhangen 9y ago
      The only thing I see is that I'm given the starter plan, which means .04% surcharge after 1 million in sales.
    - dmerfield 9y ago
      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?

mstefff 9y ago

How is this any different than the subscriptions they previously offered? And what do services like Recurly do that Stripe subscriptions don't? And when is Stripe going to automatically handle sales tax?

whitepoplar 9y ago
This. Also, how does it compare to something like Chargebee?
jotto 9y ago
Previously they only offered tiered billing (e.g.: gold, silver, bronze plans), further, the API for that was structured so you're billing for the next month. This announcement suggests "usage-based", which is how AWS and Google Cloud bill you: for how much you used during the previous billing period.
mstefff 9y ago
I still have not found a single subscription solution that seamlessly handles adding sales tax and properly reporting it. Stripe does not. Recurly does not. TaxJar does not work with subscriptions. Avalara does not work with subscriptions... What are people doing?
- jared_buckner 9y ago
  Same problem here. We use Avalara and just manage the subscription piece ourselves, i.e submit the transaction once we receive the webhook from Stripe.
- Silhouette 9y ago
  What are people doing? With my UK small business hat on: Sometimes, it is just easier and cheaper to build it yourself than to rely on an outsourced service that doesn't do exactly what you need. We have a database table of VAT rates per country with starting dates when they come into effect. All customer accounts are tied to a specific country, so all payments or subscriptions for an account can look up the current rate from the database and apply tax as necessary. All successful payments (one-off or recurring) are recorded in our DB, triggered by webhooks from the various payment services we use. The DB records include all the tax information that applied at the time of the payment, including things like country and proof-of-location as required under EU VAT rules, and also including generating a sequential ID for each payment to comply with the rules there. This is also the point at which we do any necessary currency conversion calculations, and we then generate and send customers an email automatically with all the same details. A little scripting looks up the necessary sales and tax figures from the database for the various VAT returns we are required to file for UK and for other EU customers. The significant limitations are mostly around keeping that VAT rates table up-to-date (I know of no acceptable automated method for doing this, so we just have to review the information manually at frequent intervals) and around handling money repaid (refunds, or if we do ever get a chargeback or similar). As far as I'm aware, none of the automated services is even close to getting these things right either, so we're still no worse off having to do a few things by hand in these relatively rare situations. Setting that lot up was a decent chunk of work, particularly all the hassle around EU VAT, which we had to retrofit in at least one case I can recall. However, it's certainly achievable for an average developer within a few days.

aidos 9y ago

Having used Chargebee for a long time I would say that this problem space is much larger than it first appears. There are a lot of boxes to tick before a solution like this does all the stuff you’ll need it to (but have no idea about).

k__ 9y ago
haha, I already wanted to ask if this is a viable alternative to chargebee
cmer 9y ago
I'm in the midst of integrating Chargebee. Do you feel like this new offering is a good replacement for Chargebee? I don't know what I don't know yet.
- aidos 9y ago
  Nothing is a good replacement for Chargebee - stay the course there! Don't get me wrong. I love Stripe, and we use it for handling all the payments. Over time I'm sure this billing offering will grow in functionality but it's unlikely to even get close to feature parity with Chargebee. Many days from now you're going to have this internal monologue while in Chargebee; "Noooo, I have to do this really weird thing with promotional credits and coupons and pro-rating and adjusting subscriptions all at the same time and there's no way... oh, wait, that all works. And it showed me everything that was going to happen on screen before hand so I could double check. Just. Amazing."

brianbreslin 9y ago

What companies does this hurt? Recurly? Zuora (which recently had an IPO)? Chargify? The truly interesting feature to me is the credit card recapture part which updates automatically cards that are re-issued.

philfreo 9y ago
Was thinking the same thing. I think it will hurt smaller players like Recurly/Chargify/Chargebee. Not sure if Zuora is in the same camp or not, but probably at least partially? They actually have an IPO coming up: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1423774/000119312518104015/d481302ds1a.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1423774/000119312518...
shazow 9y ago
https://stripe.com/works-with/categories/recurring-payments https://stripe.com/works-with/categories/recurring-payments is a nice list.
TimothyBJacobs 9y ago
Hasn't Stripe supported updating card expirations for a while now?
- scrollaway 9y ago
  It does. https://stripe.com/blog/smarter-saved-cards https://stripe.com/blog/smarter-saved-cards
mbesto 9y ago
Zuora customers are likely at the "enterprise" level and wouldn't consider switching, at least in the short term. Chargebee, Chargify, and Recurly might have some issues ahead of them on the other hand...

citizens 9y ago

Looks buggy to me. I created a test invoice and specified that it should be payable at a later date and only via ACH. I checked the preview link and the only option to pay was by credit card. I sent the invoice anyway and the test user's credit card was immediately charged.

chrisper 9y ago
Are you sure it's a charge and not a hold?
- citizens 9y ago
  It was a (failed) charge.
seddona 9y ago
same here
kurrik 9y ago
(Engineering Manager at Stripe Billing) Ah - sorry about that, a last minute fix caused a bug. This is now fixed in production. Thank you so much for reporting!
- citizens 9y ago
  Thanks for the update. Am I understanding the ACH payment flow correctly: 1) Send a user an invoice 2) The user copies the auto-generated bank details and manually initiates a transfer from their bank?
  - kurrik 9y ago
    That's correct - if you want to learn more specifics, we wrote a guide which is available at https://stripe.com/docs/billing/invoices/reconciliation https://stripe.com/docs/billing/invoices/reconciliation
    - 9y ago

TheSoftwareGuy 9y ago

>We're also introducing a new feature: smart retry logic. It’s powered by the same machine learning infrastructure behind Stripe Radar. Our algorithms train on data across the billions of payments in the Stripe network to predict the right way to retry failed payments. As someone who is completely oblivious to how payments work behind the scenes (for the most part) could someone please explain how this became necessary?

lbearl 9y ago
That's a good question. AFAIK Stripe already had their magical Dunning rules for retries, which were supposedly already optimized via machine learning. I'm curious if this is substantially different from that.
tschwimmer 9y ago
I used to work on billing and a bit of payments stuff for a large SaaS company, so I have some experience with this. When you charge a credit or debit card, send a bunch of messages that end up going to an organization called a payment processor. Payment processors do stuff like make sure your account has enough money/remaining credit and also have fraud checks and other security features. Sometimes, the payment processor rejects a payment because of insufficient funds, suspected fraud, their system being down or a malformed request. Unfortunately, a lot of this stuff is pretty archaic and there are a few layers between your servers and the processor, so it's very hard to debug. On your end, you could simply retry payments if they get rejected, but that might lead to a set of ping pong failures that might even trip fraud alerts to the customer. You can also have retry logic that uses an exponential backoff, just like any other request. That's a reasonable strategy, but you can probably do better.If you're a big company, involuntary credit card churn is actually a pretty sizeable source of churn for you. 99% transaction completion rate sounds pretty good until you realize it means a guaranteed 1% churn rate (assuming people don't sign up again), which is not insignificant. You really want to get this as low as possible. Enter Stripe: Stripe has handled a very very large number of payments, and they probably have really comprehensive data about failure rates. This allows them to identify patterns and come up with some rules around retries. A simple (fully hypothetical) example is: If a transaction is declined for insufficient funds, retry again on the 15th and the last day of the month (usually when people get paid). These rules can get really complicated. We had some rules that were as complex as "If the cardholder is in Spain, and the card is Amex, retry in three days before 5pm if it's a weekday, otherwise wait until Tuesday." Overall, this is a pretty nice feature for large customers with high transaction volumes. We did the data analysis/rule generation ourselves and hand rolled the retry logic in our system, but offering it as a built-in service is a convenient (albiet probably expensive) perk.

drinchev 9y ago

I think most difficult problem is still proper accounting. I'm with a client right now, based in Europe and we had >really good time< integrating Recurly with Stripe and use it as their payment provider, but we got stuck when we figured out that there was a need to hire an accountant to handle the cancelations for us. Having a service like Cleverbridge [1] / Avangate [2], where they end-up having someone to manage this for them for a bigger % of the sale, was the better deal. Not sure how the startup-scene will solve this, but it's actually still really hard to do this properly. My best solution would be to have Stripe doing whole-sale solution, where they invoice customers and you simply invoice them each month. It just takes too much efforts to do this >legally< in Europe if you are on your own. 1 : https://www.cleverbridge.com/corporate/ https://www.cleverbridge.com/corporate/ 2 : http://www.avangate.com http://www.avangate.com

tarstarr 9y ago
(Stripe PM here) We're actually working on exactly this problem right now. :) More to come in the next couple months, if you're interested in beta testing let me know! (tara@stripe.com)
jacquesm 9y ago
And that's before you get into VAT-MOSS and all that jazz. That's the real issue if your payment gateway doesn't do a perfect job of it, even better if you have to issue refunds.

aeharding 9y ago

First $1 million for the lifetime of the account I assume, not per year? Seems odd that they announce a fee increase without any notice to existing customers. Also I found their wording very confusing - I had a few seconds that I was very worried I'd have to migrate something or other. Poor communication wording on Stripe's part. C'mon, guys.

thedangler 9y ago

Sweet another service I can't use because I'm Canadian, but wont get access to their Atlas program because I don't qualify. I'll have to take another approach.

pokoleo 9y ago
(I work at Stripe and am also Canadian!) It looks like you might have applied for Stripe Atlas when we were in a small private beta and we’ve greatly expanded the businesses we can support. Please feel free to apply to Atlas again, or you can email me us at atlas@stripe.com.
- thedangler 9y ago
  Thank you, I sent an email with some questions. Thanks

encoderer 9y ago

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.

_kyran 9y ago
It was possible, using one off charges with a webhook.
buttscicles 9y ago
Yeah, people seem to have missed the forest for the trees here. Being able to iterate on billing easily seems the killer feature here, to me. I would like to see exactly how it works.

ninjalupo 9y ago

If anyone from Stripe is here, question: We currently use Chargebee for all our subscription and Stripe to actually process the payments. With Chargebee V3 [1] we've just dropped in their js and then we get an overlay/pop-up for both subscription and then subscription management, like editing subscription, invoicing etc. Is this a replacement for Chargebee on the integration and coding side that we get without work? [2] We'd like to reduce the number of services we integrate with and if Stripe Billing provides this, then we would like to directly use it. [1] https://www.chargebee.com/docs/checkout-v3.html https://www.chargebee.com/docs/checkout-v3.html [2] https://www.chargebee.com/docs/assets/screenshots/images/chargebee-checkout-portal-v3/why-checkout.png https://www.chargebee.com/docs/assets/screenshots/images/cha...

StefanPretty 9y ago
As far as I can tell this is just dashboard and api only. But I guess they're moving towards that. Ironic as the connect partners that helped them grow are now having their toes be stepped on. Not a nice way to play. Burn the community who helped you get there in the first place. Turn and burn it seems
- ninjalupo 9y ago
  It seems on par with many platforms in the past. Twitter, FB, Paypal etc. See what was built on top, see what is succeeding and they add that to the offering.
  - StefanPretty 9y ago
    Yeah makes sense. I’m mostly upset they’re charging for it. We offer way more than what Stripe offers our customers. Not worried about that.
- philfreo 9y ago
  You can't expect that Stripe doesn't expand their feature set. Seeing that there are hundreds of services built around stripe (https://stripe.com/works-with/types/stripe-extensions https://stripe.com/works-with/types/stripe-extensions) it's really expected that some of them will be cannibalized eventually. Subscription billing has been in Stripe for many years... it's just been very weak until now. Totally makes sense for them to work on this and if you built a subscription billing company on top of Stripe you should have known it was only a matter of time before theirs got better.

acabal 9y ago

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 recurring billing. Sure it's a pain to set up but once you've built it in it works pretty damn well with little to no maintenance. If you do even a smallish amount of business through them you can set up daily sweeps into your bank account to stave off the famous Paypal "random freezing of funds" nonsense.

anthony_franco 9y ago
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."
- acabal 9y ago
  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.
  - tarstarr 9y ago
    (PM from Stripe) If you're an existing user of Stripe Subscriptions, you get Stripe Billing features included in your current price. (To be clear, there's no extra fees for existing users.)
    - rectang 9y ago
      No extra fees for the first million, or no extra fees period?

nodesocket 9y ago

Under invoices there are two new documents "Invoice PDF" and "Receipt PDF" which are different from the standard e-mail receipts. Are these documents emailed to the customer automatically? Is there a way to control this?

universenz 9y ago

Well, this is all a bit cheeky. Backed Stripe for so long now, kinda lost touch with the options. What are some other decent recurring payment processors that support Asia Pacific, specifically Australia/New Zealand?

_kyran 9y ago
Pin Payments for a local solution or Braintree?
welder 9y ago
Braintree, which has a similar API to Stripe.

pg_bot 9y ago

This is extremely disappointing. For my business this means an additional 0.4%-0.7% fee added onto a service I currently use for free justified by features that I cannot use for compliance purposes. This new invoicing process does not qualify as an exempt financial service for a covered entity. (see subsection 1179 of HIPAA) So unless they are now willing to sign a business associates agreement I just got a price hike for a feature that would cause fines so large they would close my business. This is going to be a PR nightmare for stripe. They have destroyed all of their goodwill, and now I will have to start considering competitors. If anyone from Stripe is here in the comments I would love to chat (email is in profile)

degenerate 9y ago
I don't do $1MM in business but I'll definitely shop around once I get close. Prior to this announcement I wouldn't think twice about staying with Stripe forever. This is the first time I've ever thought, hmm, who else can I use?
- intheon 9y ago
  Same here. I just took a look at Braintree and it has convinced me.
tarstarr 9y ago
(PM from Stripe) If you're an existing user, there's no extra fees, even if you are past the $1M lifetime threshold. For existing Stripe Subscriptions users, Stripe Billing is included in your current price. (You should have received an email about this earlier today, but you can always ping me (tara@stripe.com))
- pg_bot 9y ago
  Tara as a forewarning gmail marked your message as spam in my inbox. I would expect a lot of people to have the same experience. Second the messaging is not clear if you are indeed offering a grandfather clause for existing customers you need to state that clearly. Using the term "included" is ambiguous and I interpreted it in the same manner as a tip being included on a check. (meaning we've already added it, not that we didn't charge you)

pc 9y ago

Stripe cofounder here. For anyone wondering about pricing, here's our approach. - For new Stripe customers, this is free up to the first (lifetime) $1M of payments. - For existing customers, there's no pricing change. You just get more functionality than before for free. This is what we generally try to do: we want Stripe to continually become better value for you over time, as you get more functionality for the same price. - What we've seen over Stripe's history is that customers handling large amounts of revenue have been forced to pay substantial amounts for expensive third-party systems. So, we've decided to build something that we think will be better and cheaper -- and that will, over time, increase the net revenue of businesses built on Stripe. I'm sorry about any confusion in our communication around this!

whitepoplar 9y ago
Does "existing customers" mean someone (like me) who has a Stripe account set up, but who hasn't (yet) started accepting payments? Am I grandfathered in?
- tarstarr 9y ago
  We'll make sure you're taken care of here. (If you're just running test subscription charges right now, you're still grandfathered. You can ping me any time if you have questions.)
  - dbenjamin 9y ago
    Any luck if we weren't quite running test charges yet? Just wanted to use the subscription abilities.
- sjs382 9y ago
  The email sent by Stripe says "Since you used Stripe Subscriptions in the past year, the Stripe Billing Starter plan is included in your current pricing." So... based on that, it seems that "existing customers" means "customers that have actually used the product we're replacing". I think we'd all appreciate a confirmation or clarification, though. :)

whitepoplar 9y ago

Will Stripe include free Billing for companies that have negotiated a volume discount?

tarstarr 9y ago
Yes, if you're an existing user, no matter your current rate, you'll get Billing for free at your current price.

joshpadnick 9y ago

Somewhat off-topic question, but how do others handle the need to create an invoice that corresponds to a Stripe charge? We've been using Stripe Subscriptions (I guess, now Stripe Billing) to auto-charge customers, and we separately define recurring invoices in QuickBooks Online. It's a clumsy process, but I'm assuming all Stripes Billing users have to solve it. Is there a better way to handle?

stevoski 9y ago
We use Quaderno to generate invoices for our Stripe charges. Quaderno integrates well with Stripe.

dboreham 9y ago

This thread highlights the following lesson: When communicating important and potentially difficult to understand information: have some non-insiders read the text and ask them what they think it means.

sakabaro 9y ago

That’s really awesome. Chargebee is spammy in my experience. Bad kind of spam. Glad Stripe is replacing them.

wane_linning 9y ago
care explaining how?

fooey 9y ago

I wish this had existed a year ago when we shifted from primarily doing everything through Stripe to Chargify for metered billing, invoicing and dunning.

fiatjaf 9y ago

Stripe now begins to turn into Paypal. Soon: 4 versions of APIs working simultaneously, with a different mix of missing features in each one of them, and no docs.

scrollaway 9y ago
Bit quick on the slippery slope are you? Whatever makes you say something so absurd?

simonw 9y ago

OK, this is brilliant: "Behind the scenes, Stripe now generates a unique virtual bank account number for each of your customers, which keeps your company’s banking details private. Any payments received appear in your Stripe balance and invoices are automatically reconciled and marked as closed."

Remnant44 9y ago

Does this support international wire transfers as an invoice payment method? If so, that's a killer feature for us, as US-based customers have other options including simply mailing a check; it is our international customers exclusively who are interested in wire transfer...

tschellenbach 9y ago

I'm so excited about this. We were looking into Recurly, but the migration from Stripe to them seemed like a huge hassle. Not sure yet, but it looks like this will allow us to unify all billing in 1 place, without a large dev or monthly cost. #awesome

rodh257 9y ago

I'd love something like this that handled in-app purchased subscriptions. There's a bunch of annoying parts of dealing with the app store SDK's & verifying transactions, handling refunds etc. We have a combination of online credit card purchases and in-app ones, it seems like there's an opening for some tool to handle the in-app part as well.

trotzke 9y ago

CEO of Cheddar here. I think this is a big step in the right direction for Stripe (unclear pricing aside). We’ve been thinking about usage based billing for a long time now. We built a bunch of apps using Stripe and found there was a lot missing if you wanted to track activity and bill for it, as well as with reporting and revenue optimization. Having not dug into the platform too far, this definitely looks like it could fill some gaps. I will say I’m not a fan of taking a percentage for billing on top of taking a percentage on payments, though. There is risk involved for payments (chargebacks, fraud, etc), but billing is transactional. A percent there feels like a money grab to me. The only other problem I see with this is that it all seems a bit convoluted. I get that it has to be tacked on to their existing platform. But we’ve found that the secret to an awesome usage based billing system was to track activity in real time, then apply automated billing to that tracked activity. It’s a different approach and we’re working on polishing that up and bringing it to market over the next few months. Would love to hear more about how folks are thinking about consumption and usage based billing and pricing. I think it’s the next big wave in Internet monetization, so it’s important to get right.

tarstarr 9y ago
Appreciate the kind words! To the point on pricing: believe in revenue-based business models because it's the clearest way to align our incentives with those of our customers. We want to be forced to find ways to generate more revenue, via smart recovery, better invoice payment methods, more payment method support, etc. Our fees are actually significantly less expensive than those of our competitors, and we only make money when our users make money here (instead of charging a flat fee, which can penalize companies that are bootstrapping.) Excited to check out Cheddar when it launches!

shekyboy 9y ago

Billing (recurring or one time) is a transactional activity and should be monetized as such. There should be a per invoice or per customer type of rate. This whole % of revenue seems crazy to me. There is no inherent risk involved like payment processing. You can get paid no matter what in a tx model... Based on what I see in the market with other billing/subscription providers, they all do the same thing (rev share). Since these businesses are not the payment gateway they try to do a revenue grab with the % share. I hoped Stripe would be able to disrupt this by already being positioned as a payment gateway and offer this on top in a transactional model.... Hope they rethink this strategy. And no first $1MM isnt going to cut it. Any serious business will see this as a growth challenge. Backend billing flows are challenging to build and once you are committed to this you are locked in for quite sometime from the roadmap perspective.

tarstarr 9y ago
Thanks for the feedback. To your risk point -- there is often risk involved, as businesses that have worked with large ACH payments know. More broadly, we believe in revenue-based business models because it's the clearest way to align our incentives with those of our customers. We want to be forced to find ways to generate more revenue, via smart recovery, better invoice payment methods, more payment method support, etc.
- shekyboy 9y ago
  Maybe you can provide clarity on ACH risk. Seems like businesses have most of the risk there.. and not the billing system (keeping the gateway out of this). Secondly, transaction/user based models are also aligned with customer incentives. With growth, customers will execute more transactions on the system. Frankly, Smart recovery is an area where I can see you can ask for % share. Other features like payment methods etc sound transactional again. Finally, Stripe has a payment gateway business already. This will ensure growth on that side of the business. Optically this seems like a revenue grab. You have the opportunity to disrupt the ecosystem. Thanks for responding to my comment. Appreciate the interaction.
  - 9y ago

hartator 9y ago

Not sure how I feel about it. One of my existing plan got duplicated for some reason.

chromaton 9y ago

I've been waiting for the invoicing piece for a long time. We currently use PayPal invoices (and will probably continue to do so), but for those customers who can't use PayPal, this is fantastic! We've been using Plasso's payment form service, but they just changed how that works, so this came along at exactly the right time.

usaphp 9y ago

A really cool touch is that those animated examples of pricing and other elements are actually animated html elements, not GIFs or video files. Again really slick touch from designers at Stripe.

joking 9y ago

I understand how handy are solutions like stripe, but at least in Europe you can have a payment gateway from your bank just like they can give you a handheld device, and the rates are way cheaper, I just looked one which is 0.50%, six time less than stripe.

gamzer 9y ago
Can you name some payment gateways from banks? I would like to read up on this.

StefanPretty 9y ago

As a connect platform partner this is a bit of a blow as this impacts our customer acquisition funnel, we drive customers to Stripe and then they use us. I have been talking with Tara who has been very helpful on this matter but wanted to pitch in here. I think from a connect platform partner stand point it comes across as a bit inconsiderate almost. I have already seen some people immediately put off considering using Stripe now due to the additional fees and complexity. It just doesn't seem to sit well. The Subscriptions API was the main reason for Stripe's success and now it's being charged for, why not charge for the dashboard usage and leave the api users alone?

TheForumTroll 9y ago

Woaah there! 2.9% + $0.30?! I just changed my provider because their 1.45% (+ $0!) was way too expensive compared to the competition. Do Stripe provide a bag of gold at every Christmas?!

epa 9y ago
Where were you getting 1.45% fixed, and where did you get a cheaper rate (for USD transactions).
markwcollins 9y ago
Was this from another country? 1.45% is extremely low for a USA merchant. Stripe has different rates in each country, as do all card processors.

enraged_camel 9y ago

Still no way to cleanly pause/unpause subscriptions? Why not?

CoachRufus87 9y ago

Billing systems are hard. Building a system to serve as the billing system for N clients? Wow. Kudos to all involved.

artur_makly 9y ago

how does this compare to ChargeBee?

SuperGoodJared 9y ago

This seems like an excellent move for Stripe. Lowering the barrier to entry for anyone trying to get into the SaaS (or really Anything-aaS) field by making recurring billing easier strikes me a great move for their bottom line.

tjholowaychuk 9y ago

This is awesome, congrats! I'd love to be able to send invoice emails, and/or retrieve links for invoice PDFs and list those in your application for download (or re-sending of email). Seems a bit bizarre as the infrastructure for emails, and generation of the PDFs are clearly in place, just missing the bits to tie those two together.

wakeless 9y ago

How does this work in the case where the majority of your customers currently pay by direct-debit/cheque? This is certainly the case for us, but we have long been looking for a affordable solution to have them managed with some sort of managed subscription engine

intrasight 9y ago

I see interest here in the new invoicing feature. My question is, if your accounting system can send electronic invoices (Quickbooks does), why do you need Stripe? Especially if it's more expensive?

deleted 9y ago

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zwendkos 9y ago

Skeptical a bit about "usage-based" billing and interested to hear others' thoughts. Isn't a major profit-driver for many subscription-based businesses the breakage?

inertial 9y ago

Awesome job on making it easy to add usage based plans. I've found Stripe's customer service to be a notch above the rest. Request to folks at Stripe ( @pc / @tarstarr ) : Please do something to protect small business owners against fraudulent payments (i.e. with stolen cards). Even if they follow all recommended practices by Stripe, it's very likely that there are a handful of stolen cards that will fly under the radar and hit them negatively. I'd say if the merchant is not at fault due to a stolen card being used on their site, they should not get penalized for it. The chargeback fee is one thing, the worse part is the dispute rate going up. This threatens the existence of any business if their account is suspended by Stripe.

disillusioned 9y ago

So... "Subscriptions" is now 3.3% + 30c for new clients, for a bunch of features that used to be 2.9% + 30c, along with different billing models, "smart recovery," and automatic card updater (which I swear was already a feature they'd implemented.) This feels like a very backdoor way to raise their rates for their subscription service because they felt like they were undercharging and they need more margin, and masking it with a couple of features that they're claiming can help make it worth it. (And sure, first $1M free, but still.) I kind of wish there was a "standard" tier that kept it at the normal rate and maintained parity with the features we had yesterday for 2.9%...

laurentb 9y ago

can anyone comment on support for purchase orders which a lot of companies use to recognise or initiate a purchase? it seems to still be the only thing that needs to be manual in that process....

robbiemitchell 9y ago

Everyone here is complaining about price, so let me offer a counterpoint. My understanding is that 2.9% + 30 cents is barely above what you would expect the credit card networks themselves to be charging Stripe. The margins are razor thin. If you have beef with this percentage of your revenue being taken, it's with the credit cards. Adding a .4% fee on top is likely cheaper than using a separate service on top, like Chargify/Recurly/Chargebee. (Sure, if you had already built your own stuff on top of Stripe, you don't see this tradeoff as real. But all of those are legitimate businesses, suggesting there's a huge market out there of people who don't prioritize eng time like you.) .4% isn't nothing, but put it in context of a functioning SaaS business with product priorities, especially when you think about expensive it is to hire software engineering talent. It's going to be a fraction of a fully loaded engineer's time that is probably best dedicated to other parts of the business. (Fully loaded = take a salary, add 30% for taxes and benefits, plus ammortized recruiting fees.) A one-time or occasional integration project frees up engineering to focus on other stuff and enables other teams to work on their own.

flibble 9y ago

If I may take advantage of the numerous highly knowledgeable people in the industry here — has anyone recommendations for accepting payments from the UAE? We use Stripe to receive card payments there in AED and then need to pay this money out again in AED. As Stripe don’t settle in AED the funds get converted to USD and then we have to convert them to AED again to pay out. Stripe charge 2% conversion fee over market rates to convert the funds. What’s most annoying is AED is pegged to USD and there’s no conversion risk, yet Stripe charge the conversion fee anyway. So we pay 2.9% or 3.4% (can’t remember which it is off the top of my head) international card fee, 2% Fx to USD and another few % back to AED :-€