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I mean this in the most constructive way possible. As a stripe customer for 6 years, I effectively only care about reducing transaction costs. Period. Stripe'

I mean this in the most constructive way possible. As a stripe customer for 6 years, I effectively only care about reducing transaction costs. Period. Stripe's core business is being a part of a "credit card sales tax" that is substantial. Much of this is the fault of Visa/Mastercard/Amex, but that is the problem-space they exist in. Payments are transferring bits, and should be effectively free. If they want to "make the world better", that is basically the only problem that matters in their space, and I never see any recognition of this fact in anything Stripe puts out. They do a LOT of work to try and make me feel better about the tax (e.g. your money goes towards book publishing!). None of it works, it just seems like the "your tax dollars at work" road signs. Now maybe people at Stripe are working on ways to reduce the tax on businesses/consumers. It is not a technical problem, its societal. I hope they are, and they will announce something amazing and I can worship at their feet. Please Stripe, work on reducing the costs to transact online by 1-2 orders of magnitude, where it should be.

nimish 6y ago
Turns out private taxes aren't good!
abstractbarista 6y ago
Transferring those bits with just the right logic for each transaction scenario is what still costs something. I'm sure the margin is massively excessive today. But I don't think it can be quite 'effectively free'.
- Waterluvian 6y ago
  Debit e-transfers in Canada are free (and have been around a long time). It makes the Venmo thing a real head scratcher.
  - mcpherrinm 6y ago
    They're only free in certain circumstances: personal transfers, and only for some bank accounts. It wasn't that long ago that all e-transfers cost $1, which makes them pretty impractical for giving a few bucks to a friend to split a pizza or whatever. Venmo's been around longer than free e-transfers.
  - wolco2 6y ago
    I pay for each etransfer what bank are you with?
    - Waterluvian 6y ago
      Really? I thought it was universally free. Simplii, TD, Scotiabank.
jackdeansmith 6y ago
> Payments are transferring bits, and should be effectively free Payments are also about establishing trust, which goes wrong a lot. You can in practice make payments very cheap with some cryptocurrency schemes, but don't get fraud protection, chargebacks, and customer service that credit cards provide (unless you introduce another party in the middle taking a cut). It seems to me the innovation required to actually reduce costs would replace the credit card system, not build on top of it.
singhrac 6y ago
This is another phrasing of what jackdeansmith says, but this is not right: > Payments are transferring bits, and should be effectively free. Payments is taking on a short term risk that the (slow) transaction between a customer's bank and a vendor's bank will not settle, because of (a) fraud, (b) chargeback-like issues, (c) insolvency. This isn't exactly right, but overally its not quite 0 risk without crypto, which people don't trust (from a UX perspective). And all kinds of risk-taking charges for it: loans, mortgages, etc. If you want to shoulder the risk yourself and save the fees, pay with a debit card.
- mc32 6y ago
  Agree. I think that’s a very glaring omission in the original argument and one can interpret that as a simple misunderstanding or purposeful omission to misrepresent the totality of what comprises the cost to present a biased argument for more favorable terms.
  - awakeasleep 6y ago
    It's basic human nature. Out of sight, out of mind- and I could build it in a weekend. But aside from that, the risk of payments is not intuitive. We regularly see threads on Hacker News where people pile on PayPal for 'seizing' the money of an entrepreneur with a business model that involves collecting payments up front and then delivering their good or service at a later date. Unless you've worked in the space, or read the fine print of the agreements, it's easy to get upset about that.
- billclerico 6y ago
  One thing that often gets overlooked with respect to payments is consumer preference (and this is actually the primary driver of cost). Why do credit cards cost 2-3% to process? Because of expensive rewards programs given to the consumers who use the card. Why are there expensive rewards programs? Because consumers like them! And they insist on paying with a credit card because of them. Except in edge cases, merchants have no choice but to accept credit cards despite the cost. While Visa, Mastercard & Amex frequently get the blame, the lions share of the processing fee flows to the issuing bank of the card, and the lions share of that fee goes to fund rewards programs. (There are other perks to credit cards that encourage consumer usage, including chargeback protections, free 30 days of float, near universal acceptance, etc) Payment costs won't materially decrease unless someone invents a form of payment that consumers prefer which doesn't have these cost burdens. Or if you, as the merchant, have such market power that you can mandate a less preferred but cheaper form of payment (like cash or debit card or ACH - this is why you often can't use your credit card to pay a parking ticket or your taxes)
arrel 6y ago
It seems like a lot of people are defending credit card pricing, but the idea that they’ve been charging the same % since before the internet and are still absorbing the same “cost” of fraud protection is absurd. I would love Stripe to start advocating for lowering credit card fees, either through regulation or providing more avenues for competition.
- lumost 6y ago
  There are many costs that remain stubbornly fixed as a portion of GDP (Ads has been 2% of GDP for > 100 years). Fraud as an industry, and corresponding fraud protection services likely fall under this umbrella barring substantial technological innovation.
- cycrutchfield 6y ago
  It’s too late. Much of that extra savings on fraud protection has already been funneled back to the card owner in the form of cash back or reward points. Not a whole lot can be done to break that unless the government comes in and legislates something as they do in Europe.
  - C1sc0cat 6y ago
    The benefit went entirely to the merchant the consumer lost out in the EU
    - alisonkisk 6y ago
      If your merchants are charging monopoly prices then you need antitrust enforcement.
- megablast 6y ago
  Has the internet decreased or increased fraud.
- C1sc0cat 6y ago
  Be careful what you wish for the EU mandated reduced fees - the backs just stopped doing cashback cost me almost £20 a month. Of course the reduced savings where not passed on to the end consumer
brianwawok 6y ago
As a user of stripe I agree However the biggest slice of the pie is Visa and MasterCard. Stripe could release no new features in a year, if they could lower my rate by .1% I would be far happier.
NateThePirate 6y ago
I worked on a project where the client wanted to switch to Authorize.net from Stripe midway through because of Stripe’s cost. From a developer perspective, it was a lot more miserable to work with than Stripe. Other projects I’ve worked on have had a similar motivation for not using Stripe. Annoyingly, the cost of implementing the replacement and getting it working with React Native (which involved creating native modules for iOS and Android) ended up costing them as much as several years of fees. Also the client was a startup that went bust, so they never really got the value out of it that they hoped.
- bobwall 6y ago
  Yea, when companies really want to lower the cost, they implement directly with the bank, like say JP Morgan. That makes authorize.net even seem good. Stripe is really a pleasure to work with as a developer.
- hakfoo 6y ago
  Interestingly, I tended to prefer Authorize.net to other alternatives. But a lot of that is likely a 'moment in time" thing when I got into development. There were a few years where Authnet was the "default" gateway. Other gateways offered compatibility modes for their SIM and AIM APIs, and if you had some random off-the-shelf cart, it probably spoke AIM out of the box. Part of the difference in experience is also likely due to their model. The Authnet model was very much "take direct card data and relay it to your server and then to us", and the Stripe model is very much "JavaScript up your checkout process to do tokenization, so you never see the card number." If you're at a point in time when JavaScript is a bit sketchy (the IE6-is-the-dominant-browser era), you might be more willing to go for a worse PCI compliance scope in exchange for the comparative bulletproofness of doing things server-side. Now I work for a firm competing with both of them, so I can hardly express a preference today. :)
philfreo 6y ago
As a customer of Stripe too, I almost[1] couldn't disagree more. Running a global online/SaaS business is hard. So much complexity everywhere. I wish Stripe would handle MORE problems & complexity and would happily pay for it. Just a few examples Stripe could handle: - Checkout + Portal is a great start, but it still takes too much (expensive) design+dev brainpower to create the entire experience of a high quality trial-to-paid and existing-customer billing management in a SaaS app. - Running a SaaS company at any scale is full of Support headaches that Stripe Dashboard simply does not handle well - stuff like tweaking a billing date, and doing combination (e.g. wire transfer + credit card) payments, "can you re-send my invoice but with my VAT ID on it this time?" and many more. At any scale, lots of effort is spend on custom billing support tickets and building internal tooling even if you use all of Stripe's features. - Are you a SaaS company selling all over the US? Good luck being complaint with all 50 states in terms of sales tax reporting without expensive legal/accounting help. Did you hire any remote out-of-state employees? Good luck -- now your financial compliance got even more complicated. Stripe doesn't do any of these things well today. And if they did, it would likely be much cheaper than the in-house solutions everyone is coming up with instead. I think Stripe should handle 10x as much complexity for a SaaS company than it does today, and of course they should get paid for doing so. [1] I agree it would be amazing to see Stripe come up with smoother flows for supporting payments that bypassing the expensive card network's fees.
- austinpena 6y ago
  Do you know of anyone who does a god job for SaaS companies?
  - dbbk 6y ago
    Paddle, they take on literally all of your tax and VAT compliance globally.
    - jgalt212 6y ago
      Where is this handled now? We do this ourselves, but then I hit the google, and got this page: https://stripe.com/docs/orders/tax-integration https://stripe.com/docs/orders/tax-integration but the header says the service is now deprecated. Is there a new one?
x87678r 6y ago
The best thing I read was Australian regulator capped cc interchange fees at 0.5% and allowed merchants to charge as an extra fee over the price. I guess it'll never happen in the US but maybe Europe? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interchange_fee#Australia_and_New_Zealand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interchange_fee#Australia_and_...
puppymaster 6y ago
Could it also be you only care about transaction cost because everything else works so well? The time I spent on customer support with paypal/visa/plaid, ridiculous documentation from other payment processors and payouts snags make me appreciate Stripe even more. EDIT: As in I haven't touch my stripe code for 2 years. They still work.
mbesto 6y ago
I understand the sentiment but I don't think you understand what exactly Stripe does that actually makes it cheaper than alternatives. They are an ISO, payment processor, merchant bank, payfac and gateway all rolled into one. Add all of those up and you can see why its actually, generally speaking, cheaper.
manmal 6y ago
Decent fraud protection alone is worth so much. I honestly think you are a bit spoiled by modern payment processors. Their tax is hard earned.
megablast 6y ago
Exactly. Fraud doesn’t exist. So why should I have to pay for it.
antupis 6y ago
You barking wrong tree here, what USA needs is new competitors to credit card giants if you go about anywhere world there is already pretty good competitors with superior user experience to credit cards eg Mobilepay(Denmark and Finland),Swish(Sweden) and of course Alipay(chnina) etc.
ptman 6y ago
Adyen is probably cheaper, but maybe not enough to matter: https://www.adyen.com/pricing https://www.adyen.com/pricing
- andrea_sdl 6y ago
  Adyen has also high requirements for companies in terms of volumes, so it's an alternative but available only to a subset of companies
eps 6y ago
To that end at least allow payouts in USD to the non-US banks. We charge in USD and we pay for our infrastructure in USD, so the hit we get on the double currency conversion is really unpleasant... as it is completely avoidable. This has been asked of Stripe for AGES and they did nothing. The only explanation is that this is by design, which means that they have no problem bleeding merchants with unnecessary fees just like all other payment companies. It's just that these fees are disguised differently.
NKCSS 6y ago
Here in The Netherlands, we have a platform called iDeal. All dutch banks are connected and all webshops accept it (it's hard to find a place to use your creditcard here). Transactions are instant and non-refundable. Costs are around 0.35 per transaction and NO % fees. Just a fixed amount per transaction. For big volumes, that per-transaction amount can be lower. It's amazing and I wished they'd just roll that out worldwide. No risk for merchants at all.
- __float 6y ago
  It's also much less reliable than the credit card networks. Fundamentally it's not ready to be a large instant payment provider, as it's still based on the same slow batch processes that run your normal bank transfers.
- swyx 6y ago
  do they handle sales taxes? for in country vs out of country sales?
  - NKCSS 6y ago
    Here in The Netherlands, everyone is charged sales tax (it's always included in all prices that's communicated to consumers, required by law). Companies pay sales tax to the state and can deduct sales tax they paid to other companies. There are rules for applying sales taxes to other EU countries and it get's complicated fast; once you do more than X amount in another EU country, you're supposed to register in that country and file taxes in that country. Thresholds here: https://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/sites/taxation/files/resources/documents/taxation/vat/traders/vat_community/vat_in_ec_annexi.pdf https://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/sites/taxation/files/r...
- YawningAngel 6y ago
  This doesn't really solve the problem, it just shifts all risk onto the buyer. Under this system, if you take my money and run, I have no possible recourse
  - 6y ago
netcan 6y ago
>>Please Stripe, work on reducing the costs to transact online by 1-2 orders of magnitude, where it should be. I agree with the could and should. Payment costs could be a tiny fraction of current. It is a tax. I'm dubious of the who. Stripe is now a big player. They're have no interest in turning their $X00bn sector into a $Xbn sector. Incidentally, I think the current economy harbours a lot of sectors that could be orders of magnitude smaller. This has always been a debate in the financial sectors. Today though, there are some (IMO) less ambiguous sectors/companies. Does facebook actually need $70bn in revenue to operate facebook. Could it be done on $7bn? To me, it seems like an obvious yes. Quite a glaring inefficiency, IMO.

nimish 6y ago

Turns out private taxes aren't good!

abstractbarista 6y ago

Transferring those bits with just the right logic for each transaction scenario is what still costs something. I'm sure the margin is massively excessive today. But I don't think it can be quite 'effectively free'.

Waterluvian 6y ago
Debit e-transfers in Canada are free (and have been around a long time). It makes the Venmo thing a real head scratcher.
- mcpherrinm 6y ago
  They're only free in certain circumstances: personal transfers, and only for some bank accounts. It wasn't that long ago that all e-transfers cost $1, which makes them pretty impractical for giving a few bucks to a friend to split a pizza or whatever. Venmo's been around longer than free e-transfers.
- wolco2 6y ago
  I pay for each etransfer what bank are you with?
  - Waterluvian 6y ago
    Really? I thought it was universally free. Simplii, TD, Scotiabank.

jackdeansmith 6y ago

> Payments are transferring bits, and should be effectively free Payments are also about establishing trust, which goes wrong a lot. You can in practice make payments very cheap with some cryptocurrency schemes, but don't get fraud protection, chargebacks, and customer service that credit cards provide (unless you introduce another party in the middle taking a cut). It seems to me the innovation required to actually reduce costs would replace the credit card system, not build on top of it.

singhrac 6y ago

This is another phrasing of what jackdeansmith says, but this is not right: > Payments are transferring bits, and should be effectively free. Payments is taking on a short term risk that the (slow) transaction between a customer's bank and a vendor's bank will not settle, because of (a) fraud, (b) chargeback-like issues, (c) insolvency. This isn't exactly right, but overally its not quite 0 risk without crypto, which people don't trust (from a UX perspective). And all kinds of risk-taking charges for it: loans, mortgages, etc. If you want to shoulder the risk yourself and save the fees, pay with a debit card.

mc32 6y ago
Agree. I think that’s a very glaring omission in the original argument and one can interpret that as a simple misunderstanding or purposeful omission to misrepresent the totality of what comprises the cost to present a biased argument for more favorable terms.
- awakeasleep 6y ago
  It's basic human nature. Out of sight, out of mind- and I could build it in a weekend. But aside from that, the risk of payments is not intuitive. We regularly see threads on Hacker News where people pile on PayPal for 'seizing' the money of an entrepreneur with a business model that involves collecting payments up front and then delivering their good or service at a later date. Unless you've worked in the space, or read the fine print of the agreements, it's easy to get upset about that.
billclerico 6y ago
One thing that often gets overlooked with respect to payments is consumer preference (and this is actually the primary driver of cost). Why do credit cards cost 2-3% to process? Because of expensive rewards programs given to the consumers who use the card. Why are there expensive rewards programs? Because consumers like them! And they insist on paying with a credit card because of them. Except in edge cases, merchants have no choice but to accept credit cards despite the cost. While Visa, Mastercard & Amex frequently get the blame, the lions share of the processing fee flows to the issuing bank of the card, and the lions share of that fee goes to fund rewards programs. (There are other perks to credit cards that encourage consumer usage, including chargeback protections, free 30 days of float, near universal acceptance, etc) Payment costs won't materially decrease unless someone invents a form of payment that consumers prefer which doesn't have these cost burdens. Or if you, as the merchant, have such market power that you can mandate a less preferred but cheaper form of payment (like cash or debit card or ACH - this is why you often can't use your credit card to pay a parking ticket or your taxes)

arrel 6y ago

It seems like a lot of people are defending credit card pricing, but the idea that they’ve been charging the same % since before the internet and are still absorbing the same “cost” of fraud protection is absurd. I would love Stripe to start advocating for lowering credit card fees, either through regulation or providing more avenues for competition.

lumost 6y ago
There are many costs that remain stubbornly fixed as a portion of GDP (Ads has been 2% of GDP for > 100 years). Fraud as an industry, and corresponding fraud protection services likely fall under this umbrella barring substantial technological innovation.
cycrutchfield 6y ago
It’s too late. Much of that extra savings on fraud protection has already been funneled back to the card owner in the form of cash back or reward points. Not a whole lot can be done to break that unless the government comes in and legislates something as they do in Europe.
- C1sc0cat 6y ago
  The benefit went entirely to the merchant the consumer lost out in the EU
  - alisonkisk 6y ago
    If your merchants are charging monopoly prices then you need antitrust enforcement.
megablast 6y ago
Has the internet decreased or increased fraud.
C1sc0cat 6y ago
Be careful what you wish for the EU mandated reduced fees - the backs just stopped doing cashback cost me almost £20 a month. Of course the reduced savings where not passed on to the end consumer

brianwawok 6y ago

As a user of stripe I agree However the biggest slice of the pie is Visa and MasterCard. Stripe could release no new features in a year, if they could lower my rate by .1% I would be far happier.

NateThePirate 6y ago

I worked on a project where the client wanted to switch to Authorize.net from Stripe midway through because of Stripe’s cost. From a developer perspective, it was a lot more miserable to work with than Stripe. Other projects I’ve worked on have had a similar motivation for not using Stripe. Annoyingly, the cost of implementing the replacement and getting it working with React Native (which involved creating native modules for iOS and Android) ended up costing them as much as several years of fees. Also the client was a startup that went bust, so they never really got the value out of it that they hoped.

bobwall 6y ago
Yea, when companies really want to lower the cost, they implement directly with the bank, like say JP Morgan. That makes authorize.net even seem good. Stripe is really a pleasure to work with as a developer.
hakfoo 6y ago
Interestingly, I tended to prefer Authorize.net to other alternatives. But a lot of that is likely a 'moment in time" thing when I got into development. There were a few years where Authnet was the "default" gateway. Other gateways offered compatibility modes for their SIM and AIM APIs, and if you had some random off-the-shelf cart, it probably spoke AIM out of the box. Part of the difference in experience is also likely due to their model. The Authnet model was very much "take direct card data and relay it to your server and then to us", and the Stripe model is very much "JavaScript up your checkout process to do tokenization, so you never see the card number." If you're at a point in time when JavaScript is a bit sketchy (the IE6-is-the-dominant-browser era), you might be more willing to go for a worse PCI compliance scope in exchange for the comparative bulletproofness of doing things server-side. Now I work for a firm competing with both of them, so I can hardly express a preference today. :)

philfreo 6y ago

As a customer of Stripe too, I almost[1] couldn't disagree more. Running a global online/SaaS business is hard. So much complexity everywhere. I wish Stripe would handle MORE problems & complexity and would happily pay for it. Just a few examples Stripe could handle: - Checkout + Portal is a great start, but it still takes too much (expensive) design+dev brainpower to create the entire experience of a high quality trial-to-paid and existing-customer billing management in a SaaS app. - Running a SaaS company at any scale is full of Support headaches that Stripe Dashboard simply does not handle well - stuff like tweaking a billing date, and doing combination (e.g. wire transfer + credit card) payments, "can you re-send my invoice but with my VAT ID on it this time?" and many more. At any scale, lots of effort is spend on custom billing support tickets and building internal tooling even if you use all of Stripe's features. - Are you a SaaS company selling all over the US? Good luck being complaint with all 50 states in terms of sales tax reporting without expensive legal/accounting help. Did you hire any remote out-of-state employees? Good luck -- now your financial compliance got even more complicated. Stripe doesn't do any of these things well today. And if they did, it would likely be much cheaper than the in-house solutions everyone is coming up with instead. I think Stripe should handle 10x as much complexity for a SaaS company than it does today, and of course they should get paid for doing so. [1] I agree it would be amazing to see Stripe come up with smoother flows for supporting payments that bypassing the expensive card network's fees.

austinpena 6y ago
Do you know of anyone who does a god job for SaaS companies?
- dbbk 6y ago
  Paddle, they take on literally all of your tax and VAT compliance globally.
  - jgalt212 6y ago
    Where is this handled now? We do this ourselves, but then I hit the google, and got this page: https://stripe.com/docs/orders/tax-integration https://stripe.com/docs/orders/tax-integration but the header says the service is now deprecated. Is there a new one?

x87678r 6y ago

The best thing I read was Australian regulator capped cc interchange fees at 0.5% and allowed merchants to charge as an extra fee over the price. I guess it'll never happen in the US but maybe Europe? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interchange_fee#Australia_and_New_Zealand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interchange_fee#Australia_and_...

puppymaster 6y ago

Could it also be you only care about transaction cost because everything else works so well? The time I spent on customer support with paypal/visa/plaid, ridiculous documentation from other payment processors and payouts snags make me appreciate Stripe even more. EDIT: As in I haven't touch my stripe code for 2 years. They still work.

mbesto 6y ago

I understand the sentiment but I don't think you understand what exactly Stripe does that actually makes it cheaper than alternatives. They are an ISO, payment processor, merchant bank, payfac and gateway all rolled into one. Add all of those up and you can see why its actually, generally speaking, cheaper.

manmal 6y ago

Decent fraud protection alone is worth so much. I honestly think you are a bit spoiled by modern payment processors. Their tax is hard earned.

megablast 6y ago

Exactly. Fraud doesn’t exist. So why should I have to pay for it.

antupis 6y ago

You barking wrong tree here, what USA needs is new competitors to credit card giants if you go about anywhere world there is already pretty good competitors with superior user experience to credit cards eg Mobilepay(Denmark and Finland),Swish(Sweden) and of course Alipay(chnina) etc.

ptman 6y ago

Adyen is probably cheaper, but maybe not enough to matter: https://www.adyen.com/pricing https://www.adyen.com/pricing

andrea_sdl 6y ago
Adyen has also high requirements for companies in terms of volumes, so it's an alternative but available only to a subset of companies

eps 6y ago

To that end at least allow payouts in USD to the non-US banks. We charge in USD and we pay for our infrastructure in USD, so the hit we get on the double currency conversion is really unpleasant... as it is completely avoidable. This has been asked of Stripe for AGES and they did nothing. The only explanation is that this is by design, which means that they have no problem bleeding merchants with unnecessary fees just like all other payment companies. It's just that these fees are disguised differently.

NKCSS 6y ago

Here in The Netherlands, we have a platform called iDeal. All dutch banks are connected and all webshops accept it (it's hard to find a place to use your creditcard here). Transactions are instant and non-refundable. Costs are around 0.35 per transaction and NO % fees. Just a fixed amount per transaction. For big volumes, that per-transaction amount can be lower. It's amazing and I wished they'd just roll that out worldwide. No risk for merchants at all.

__float 6y ago
It's also much less reliable than the credit card networks. Fundamentally it's not ready to be a large instant payment provider, as it's still based on the same slow batch processes that run your normal bank transfers.
swyx 6y ago
do they handle sales taxes? for in country vs out of country sales?
- NKCSS 6y ago
  Here in The Netherlands, everyone is charged sales tax (it's always included in all prices that's communicated to consumers, required by law). Companies pay sales tax to the state and can deduct sales tax they paid to other companies. There are rules for applying sales taxes to other EU countries and it get's complicated fast; once you do more than X amount in another EU country, you're supposed to register in that country and file taxes in that country. Thresholds here: https://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/sites/taxation/files/resources/documents/taxation/vat/traders/vat_community/vat_in_ec_annexi.pdf https://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/sites/taxation/files/r...
YawningAngel 6y ago
This doesn't really solve the problem, it just shifts all risk onto the buyer. Under this system, if you take my money and run, I have no possible recourse
- 6y ago

netcan 6y ago

>>Please Stripe, work on reducing the costs to transact online by 1-2 orders of magnitude, where it should be. I agree with the could and should. Payment costs could be a tiny fraction of current. It is a tax. I'm dubious of the who. Stripe is now a big player. They're have no interest in turning their $X00bn sector into a $Xbn sector. Incidentally, I think the current economy harbours a lot of sectors that could be orders of magnitude smaller. This has always been a debate in the financial sectors. Today though, there are some (IMO) less ambiguous sectors/companies. Does facebook actually need $70bn in revenue to operate facebook. Could it be done on $7bn? To me, it seems like an obvious yes. Quite a glaring inefficiency, IMO.