40 ms·

Stripe migrates Stripe Subscriptions users to more expensive Stripe Billing

363 points by corentin88 6y ago

tschellenbach 6y ago
This is particularly annoying since Stripe Billing was initially free, you start using it and now it suddenly costs 0.5% * revenue. Which can be quite substantial. The more frustrating part is that it's currently at best a beta quality product. Reporting and interface for the finance side of the company leaves a lot to be desired. Anyone know any solid alternatives?
- tschellenbach 6y ago
  ChargeBee, Recurly, what else is out there?
- pamonrails 6y ago
  If you are looking to manage subscriptions outside of Stripe, but keep using Stripe for payment processing, take a look at Kill Bill, the open-source subscription billing & payments platform: https://killbill.io/ https://killbill.io/ - Stripe tutorial: https://docs.killbill.io/latest/stripe_plugin.html https://docs.killbill.io/latest/stripe_plugin.html (I'm a Kill Bill cofounder)
corentin88 6y ago
This is going to impact all SaaS using Stripe. Managing your subscriptions (recurring charges) via Stripe cost 0.5% - on top of the payment fees.
KingOfCoders 6y ago
Because they can.
- sokoloff 6y ago
  If it adds more value than the cost when compared to other alternatives, why shouldn't they charge something for it? It's not like stripe has anything close to a monopoly in the payments space.
- vkou 6y ago
  Yes, and they can because being a payment processor is not easy. If it were, nobody would need middle-men like them.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
    But of course, it ought to be, and there should be no need for the middle-men, certainly not ones that take 2-4% of the transaction.
    - tudelo 6y ago
      Yeah but isn't that just the way of the world? Processes can become simpler but at a certain point the complexity of the process is inherent and it would benefit you to employ an expert (individual or entity). You can build a house yourself, with your own hands, but why? I'm not an expert on the whole domain of payment processing but it seems to me there is a lot of non trivial problems inherent with taking payments. I guess if you are hedging on a different system of holding and transferring money there may be a way to get rid of the middleman. What do you propose?
      - PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
        I propose the governments require the infrastructure for zero-cost, instant transfers be made available to anyone, with open APIs. I don't care who runs the infrastructure. If you want subscriptions/recurring payments, stored payment methods and all the "fancy" stuff contemporary payment processors offer, you pay for it. If you just want to move money from A to B, it should be easy and it should be free. The only way for that to happen is for it to be socially provided service.
        vkou 6y ago
        > I propose the governments require the infrastructure for zero-cost, instant transfers be made available to anyone, with open APIs. I don't care who runs the infrastructure. Will this infrastructure handle chargebacks? Fraud? Stolen credit cards? Forex? If yes, it can't be zero-cost. If no, it won't be usable until the middle-men build all of these systems on top of it.
mtmail 6y ago
Afaik that's the pricing since June at least https://twitter.com/GrahamJCampbell/status/1278002490185842688 https://twitter.com/GrahamJCampbell/status/12780024901858426... https://twitter.com/steveofmcleod/status/1277771707537780736 https://twitter.com/steveofmcleod/status/1277771707537780736
- ceejayoz 6y ago
  Quite a few of us were grandfathered in, though. > As an early user of Stripe, you have had free access to Stripe’s machine learning based fraud protection tools, Stripe Radar and Radar for Fraud Teams.
adrr 6y ago
Paying for payment retries.
- ceejayoz 6y ago
  Well, and hosted invoice pages, dunning emails, etc. There's quite a bit more to it than retrying the charge a few times.
gargron 6y ago
Confused because I thought Stripe Billing referred to the Customer Portal functionality and some advanced Stripe Checkout features like customer-facing promotional codes. I thought subscriptions were part of the core Stripe functionality. Can anyone clarify?
- hartator 6y ago
  It’s what I thought as well. If we knew it’s gonna to cost us an extra .5% of revenue, we would have built our own billing system instead of hacking one around Stripe one.
- clintonb 6y ago
  https://stripe.com/billing https://stripe.com/billing
breck 6y ago
I hope they can also innovate more on behalf of the customer with regards to recurring charges. PayPal has this management console where a customer can see all recurring charges and instantly cancel any of them with one click: https://imgur.com/a/lLE3iAt https://imgur.com/a/lLE3iAt IMO, this should be standard across all payment cards. I detest businesses that make it hard to cancel recurring charges and I think payment card providers need to stop that from happening (I get Stripe is not quite a consumer card provider...yet).
alooPotato 6y ago
We (Streak yc s11) signed up for Stripe way back in the day and have just been paying their standard payment processing fees for years. We haven't upgraded our API version or used any of their new billing features or anything like that. Basically we get the same value from Stripe we did from the day we integrated. I thought our pricing was going to be grandfathered but this change will cost us tens of thousands of dollars. Unfortunately, we're kind of hostage to it. Anyone else at scale and have an old integration? How are you handling the fee increase?
- klinskyc 6y ago
  If you're doing significant volume, which I assume Streak does, you can negotiate significant volume discounts. You have been leaving a ton of money on the table if you have not done that.
  - enahs-sf 6y ago
    Could you define "significant volume" a bit more specifically? Wondering if I too, have been leaving a ton of money on the table. What is the approximate scale that this makes sense at?
    - klinskyc 6y ago
      This link says 80k/month, which matches our experience -> https://www.fool.com/the-blueprint/stripe-payments-review/ https://www.fool.com/the-blueprint/stripe-payments-review/
  - danpalmer 6y ago
    Huge +1 to this. Everything about Stripe pricing is negotiable. I'd recommend going in to the discussion with a quote from another provider.
  - Alupis 6y ago
    Maybe - they seemed really not interested in negotiating much at all and I got the impression they feel that their customers should be lucky enough to be allowed to use Stripe as a processor. My company went through negotiations with Stripe earlier this year. We were more than 1.5% + $0.10 away from our current processor, and they wouldn't budge to even match our existing rates. They kept saying they are a better value, and offer more things for the price - except most of the "value-adds" we didn't care about (their only interesting things was the Stripe Checkout with Fraud detection - which requires you to use their hosted checkout page... which is a complete non-starter for a serious eCommerce operation). Perhaps not a good fit - but paying a ton more per year in CC processing fees just because Stripe uses "AI!!!!" wasn't something we could swallow.
elevenoh 6y ago
How much more can stripe wring out of merchants while signalling virtue? e.g. 2.6%+ per transaction? Jesus christ. I worked for a payment processing co. It was all about financial institution connections (uncompetitive). And the costs my company incurred to process payments were negligible.
kgog 6y ago
Stripe apologists coming to this thread in 3..2..
clark_ruby 6y ago
On the other hand, this opens up space for competitors to beat them on price.
dabeeeenster 6y ago
We're very happy ChargeBee customers - I guess this doesn't affect us as we only use Stripe to store the card details - ChargeBee is the actual recurring billing engine. Not affiliated to CB - just a happy customer!
- merlinbeard 6y ago
  Do you pay CB the listed prices, or there is significant volume discount?
  - skrish 6y ago
    There is volume discount available with assisted solutioning and onboarding from our team for customers with over 1M revenue.
- GordonS 6y ago
  I just had a look at the pricing, and I'm a bit confused. Take the base plan for example, £199/month - it doesn't mention any other charges, and is apparently all-inclusive; or do you have to pay card processing fees on top?
nathcd 6y ago
Is there any downside (other than a little more work for the implementer) to just using their main payment processing API, and to implement subscription billing with a cronjob? This is what sr.ht does [1], at least as of a year ago. If doing it manually now means saving a bunch of money, seems like a no-brainer. [1] https://cmpwn.com/@sir/103074952842876982 https://cmpwn.com/@sir/103074952842876982
- drchiu 6y ago
  We did that for a couple of SAAS. In fact, we even extracted this out to an internal library with a web UI. If anyone is interested, let me know and I’d be happy to open source it. It’ll have to be run in its own server and process. But for full disclosure, my latest project just bit the bullet and accepted the extra 0.5%. Wanted to see how it goes. Could always switch if I found the need.
  - tomsi 6y ago
    We'd definitely be interested since we are currently evaluating our options
  - corentin88 6y ago
    Interested as well!
- driverdan 6y ago
  The downside is that you have to write and maintain the code and infrastructure to do it. You have to do the math for your business to decide if those costs are lower than the 0.5% fee.
wishinghand 6y ago
Isn't this backwards? Shouldn't a steady cash flow be rewarded?
- cbhl 6y ago
  I would expect subscriptions to get a higher chargeback rate since people aren't always expecting that second or third charge to come through.
ppod 6y ago
I'm mostly joking but.. didn't they hire the guy who wrote the really famous "charge more" post?
- smnrchrds 6y ago
  patio11. They sure did hire him.
  - markdown 6y ago
    I bet he's behind this. Grab a pitchfork!
edwinwee 6y ago
Edwin from Stripe here. It’s worth distinguishing between charging money on Stripe (for which you incur payments pricing) and using Stripe Billing (which is a separately-paid product). Stripe Billing has had this pricing for a few years. For some longtime users of Subscriptions, we originally didn’t change their pricing but are doing so now. We think charging a separate fee for our Billing product is fair, given comparable products in the market (say, Recurly or Chargebee) charge something similar. (Generally more!) We’ve been investing a ton in making Stripe Billing better. For example, from talking to users we learned people needed it be significantly easier to get up and running with subscriptions. So in the last year we built the Customer Portal[0]. (We’ve also listened to you and improved the analytics[1].) Payments is a low-margin business and our customers are (quite reasonably) very price sensitive. So to be able to make Billing a great product, we realized it was going to have to charge a fee commensurate with the product scope. [0] https://stripe.com/docs/billing/subscriptions/customer-portal https://stripe.com/docs/billing/subscriptions/customer-porta... [1] https://support.stripe.com/questions/billing-analytics-dashboard https://support.stripe.com/questions/billing-analytics-dashb...
- vmception 6y ago
  > Payments is a low-margin business and our customers are (quite reasonably) very price sensitive. Thanks for tackling a low margin business! I always look at people like they have two heads when they pitch something like that.
- pixiemaster 6y ago
  Well, if you start comparing yourselves to chargebee, they have a far more complex product - and really impressive traction in terms of new features being released regularly - combined with a really super support. I have not even seen a single company that deliver on the same level as chargebee does.
- onassar 6y ago
  Thanks for jumping in here so quick. I'm sure it'll be a tough thread, but something about this response rubs me the wrong way. It doesn't seem like it's really addressing the change (eg. why is it worth _existing_ customers to be paying an extra 0.5%? The fact that Stripe added features for new customers doesn't really impact those of us who have been with you for 5-10 years). Additionally, I don't recall getting an email about the price increase. I genuinely don't even know: am I going to be seeing this price increase? Would have liked getting an email about something like this, rather than finding out on HN, and now having to dig into things to figure out if I'm actually affected (which I presume I am). To give you a comparison: if my bank or credit card company increased their rate, I'd expect to be (and am) notified of that. My two cents :)
hugoromano 6y ago
5¢ made sense, 0.5% is a parasitic approach, the tech stack and engineering costs them 0.1¢ per recurring transaction.
- donor20 6y ago
  Sounds like you could clean up in this space at $00.001 per transaction!
  - hugoromano 6y ago
    ¢5/transactions for billing services we could do it, might need some small seed funding to set up a small dev team. Do you think we could get interest customers?
    - __float 6y ago
      You could get customers, but you'll quickly learn they ask for very complex features, and you'll struggle to pay your dev team with 5 cents per transaction.
      - hugoromano 6y ago
        Complex customers can use 0.5% extra service from Stripe, they could even build their own solution. Billing, recurring, invoicing can be done here. What could be interesting is setting up a billing service that the client brings its own Payment Service (checkout.com, stripe.com, adyen.com).
- adrr 6y ago
  There's a fixed cost to put a transaction onto the card brand networks. Recurring includes dunning management which retries failed auths. If you rolled your own, you'd be paying for the declines.
  - hugoromano 6y ago
    Stripe is charging extra 0.5% for the billing feature, so a billing charge goes in the US with stripe 3.4% + 30¢. It could be done for 2.9% + 30¢ + 5¢, stripe will still get the its cut, but not the extra 0.5%.
candiddevmike 6y ago
In my opinion, no one should be using recurring billing for any provider. If you do, you've basically tied yourselves to them--if you ever decide to move, you need to somehow get the subscription details for every customer migrated into your app! Instead, view your payment processor as just another PaymentProcessor enum. Own the recurring subscriptions yourself, or be willing to pay for someone to do it for you.
- paxys 6y ago
  That is easier said than done. Managing recurring billing is a significant engineering problem, and getting tied in with a provider and paying a surcharge is still worth it over maintaining an entire in-house dev team to do it.
  - raiyu 6y ago
    I guess now it's as simple as checking whether cost of a dev team to do recurring billing is < 0.5%
  - candiddevmike 6y ago
    In my experience, it should be no more difficult than sending recurring emails. You should have all the data (PaymentProcessorCustomerID, LastBillingDate, etc), run it like you would a email with a retry queue.
    - abfan1127 6y ago
      its more than that. The "What ifs" get out of control pretty quickly. Prorating, canceling, expired/canceled cards, tend to create a ton of end cases. For instance, a person pays for Feb 15 to Mar 14, the card expires March 1, then the person requests a cancellation Mar 7 and wants a refund. Its not impossible, it just takes a lot of time and effort to weasel out all of these end cases.
      - candiddevmike 6y ago
        In the example you gave, how would stripe billing solve that? This seems like you'd need some kind of manual interaction regardless? For all the end cases, you manually handle them until they happen with enough frequency to require automation. A simple recurring billing system is absolutely fine for most businesses, and as you scale you can add more bells and whistles to it.
lwhi 6y ago
I guess this is a good example of why we should be building a very flexible abstraction layer between our payment services and the payment processor we use. We don't need to be held hostage - but probably will if we're not careful.
unreal37 6y ago
This is for their product called "Stripe Billing". I have no idea if my subscriptions are on Stripe Billing. So confusing.
- merlinbeard 6y ago
  They are.
- aeden 6y ago
  Thank you, I feel exactly the same. I assume at this point any use of subscriptions in Stripe means we are using Stripe Billing, but the messaging is very unclear.
unethical_ban 6y ago
The idea that the ongoing cost of moving money between parties varies on the amount of money moving is very "sus" as they say. Whether they move $10,000 in a transaction or $3, roughly the same number of bits move, the same number of algorithms kick off, and so on. Is there a cost-based rationale for doing a percentage-based pricing model, or is it really "because they can"? I could brainstorm and say "fraud" or "defense against lawsuits involving large transactions" but those both feel weak.
- lukevdp 6y ago
  > Is there a cost-based rationale for doing a percentage-based pricing model, or is it really "because they can"? It’s definitely because they can. There is no rule that pricing must be cost based.
- PaybackTony 6y ago
  Much of the interchange rate is charged directly by Visa / Mastercard. The merchant bank will then add basis points to that, and often you get another mark-up by the individual ISO (independent sales organization) in a typical set up. So, then, why do card processors charge percentage? Well, when you see those Capital One commercials where you get 1% cashback on this type of purchase or 2% cashback on this, that's where the money is coming from. Companies like Stripe shield you from the intricacies of interchange pricing but if you operate on interchange + (meaning, the merchant account provider is charging you interchange + X %), you see that processing corporate rewards cards are the biggest killers, because you are essentially covering their 2% cashback programs. Additionally, some of that cost is insurance. If you have a fraudulent charge on your card processors work with your banks to cover some of that money, which they make from the overall % of total volume. Not saying any of that is right, or an ideal situation, that's just the why.
  - dmlittle 6y ago
    Isn't that rate part of the 2.9% + 30c fee? Not the additional 0.5% for Stripe Billing.
    - 6y ago
byteofbits 6y ago
We recently finished moving our "Recurring Billing" stack from Stripe to Recurly after we found a tonne of problems with the Stripe billing setup. We still use Stripe as a Payment Gateway but we migrated off of their "Billing" product. I think a lot of those problems related to us being a European business and Stripe not quite being there yet in regards to Tax and Invoicing but now we have switched it's really shocking to me how steep of a price Stripe is placing on a somewhat lacking billing system here. I always assumed their Billing product was there to lock people in to the payment gateway and make it harder to have Interchange++ pricing negotiations. What's particularly sad is that I have fond memories of the early days of Stripe when I was genuinely excited to use their recurring charge product because the developer experience was so nice. Today with VAT MOSS, SCA and a larger team the Billing product is neither easy nor powerful for us. One saving grace for anyone else who finds themselves with an expensive / insufficient Stripe integration is that they make migration out very easy. We were able to get the whole process done with no downtime or missed billing - so it's definitely possible even when dealing with complex billing arrangements.
- edwinwee 6y ago
  Stay tuned on the European tax stuff—we're working on that now. (And if you want to talk more about it, feel free to email kmoriarty@stripe.com and me at edwin@stripe.com.)
ddevault 6y ago
As a Stripe user, it has never been smart to use recurring charges, or most of Stripe's other advanced, hands-off features. It's much, much better to just store payment source IDs and run charges in a cronjob. This gives you the flexibility to leave Stripe more easily when they make changes you don't like. Keep your integrations lean, dependencies are a liability.
pc 6y ago
(Stripe cofounder.) Hi folks -- as Edwin points out elsewhere in the thread, the article title isn't accurate. (I'll update or delete my comment if it's fixed.) [Update: it was changed. It used to read "Stripe is now charging 0.5% more for recurring charges."] You can happily make recurring charges yourself and no additional fees are incurred. Lots of Stripe customers do this and we don't charge anything extra for it. If you decide to use Stripe Billing, which is a separate product, we charge for that. Stripe Billing's pricing hasn't changed in a few years. What's changing is that we're ending the several-year grace period where we didn't charge anything for Stripe Billing for businesses who started to use this functionality before 2018. Charging for Billing helps us fund a lot more investment in it -- we've gone from very basic cron-like functionality to a pretty full-featured subscriptions management tool. (You can read more at https://stripe.com/billing https://stripe.com/billing.) Billing is now sophisticated enough that companies like Slack and Atlassian are using and paying for it. We've built things like "Smart Dunning" (which improves revenue recovery for failed charges by about 14%), better analytics, international payment method and invoicing support, and a whole host of other features. There are now more than 30 people working on improving Billing. Importantly, Stripe Billing is (and will remain) significantly cheaper than most of the other competitors in the space.
- radihuq 6y ago
  Thanks pc! OT: You're very active, and usually one of the first to get involved, in Stripe-related discussions on HN. I'm curious how you manage this. Do you lurk HN all day like me and spot the new Stripe-related threads, or do others at Stripe let you know when they see a Stripe-related thread?
  - jdreaver 6y ago
    I've always wondered if there is a business opportunity here: a company that monitors social media for all mentions of your business and pings you about it. Maybe this already exists?
    - radihuq 6y ago
      I do think there are existing applications that provide this service (ex: Hootsuite[0]). I think a layman could probably setup Google Alerts[1] to achieve the desired results for topics they're interested in (like your company) I'm curious how Patrick does it though as his attention isn't exactly cheap [0](https://hootsuite.com/platform/monitor https://hootsuite.com/platform/monitor) [1](https://www.google.ca/alerts https://www.google.ca/alerts)
xyst 6y ago
We really need a way to facilitate money transfer between one or more parties. There are way too many middlemen (credit card processor, credit card network, bank fees, merchant fees, exchange network fees, ...) that artificially inflate the cost of products and services. This is likely worsened when you consider transactions between parties in different countries.
- jnwatson 6y ago
  That was one of the hopes of cryptocurrency. Unfortunately, it hasn't panned out (yet).
- jtsiskin 6y ago
  That was the intention of things like https://nano.org/ https://nano.org/. If merchants started offering products 3-5% off for paying with crypto, they would probably come out ahead.
parhamn 6y ago
Yikes! This thread. First time I’ve seen negative comments on Stripe like this on HN. I guess this is what happens when you grow! You eventually become one of ‘them’, start squeezing for the same reasons the folks in the last cycle did, and the cycle repeats.
- barry27 6y ago
  ...you become _identified_ as one of "them", by users such as kgog.
legitster 6y ago
This is funny timing for us - we are currently looking at implementing a subscription service and were already looking at this price. Even so, 0.5% fee is miles away the cheapest option. (Most others want a fixed fee per month plus .8%). Is there reason for us to be scoffing at the new price? This is still a fraction even of processing the credit card.
- tschellenbach 6y ago
  yes the billing product doesn't work well. ask your finance team what they think about it
MR4D 6y ago
This link doesn't match the title....at all
reilly3000 6y ago
Recurring billing is hard stuff. If you haven't touched it and don't know what Dunning means, or how to handle upcoming card expirations, or proation, or mixing one-time and recurring purchases, then you probably won't appreciate what kind of value is provided by a 3rd party service. Its a wonderful thing to outsource for many SaaS companies. If you have a totally novel business model with unique billing requirements it may make sense to build, otherwise its almost universally cheaper and more maintainable to buy.
- nickjj 6y ago
  Some of those things are pretty easy to solve. For example checking upcoming card expirations is running a DB query on a daily background / cron job that returns cards where the expiration date <= some threshold that makes sense for your app (maybe 2 months). It's like 3 lines of code with most popular web frameworks. Typically you'd be storing a card's last4, card type, exp date and an association to a user in your system so this info is handy. It doesn't take much more effort to send emails out as warnings for that. I've done it in a few systems before Stripe had this email feature. The smart retries is interesting but this feels like another thing where Stripe is happy to collect our data but then re-sell it to us at a premium once they've gathered enough data. Similar to having to pay a lot more money per transaction to get fraud protection rules (Radar). Basically we pay Stripe to train their system and then they double dip and charge us extra to use these features.
  - rawoke083600 6y ago
    >It's like 3 lines of code with most popular web frameworks We doing DB/cron queries now with "web frameworks" ? :O
    - nickjj 6y ago
      > We doing DB/cron queries now with "web frameworks" ? :O It depends on what web framework you use, but yes. If you had a Flask, Django, Rails, Phoenix or Laravel app it's a matter of writing a DB query in your ORM / data mapper of choice and having that execute on a scheduled job using Celery, Sidekiq or Oban (a couple of different popular job processing tools). So yes in those cases I would treat that as something my web app handles. Going into the implementation details of ORMs and background job processing strategies didn't seem important for the sake of that post. The takeaway is it's possible to solve that problem with very little code in a typical web app.
mrnobody_67 6y ago
This is the PayPal model. Starts slowly, then add in dark patterns for FX currency conversion, withdrawals, etc. etc.
dang 6y ago
I've changed the title from "Stripe is now charging 0.5% more for recurring charges", which apparently is misleading, to one that is, though clunky, apparently accurate. If anyone can suggest a better title—that is, accurate and neutral, and preferably with less clunk—we can change it again.
- merlinbeard 6y ago
  The original title was way more accurate. That is the essence of the change, and the reason why people are so unhappy.
  - dang 6y ago
    I know nothing about the intricacies of Stripe product offerings, so need to rely on others to come up with an accurate title, which is (as always) our intention. The submitted title implied that Stripe is raising its prices on all recurring charges. As I understand it, that's not true; therefore that title was misleading and needed to be changed. (Site guideline on this: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) If there's another title that is even less misleading, we can change it again. Btw, as a rule, the best way to complain about a bad title is to propose a better one. We can't come up with all of them and often adopt community suggestions (a few examples: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20ok%20title&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
      - dang 6y ago
        That contradicts what's said elsewhere in the thread. My understanding is that prices are going up for the earlier users of an older product who are now being moved to a newer product. It's understandable why they and others wouldn't be happy about that, but it's a different situation from what you're describing here. If that's wrong, I'm happy to be corrected. Like I said, I have no firsthand knowledge, so have to rely on people who do.
harrisonjackson 6y ago
For those of you that have negotiated better rates with Stripe or other vendors - are they committed to those rates for some amount of time or total volume? Stripe billing competes with Recurly and Chargebee. Anyone using those products that has had similar price increases? How were they handled?
jb775 6y ago
I love how a Ycombinator company can quickly get a HN story title changed to censor the whole "price increase" aspect being debated here.
- floatingatoll 6y ago
  I was in the process of writing an email to the mods requesting that they change it to be more accurate when I found they'd already changed it. Apparently I'm not the only user to do so, since someone beat me to it. I have no associations with YC, HN, or Stripe.
- dang 6y ago
  Literally anyone can quickly get a HN story title changed if they let us know how an existing title is inaccurate. This is bog-standard moderation which we do all day every day, and it is certainly not limited to YC cos. The intention is to have a front page with accurate and neutral titles. Call that censorship if you want to (as far as I can tell, that word is just a pejorative for editing that someone doesn't like) but it seems a bit weird to speak of "censoring" titles for being misleading. As I said elsewhere in the thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25074261 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25074261), if anyone can suggest a better title (i.e. more accurate and neutral) we'd be happy to change it again.
  - gnicholas 6y ago
    Seems like there should be a mention of a price increase. The current title gives no indication that pricing would change for anyone who isn't choosing to go out and purchase this Stripe Billing product. This thread is newsworthy for a lot of folks because they are learning that a feature that they thought they were paying for through the standard fees is now only available if they pay extra for a bundle of other stuff (which they never signed up for). So not mentioning the effective price increase in the title comes across like the someone is hiding the ball, especially because of the YC connection.
    - dang 6y ago
the-dude 6y ago
Would this thread have become #1 with this title? The title used to read something like 'Stripe charges 0.5% more for subscriptions'. edit: I would understand if this was actually the title of the page. But it isn't either.
- corentin88 6y ago
  Post author here. Original title was "Stripe is now charging 0.5% more for recurring charges". Which I agree is a bit clickbait. But the current title is definitely a well-made boring PR title.
heipei 6y ago
Nobody is a fan of extra charges, but I am quite happy with Stripe since it's simple enough to use, by now powerful enough to be used even with bigger customers and for us it was the biggest road to being able to send out invoices to customers abroad which can be paid via Credit Card quickly. Look at it this way: If you're serving big customers on annual plans you can always include text on your invoice about how they can pay via SWIFT / SEPA wire transfer. Of course you're still eating the currency conversion and bank handling fees for accepting those payments. For us the pain of the 2.9% + 0.5% percent is not big enough to warrant even researching cheaper alternatives. If someone has hot tips for something that allows me to charge via Credit Card, accept payments in various currencies, and has an invoicing and subscription product built in I'm all ears!
merlinbeard 6y ago
If you use stripe to send monthly invoices to your customers (even if they don’t pay by card) this fees is going to apply. If I’m wrong someone please correct me. I’m pulling my hair over this change as a 5+ years old customer. (edited) typo
e_commerce 6y ago
Stripe needs to lower fees. Fees have stayed high for the entire history of the company.
tallytarik 6y ago
Stripe still doesn’t support settling USD payments into a USD bank account on an Australian Stripe account, instead forcing their 2% currency conversion fee on top. So my fee for every subscription charge is increasing to a an even more ridiculous A0.30 + 5.4%. Our users have been asking for PayPal for years, and I had always put off integrating because of how frustrating their API was. But it feels like the Stripe developer dream is over. Fine, I’m adding PayPal support. :(
- timcameron 6y ago
  Paypal have recently added an extra 3% charge for AU Paypal accounts to withdraw USD into US accounts. I have spoken to a few small businesses that are going down the path of opening up a US based subsidiary to avoid these charges.
  - tallytarik 6y ago
    Yikes. I have briefly thought about doing the same thing before, but I suspect the added company overhead would wipe out most or all of the advantage. Do you have any indication from these small businesses what the setup and compliance costs are like?
lubos 6y ago
0.5% is immaterial for subscription-based businesses where profit margins are typically the highest. But... it adds up. For example, just looking at the last $39 USD transaction in my Stripe dashboard which gets converted to $53.72 AUD (I charge in USD but receive AUD) Stripe currency conversion fee: $0.88 Stripe processing fees: $1.69 Total: $2.57 That's 4.78% fee. Now add this new 0.5% and we are over 5% fee on transaction processing. Is this expensive enough for me to consider alternatives? No.
tomsi 6y ago
I'm pretty disappointed by that move from Stripe as well to be honest. When we signed up long time ago we were not aware that the basic functionality of subscriptions was offered for free only temporarily. We use the stripe backend only to create and cancel subscriptions, that's it. Now we have to pay a couple of grand a year to do this or hire a developer. I think a much better move would have been to add a new billing plan for the few new features that have been added, but leave people with the basic functionality that they grew used to. And c'mon, narrow margins my ass. We are not talking about a small startup here, we are talking about Stripe, a billion dollar company! They should be able to afford having a developer or two working on those long neglected features and not compare themselves with chargebee. It's just sad.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
jakemcgraw 6y ago
The expectation that Subscriptions/Billing would be free forever is silly. The product offering is significantly more complex than the base Stripe offering. Additionally, the proposed rate of 0.5% is 1/10th what other repeatable billing providers are charging. This is a win-win and I'll be moving my startup over to Stripe Billing in the near future.
leoplct 6y ago
So, in the end the full pricing for a no-EU card paid with a subscription is 0.5% + 2.9% + 0.25$ ?
joneshones 6y ago
Does this apply to creating a manual invoice? 2.9% + 30c for a card payment sure, but it's less clear whether making an invoice through their dashboard counts as "Invoicing" as described under stripe Billing. It looks like it does. That's a bitter pill to swallow when all you're doing is creating the odd (large) manual invoice and have zero need for all that other jazz. Time to go shave another yak and write a tiny stupid abstraction for this. Useless economic activity for the gdp win!!
barry27 6y ago
I was gold plating a startup for a few years and had the basics of subscription working with what Stripe used to have, but I was painfully aware that I always had a load of work left to go before production with such things as failed payments, end of card life etc. I started to investigate alternatives and it always seemed to me that Stripe Billing was much cheaper than anything else I looked at.

363 points by corentin88 6y ago

This is particularly annoying since Stripe Billing was initially free, you start using it and now it suddenly costs 0.5% * revenue. Which can be quite substantial. The more frustrating part is that it's currently at best a beta quality product. Reporting and interface for the finance side of the company leaves a lot to be desired. Anyone know any solid alternatives?

tschellenbach 6y ago
ChargeBee, Recurly, what else is out there?
pamonrails 6y ago
If you are looking to manage subscriptions outside of Stripe, but keep using Stripe for payment processing, take a look at Kill Bill, the open-source subscription billing & payments platform: https://killbill.io/ https://killbill.io/ - Stripe tutorial: https://docs.killbill.io/latest/stripe_plugin.html https://docs.killbill.io/latest/stripe_plugin.html (I'm a Kill Bill cofounder)

corentin88 6y ago

This is going to impact all SaaS using Stripe. Managing your subscriptions (recurring charges) via Stripe cost 0.5% - on top of the payment fees.

KingOfCoders 6y ago

Because they can.

sokoloff 6y ago
If it adds more value than the cost when compared to other alternatives, why shouldn't they charge something for it? It's not like stripe has anything close to a monopoly in the payments space.
vkou 6y ago
Yes, and they can because being a payment processor is not easy. If it were, nobody would need middle-men like them.
- PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
  But of course, it ought to be, and there should be no need for the middle-men, certainly not ones that take 2-4% of the transaction.
  - tudelo 6y ago
    Yeah but isn't that just the way of the world? Processes can become simpler but at a certain point the complexity of the process is inherent and it would benefit you to employ an expert (individual or entity). You can build a house yourself, with your own hands, but why? I'm not an expert on the whole domain of payment processing but it seems to me there is a lot of non trivial problems inherent with taking payments. I guess if you are hedging on a different system of holding and transferring money there may be a way to get rid of the middleman. What do you propose?
    - PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
      I propose the governments require the infrastructure for zero-cost, instant transfers be made available to anyone, with open APIs. I don't care who runs the infrastructure. If you want subscriptions/recurring payments, stored payment methods and all the "fancy" stuff contemporary payment processors offer, you pay for it. If you just want to move money from A to B, it should be easy and it should be free. The only way for that to happen is for it to be socially provided service.
      - vkou 6y ago
        > I propose the governments require the infrastructure for zero-cost, instant transfers be made available to anyone, with open APIs. I don't care who runs the infrastructure. Will this infrastructure handle chargebacks? Fraud? Stolen credit cards? Forex? If yes, it can't be zero-cost. If no, it won't be usable until the middle-men build all of these systems on top of it.

mtmail 6y ago

Afaik that's the pricing since June at least https://twitter.com/GrahamJCampbell/status/1278002490185842688 https://twitter.com/GrahamJCampbell/status/12780024901858426... https://twitter.com/steveofmcleod/status/1277771707537780736 https://twitter.com/steveofmcleod/status/1277771707537780736

ceejayoz 6y ago
Quite a few of us were grandfathered in, though. > As an early user of Stripe, you have had free access to Stripe’s machine learning based fraud protection tools, Stripe Radar and Radar for Fraud Teams.

adrr 6y ago

Paying for payment retries.

ceejayoz 6y ago
Well, and hosted invoice pages, dunning emails, etc. There's quite a bit more to it than retrying the charge a few times.

gargron 6y ago

Confused because I thought Stripe Billing referred to the Customer Portal functionality and some advanced Stripe Checkout features like customer-facing promotional codes. I thought subscriptions were part of the core Stripe functionality. Can anyone clarify?

hartator 6y ago
It’s what I thought as well. If we knew it’s gonna to cost us an extra .5% of revenue, we would have built our own billing system instead of hacking one around Stripe one.
clintonb 6y ago
https://stripe.com/billing https://stripe.com/billing

breck 6y ago

I hope they can also innovate more on behalf of the customer with regards to recurring charges. PayPal has this management console where a customer can see all recurring charges and instantly cancel any of them with one click: https://imgur.com/a/lLE3iAt https://imgur.com/a/lLE3iAt IMO, this should be standard across all payment cards. I detest businesses that make it hard to cancel recurring charges and I think payment card providers need to stop that from happening (I get Stripe is not quite a consumer card provider...yet).

alooPotato 6y ago

We (Streak yc s11) signed up for Stripe way back in the day and have just been paying their standard payment processing fees for years. We haven't upgraded our API version or used any of their new billing features or anything like that. Basically we get the same value from Stripe we did from the day we integrated. I thought our pricing was going to be grandfathered but this change will cost us tens of thousands of dollars. Unfortunately, we're kind of hostage to it. Anyone else at scale and have an old integration? How are you handling the fee increase?

klinskyc 6y ago
If you're doing significant volume, which I assume Streak does, you can negotiate significant volume discounts. You have been leaving a ton of money on the table if you have not done that.
- enahs-sf 6y ago
  Could you define "significant volume" a bit more specifically? Wondering if I too, have been leaving a ton of money on the table. What is the approximate scale that this makes sense at?
  - klinskyc 6y ago
    This link says 80k/month, which matches our experience -> https://www.fool.com/the-blueprint/stripe-payments-review/ https://www.fool.com/the-blueprint/stripe-payments-review/
- danpalmer 6y ago
  Huge +1 to this. Everything about Stripe pricing is negotiable. I'd recommend going in to the discussion with a quote from another provider.
- Alupis 6y ago
  Maybe - they seemed really not interested in negotiating much at all and I got the impression they feel that their customers should be lucky enough to be allowed to use Stripe as a processor. My company went through negotiations with Stripe earlier this year. We were more than 1.5% + $0.10 away from our current processor, and they wouldn't budge to even match our existing rates. They kept saying they are a better value, and offer more things for the price - except most of the "value-adds" we didn't care about (their only interesting things was the Stripe Checkout with Fraud detection - which requires you to use their hosted checkout page... which is a complete non-starter for a serious eCommerce operation). Perhaps not a good fit - but paying a ton more per year in CC processing fees just because Stripe uses "AI!!!!" wasn't something we could swallow.

elevenoh 6y ago

How much more can stripe wring out of merchants while signalling virtue? e.g. 2.6%+ per transaction? Jesus christ. I worked for a payment processing co. It was all about financial institution connections (uncompetitive). And the costs my company incurred to process payments were negligible.

kgog 6y ago

Stripe apologists coming to this thread in 3..2..

clark_ruby 6y ago

On the other hand, this opens up space for competitors to beat them on price.

dabeeeenster 6y ago

We're very happy ChargeBee customers - I guess this doesn't affect us as we only use Stripe to store the card details - ChargeBee is the actual recurring billing engine. Not affiliated to CB - just a happy customer!

merlinbeard 6y ago
Do you pay CB the listed prices, or there is significant volume discount?
- skrish 6y ago
  There is volume discount available with assisted solutioning and onboarding from our team for customers with over 1M revenue.
GordonS 6y ago
I just had a look at the pricing, and I'm a bit confused. Take the base plan for example, £199/month - it doesn't mention any other charges, and is apparently all-inclusive; or do you have to pay card processing fees on top?

nathcd 6y ago

Is there any downside (other than a little more work for the implementer) to just using their main payment processing API, and to implement subscription billing with a cronjob? This is what sr.ht does [1], at least as of a year ago. If doing it manually now means saving a bunch of money, seems like a no-brainer. [1] https://cmpwn.com/@sir/103074952842876982 https://cmpwn.com/@sir/103074952842876982

drchiu 6y ago
We did that for a couple of SAAS. In fact, we even extracted this out to an internal library with a web UI. If anyone is interested, let me know and I’d be happy to open source it. It’ll have to be run in its own server and process. But for full disclosure, my latest project just bit the bullet and accepted the extra 0.5%. Wanted to see how it goes. Could always switch if I found the need.
- tomsi 6y ago
  We'd definitely be interested since we are currently evaluating our options
- corentin88 6y ago
  Interested as well!
driverdan 6y ago
The downside is that you have to write and maintain the code and infrastructure to do it. You have to do the math for your business to decide if those costs are lower than the 0.5% fee.

wishinghand 6y ago

Isn't this backwards? Shouldn't a steady cash flow be rewarded?

cbhl 6y ago
I would expect subscriptions to get a higher chargeback rate since people aren't always expecting that second or third charge to come through.

ppod 6y ago

I'm mostly joking but.. didn't they hire the guy who wrote the really famous "charge more" post?

smnrchrds 6y ago
patio11. They sure did hire him.
- markdown 6y ago
  I bet he's behind this. Grab a pitchfork!

edwinwee 6y ago

Edwin from Stripe here. It’s worth distinguishing between charging money on Stripe (for which you incur payments pricing) and using Stripe Billing (which is a separately-paid product). Stripe Billing has had this pricing for a few years. For some longtime users of Subscriptions, we originally didn’t change their pricing but are doing so now. We think charging a separate fee for our Billing product is fair, given comparable products in the market (say, Recurly or Chargebee) charge something similar. (Generally more!) We’ve been investing a ton in making Stripe Billing better. For example, from talking to users we learned people needed it be significantly easier to get up and running with subscriptions. So in the last year we built the Customer Portal[0]. (We’ve also listened to you and improved the analytics[1].) Payments is a low-margin business and our customers are (quite reasonably) very price sensitive. So to be able to make Billing a great product, we realized it was going to have to charge a fee commensurate with the product scope. [0] https://stripe.com/docs/billing/subscriptions/customer-portal https://stripe.com/docs/billing/subscriptions/customer-porta... [1] https://support.stripe.com/questions/billing-analytics-dashboard https://support.stripe.com/questions/billing-analytics-dashb...

vmception 6y ago
> Payments is a low-margin business and our customers are (quite reasonably) very price sensitive. Thanks for tackling a low margin business! I always look at people like they have two heads when they pitch something like that.
pixiemaster 6y ago
Well, if you start comparing yourselves to chargebee, they have a far more complex product - and really impressive traction in terms of new features being released regularly - combined with a really super support. I have not even seen a single company that deliver on the same level as chargebee does.
onassar 6y ago
Thanks for jumping in here so quick. I'm sure it'll be a tough thread, but something about this response rubs me the wrong way. It doesn't seem like it's really addressing the change (eg. why is it worth _existing_ customers to be paying an extra 0.5%? The fact that Stripe added features for new customers doesn't really impact those of us who have been with you for 5-10 years). Additionally, I don't recall getting an email about the price increase. I genuinely don't even know: am I going to be seeing this price increase? Would have liked getting an email about something like this, rather than finding out on HN, and now having to dig into things to figure out if I'm actually affected (which I presume I am). To give you a comparison: if my bank or credit card company increased their rate, I'd expect to be (and am) notified of that. My two cents :)

hugoromano 6y ago

5¢ made sense, 0.5% is a parasitic approach, the tech stack and engineering costs them 0.1¢ per recurring transaction.

donor20 6y ago
Sounds like you could clean up in this space at $00.001 per transaction!
- hugoromano 6y ago
  ¢5/transactions for billing services we could do it, might need some small seed funding to set up a small dev team. Do you think we could get interest customers?
  - __float 6y ago
    You could get customers, but you'll quickly learn they ask for very complex features, and you'll struggle to pay your dev team with 5 cents per transaction.
    - hugoromano 6y ago
      Complex customers can use 0.5% extra service from Stripe, they could even build their own solution. Billing, recurring, invoicing can be done here. What could be interesting is setting up a billing service that the client brings its own Payment Service (checkout.com, stripe.com, adyen.com).
adrr 6y ago
There's a fixed cost to put a transaction onto the card brand networks. Recurring includes dunning management which retries failed auths. If you rolled your own, you'd be paying for the declines.
- hugoromano 6y ago
  Stripe is charging extra 0.5% for the billing feature, so a billing charge goes in the US with stripe 3.4% + 30¢. It could be done for 2.9% + 30¢ + 5¢, stripe will still get the its cut, but not the extra 0.5%.

candiddevmike 6y ago

In my opinion, no one should be using recurring billing for any provider. If you do, you've basically tied yourselves to them--if you ever decide to move, you need to somehow get the subscription details for every customer migrated into your app! Instead, view your payment processor as just another PaymentProcessor enum. Own the recurring subscriptions yourself, or be willing to pay for someone to do it for you.

paxys 6y ago
That is easier said than done. Managing recurring billing is a significant engineering problem, and getting tied in with a provider and paying a surcharge is still worth it over maintaining an entire in-house dev team to do it.
- raiyu 6y ago
  I guess now it's as simple as checking whether cost of a dev team to do recurring billing is < 0.5%
- candiddevmike 6y ago
  In my experience, it should be no more difficult than sending recurring emails. You should have all the data (PaymentProcessorCustomerID, LastBillingDate, etc), run it like you would a email with a retry queue.
  - abfan1127 6y ago
    its more than that. The "What ifs" get out of control pretty quickly. Prorating, canceling, expired/canceled cards, tend to create a ton of end cases. For instance, a person pays for Feb 15 to Mar 14, the card expires March 1, then the person requests a cancellation Mar 7 and wants a refund. Its not impossible, it just takes a lot of time and effort to weasel out all of these end cases.
    - candiddevmike 6y ago
      In the example you gave, how would stripe billing solve that? This seems like you'd need some kind of manual interaction regardless? For all the end cases, you manually handle them until they happen with enough frequency to require automation. A simple recurring billing system is absolutely fine for most businesses, and as you scale you can add more bells and whistles to it.

lwhi 6y ago

I guess this is a good example of why we should be building a very flexible abstraction layer between our payment services and the payment processor we use. We don't need to be held hostage - but probably will if we're not careful.

unreal37 6y ago

This is for their product called "Stripe Billing". I have no idea if my subscriptions are on Stripe Billing. So confusing.

merlinbeard 6y ago
They are.
aeden 6y ago
Thank you, I feel exactly the same. I assume at this point any use of subscriptions in Stripe means we are using Stripe Billing, but the messaging is very unclear.

unethical_ban 6y ago

The idea that the ongoing cost of moving money between parties varies on the amount of money moving is very "sus" as they say. Whether they move $10,000 in a transaction or $3, roughly the same number of bits move, the same number of algorithms kick off, and so on. Is there a cost-based rationale for doing a percentage-based pricing model, or is it really "because they can"? I could brainstorm and say "fraud" or "defense against lawsuits involving large transactions" but those both feel weak.

lukevdp 6y ago
> Is there a cost-based rationale for doing a percentage-based pricing model, or is it really "because they can"? It’s definitely because they can. There is no rule that pricing must be cost based.
PaybackTony 6y ago
Much of the interchange rate is charged directly by Visa / Mastercard. The merchant bank will then add basis points to that, and often you get another mark-up by the individual ISO (independent sales organization) in a typical set up. So, then, why do card processors charge percentage? Well, when you see those Capital One commercials where you get 1% cashback on this type of purchase or 2% cashback on this, that's where the money is coming from. Companies like Stripe shield you from the intricacies of interchange pricing but if you operate on interchange + (meaning, the merchant account provider is charging you interchange + X %), you see that processing corporate rewards cards are the biggest killers, because you are essentially covering their 2% cashback programs. Additionally, some of that cost is insurance. If you have a fraudulent charge on your card processors work with your banks to cover some of that money, which they make from the overall % of total volume. Not saying any of that is right, or an ideal situation, that's just the why.
- dmlittle 6y ago
  Isn't that rate part of the 2.9% + 30c fee? Not the additional 0.5% for Stripe Billing.
  - 6y ago

byteofbits 6y ago

We recently finished moving our "Recurring Billing" stack from Stripe to Recurly after we found a tonne of problems with the Stripe billing setup. We still use Stripe as a Payment Gateway but we migrated off of their "Billing" product. I think a lot of those problems related to us being a European business and Stripe not quite being there yet in regards to Tax and Invoicing but now we have switched it's really shocking to me how steep of a price Stripe is placing on a somewhat lacking billing system here. I always assumed their Billing product was there to lock people in to the payment gateway and make it harder to have Interchange++ pricing negotiations. What's particularly sad is that I have fond memories of the early days of Stripe when I was genuinely excited to use their recurring charge product because the developer experience was so nice. Today with VAT MOSS, SCA and a larger team the Billing product is neither easy nor powerful for us. One saving grace for anyone else who finds themselves with an expensive / insufficient Stripe integration is that they make migration out very easy. We were able to get the whole process done with no downtime or missed billing - so it's definitely possible even when dealing with complex billing arrangements.

edwinwee 6y ago
Stay tuned on the European tax stuff—we're working on that now. (And if you want to talk more about it, feel free to email kmoriarty@stripe.com and me at edwin@stripe.com.)

ddevault 6y ago

As a Stripe user, it has never been smart to use recurring charges, or most of Stripe's other advanced, hands-off features. It's much, much better to just store payment source IDs and run charges in a cronjob. This gives you the flexibility to leave Stripe more easily when they make changes you don't like. Keep your integrations lean, dependencies are a liability.

pc 6y ago

(Stripe cofounder.) Hi folks -- as Edwin points out elsewhere in the thread, the article title isn't accurate. (I'll update or delete my comment if it's fixed.) [Update: it was changed. It used to read "Stripe is now charging 0.5% more for recurring charges."] You can happily make recurring charges yourself and no additional fees are incurred. Lots of Stripe customers do this and we don't charge anything extra for it. If you decide to use Stripe Billing, which is a separate product, we charge for that. Stripe Billing's pricing hasn't changed in a few years. What's changing is that we're ending the several-year grace period where we didn't charge anything for Stripe Billing for businesses who started to use this functionality before 2018. Charging for Billing helps us fund a lot more investment in it -- we've gone from very basic cron-like functionality to a pretty full-featured subscriptions management tool. (You can read more at https://stripe.com/billing https://stripe.com/billing.) Billing is now sophisticated enough that companies like Slack and Atlassian are using and paying for it. We've built things like "Smart Dunning" (which improves revenue recovery for failed charges by about 14%), better analytics, international payment method and invoicing support, and a whole host of other features. There are now more than 30 people working on improving Billing. Importantly, Stripe Billing is (and will remain) significantly cheaper than most of the other competitors in the space.

radihuq 6y ago
Thanks pc! OT: You're very active, and usually one of the first to get involved, in Stripe-related discussions on HN. I'm curious how you manage this. Do you lurk HN all day like me and spot the new Stripe-related threads, or do others at Stripe let you know when they see a Stripe-related thread?
- jdreaver 6y ago
  I've always wondered if there is a business opportunity here: a company that monitors social media for all mentions of your business and pings you about it. Maybe this already exists?
  - radihuq 6y ago
    I do think there are existing applications that provide this service (ex: Hootsuite[0]). I think a layman could probably setup Google Alerts[1] to achieve the desired results for topics they're interested in (like your company) I'm curious how Patrick does it though as his attention isn't exactly cheap [0](https://hootsuite.com/platform/monitor https://hootsuite.com/platform/monitor) [1](https://www.google.ca/alerts https://www.google.ca/alerts)

xyst 6y ago

We really need a way to facilitate money transfer between one or more parties. There are way too many middlemen (credit card processor, credit card network, bank fees, merchant fees, exchange network fees, ...) that artificially inflate the cost of products and services. This is likely worsened when you consider transactions between parties in different countries.

jnwatson 6y ago
That was one of the hopes of cryptocurrency. Unfortunately, it hasn't panned out (yet).
jtsiskin 6y ago
That was the intention of things like https://nano.org/ https://nano.org/. If merchants started offering products 3-5% off for paying with crypto, they would probably come out ahead.

parhamn 6y ago

Yikes! This thread. First time I’ve seen negative comments on Stripe like this on HN. I guess this is what happens when you grow! You eventually become one of ‘them’, start squeezing for the same reasons the folks in the last cycle did, and the cycle repeats.

barry27 6y ago
...you become _identified_ as one of "them", by users such as kgog.

legitster 6y ago

This is funny timing for us - we are currently looking at implementing a subscription service and were already looking at this price. Even so, 0.5% fee is miles away the cheapest option. (Most others want a fixed fee per month plus .8%). Is there reason for us to be scoffing at the new price? This is still a fraction even of processing the credit card.

tschellenbach 6y ago
yes the billing product doesn't work well. ask your finance team what they think about it

MR4D 6y ago

This link doesn't match the title....at all

reilly3000 6y ago

Recurring billing is hard stuff. If you haven't touched it and don't know what Dunning means, or how to handle upcoming card expirations, or proation, or mixing one-time and recurring purchases, then you probably won't appreciate what kind of value is provided by a 3rd party service. Its a wonderful thing to outsource for many SaaS companies. If you have a totally novel business model with unique billing requirements it may make sense to build, otherwise its almost universally cheaper and more maintainable to buy.

nickjj 6y ago
Some of those things are pretty easy to solve. For example checking upcoming card expirations is running a DB query on a daily background / cron job that returns cards where the expiration date <= some threshold that makes sense for your app (maybe 2 months). It's like 3 lines of code with most popular web frameworks. Typically you'd be storing a card's last4, card type, exp date and an association to a user in your system so this info is handy. It doesn't take much more effort to send emails out as warnings for that. I've done it in a few systems before Stripe had this email feature. The smart retries is interesting but this feels like another thing where Stripe is happy to collect our data but then re-sell it to us at a premium once they've gathered enough data. Similar to having to pay a lot more money per transaction to get fraud protection rules (Radar). Basically we pay Stripe to train their system and then they double dip and charge us extra to use these features.
- rawoke083600 6y ago
  >It's like 3 lines of code with most popular web frameworks We doing DB/cron queries now with "web frameworks" ? :O
  - nickjj 6y ago
    > We doing DB/cron queries now with "web frameworks" ? :O It depends on what web framework you use, but yes. If you had a Flask, Django, Rails, Phoenix or Laravel app it's a matter of writing a DB query in your ORM / data mapper of choice and having that execute on a scheduled job using Celery, Sidekiq or Oban (a couple of different popular job processing tools). So yes in those cases I would treat that as something my web app handles. Going into the implementation details of ORMs and background job processing strategies didn't seem important for the sake of that post. The takeaway is it's possible to solve that problem with very little code in a typical web app.

mrnobody_67 6y ago

This is the PayPal model. Starts slowly, then add in dark patterns for FX currency conversion, withdrawals, etc. etc.

dang 6y ago

I've changed the title from "Stripe is now charging 0.5% more for recurring charges", which apparently is misleading, to one that is, though clunky, apparently accurate. If anyone can suggest a better title—that is, accurate and neutral, and preferably with less clunk—we can change it again.

merlinbeard 6y ago
The original title was way more accurate. That is the essence of the change, and the reason why people are so unhappy.
- dang 6y ago
  I know nothing about the intricacies of Stripe product offerings, so need to rely on others to come up with an accurate title, which is (as always) our intention. The submitted title implied that Stripe is raising its prices on all recurring charges. As I understand it, that's not true; therefore that title was misleading and needed to be changed. (Site guideline on this: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) If there's another title that is even less misleading, we can change it again. Btw, as a rule, the best way to complain about a bad title is to propose a better one. We can't come up with all of them and often adopt community suggestions (a few examples: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20ok%20title&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
    - dang 6y ago
      That contradicts what's said elsewhere in the thread. My understanding is that prices are going up for the earlier users of an older product who are now being moved to a newer product. It's understandable why they and others wouldn't be happy about that, but it's a different situation from what you're describing here. If that's wrong, I'm happy to be corrected. Like I said, I have no firsthand knowledge, so have to rely on people who do.

harrisonjackson 6y ago

For those of you that have negotiated better rates with Stripe or other vendors - are they committed to those rates for some amount of time or total volume? Stripe billing competes with Recurly and Chargebee. Anyone using those products that has had similar price increases? How were they handled?

jb775 6y ago

I love how a Ycombinator company can quickly get a HN story title changed to censor the whole "price increase" aspect being debated here.

floatingatoll 6y ago
I was in the process of writing an email to the mods requesting that they change it to be more accurate when I found they'd already changed it. Apparently I'm not the only user to do so, since someone beat me to it. I have no associations with YC, HN, or Stripe.
dang 6y ago
Literally anyone can quickly get a HN story title changed if they let us know how an existing title is inaccurate. This is bog-standard moderation which we do all day every day, and it is certainly not limited to YC cos. The intention is to have a front page with accurate and neutral titles. Call that censorship if you want to (as far as I can tell, that word is just a pejorative for editing that someone doesn't like) but it seems a bit weird to speak of "censoring" titles for being misleading. As I said elsewhere in the thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25074261 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25074261), if anyone can suggest a better title (i.e. more accurate and neutral) we'd be happy to change it again.
- gnicholas 6y ago
  Seems like there should be a mention of a price increase. The current title gives no indication that pricing would change for anyone who isn't choosing to go out and purchase this Stripe Billing product. This thread is newsworthy for a lot of folks because they are learning that a feature that they thought they were paying for through the standard fees is now only available if they pay extra for a bundle of other stuff (which they never signed up for). So not mentioning the effective price increase in the title comes across like the someone is hiding the ball, especially because of the YC connection.
  - dang 6y ago

the-dude 6y ago

Would this thread have become #1 with this title? The title used to read something like 'Stripe charges 0.5% more for subscriptions'. edit: I would understand if this was actually the title of the page. But it isn't either.

corentin88 6y ago
Post author here. Original title was "Stripe is now charging 0.5% more for recurring charges". Which I agree is a bit clickbait. But the current title is definitely a well-made boring PR title.

heipei 6y ago

Nobody is a fan of extra charges, but I am quite happy with Stripe since it's simple enough to use, by now powerful enough to be used even with bigger customers and for us it was the biggest road to being able to send out invoices to customers abroad which can be paid via Credit Card quickly. Look at it this way: If you're serving big customers on annual plans you can always include text on your invoice about how they can pay via SWIFT / SEPA wire transfer. Of course you're still eating the currency conversion and bank handling fees for accepting those payments. For us the pain of the 2.9% + 0.5% percent is not big enough to warrant even researching cheaper alternatives. If someone has hot tips for something that allows me to charge via Credit Card, accept payments in various currencies, and has an invoicing and subscription product built in I'm all ears!

merlinbeard 6y ago

If you use stripe to send monthly invoices to your customers (even if they don’t pay by card) this fees is going to apply. If I’m wrong someone please correct me. I’m pulling my hair over this change as a 5+ years old customer. (edited) typo

e_commerce 6y ago

Stripe needs to lower fees. Fees have stayed high for the entire history of the company.

tallytarik 6y ago

Stripe still doesn’t support settling USD payments into a USD bank account on an Australian Stripe account, instead forcing their 2% currency conversion fee on top. So my fee for every subscription charge is increasing to a an even more ridiculous A0.30 + 5.4%. Our users have been asking for PayPal for years, and I had always put off integrating because of how frustrating their API was. But it feels like the Stripe developer dream is over. Fine, I’m adding PayPal support. :(

timcameron 6y ago
Paypal have recently added an extra 3% charge for AU Paypal accounts to withdraw USD into US accounts. I have spoken to a few small businesses that are going down the path of opening up a US based subsidiary to avoid these charges.
- tallytarik 6y ago
  Yikes. I have briefly thought about doing the same thing before, but I suspect the added company overhead would wipe out most or all of the advantage. Do you have any indication from these small businesses what the setup and compliance costs are like?

lubos 6y ago

0.5% is immaterial for subscription-based businesses where profit margins are typically the highest. But... it adds up. For example, just looking at the last $39 USD transaction in my Stripe dashboard which gets converted to $53.72 AUD (I charge in USD but receive AUD) Stripe currency conversion fee: $0.88 Stripe processing fees: $1.69 Total: $2.57 That's 4.78% fee. Now add this new 0.5% and we are over 5% fee on transaction processing. Is this expensive enough for me to consider alternatives? No.

tomsi 6y ago

I'm pretty disappointed by that move from Stripe as well to be honest. When we signed up long time ago we were not aware that the basic functionality of subscriptions was offered for free only temporarily. We use the stripe backend only to create and cancel subscriptions, that's it. Now we have to pay a couple of grand a year to do this or hire a developer. I think a much better move would have been to add a new billing plan for the few new features that have been added, but leave people with the basic functionality that they grew used to. And c'mon, narrow margins my ass. We are not talking about a small startup here, we are talking about Stripe, a billion dollar company! They should be able to afford having a developer or two working on those long neglected features and not compare themselves with chargebee. It's just sad.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

jakemcgraw 6y ago

The expectation that Subscriptions/Billing would be free forever is silly. The product offering is significantly more complex than the base Stripe offering. Additionally, the proposed rate of 0.5% is 1/10th what other repeatable billing providers are charging. This is a win-win and I'll be moving my startup over to Stripe Billing in the near future.

leoplct 6y ago

So, in the end the full pricing for a no-EU card paid with a subscription is 0.5% + 2.9% + 0.25$ ?

joneshones 6y ago

Does this apply to creating a manual invoice? 2.9% + 30c for a card payment sure, but it's less clear whether making an invoice through their dashboard counts as "Invoicing" as described under stripe Billing. It looks like it does. That's a bitter pill to swallow when all you're doing is creating the odd (large) manual invoice and have zero need for all that other jazz. Time to go shave another yak and write a tiny stupid abstraction for this. Useless economic activity for the gdp win!!

barry27 6y ago

I was gold plating a startup for a few years and had the basics of subscription working with what Stripe used to have, but I was painfully aware that I always had a load of work left to go before production with such things as failed payments, end of card life etc. I started to investigate alternatives and it always seemed to me that Stripe Billing was much cheaper than anything else I looked at.