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Ask HN: How do you handle recurring payments in 2021?

• tdevito 6y ago
  Stripe all the way! They have the best infrastructure and security, you can build out any payments system with their APIs and now they even have treasury-as-a-service to build your own bank. Elon and Peter Thiel were early investors, I can't imagine any company catching up at this point.
  • gingerlime 6y ago
    We’re using Stripe and super happy in general. But they don’t cover PayPal (which lots of our users need), and also recently added 0.5% charge for all subscriptions [0]. Previously it was included. They definitely added value over time, but I would expect them to raise prices as well over time. Also their support, while still great overall, can be w bit patchy and much slower than before (from our own anecdotal experience). I’m curious about the experience of others with chargebee etc as a layer that potentially lets you “swap” Stripe with something else. Is it worth it? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25072783 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25072783
  • colesantiago 6y ago
    Thanks for this, seems Stripe is the way to go, I'm sure that Stripe has no issues with selling worldwide. One thing I keep hearing is Stripe does not handle 'VAT' and all those tax stuff but not sure if I need it though. Is this still an issue with Stripe?
• jon-wood 6y ago
  These days I’d use Stripe for everything, but the other payment SaaS products exist because for a long time there were some big holes in Stripe’s subscription offering - most notably not having any simple way to handle expired/cancelled cards without building out all the UI for it yourself. They recently released self-service portals for that sort of thing making it much less painful to use.
  • colesantiago 6y ago
    This sounds good, sounds like that Stripe has everything I need for subscriptions, I'll consider this.
• kull 6y ago
  Stripe and Braintree
  • wmichelin 6y ago
    Why do you use two? I'm a noob.
• santa_boy 6y ago
  I just implemented a recurring subscription in a nocode platform called Bubble using Stripe. I love the intuitive API support and documentation of Stripe. Also, the Stripe brand seems to give a lot of credibility to the service provided by my client.
• sneeuwpopsneeuw 6y ago
  In the Netherlands we prefer to use the dutch payment system "Ideal" (One of the best systems ever btw). Most dutch payment service providers give you an url back from there api and when you send the user to that url they can select their prefered payment option. So recurring payments with Ideal is just sending 1 additional boolean to the api. https://www.mollie.com/en https://www.mollie.com/en does this for example. (Disclaimer I worked in the same office as the dutch payments provider Qantani. They sold all their users to Mollie.) I know of some dutch companies that check all the prices and based on the payments option the customer wants they sent the user to a different payments provider to save money on processing fees. I'm not very familiar with Stripe, I have only set it up on a wordpress website once. but if they do not allow you to do cheap recurring payments then just implement a second provider and switch between them.
• rronalddas 6y ago
  In india, we mostly use Razorpay
• mtnGoat 6y ago
  Stripe, but eh, they nickel and dime you for stuff that should be included.
  • array 6y ago
    Can you provide an example of something that should be included but isn’t? My payment processing requirements are fairly standard so I’m genuinely curious.
    • mtnGoat 6y ago
      You pay extra for reporting, you pay extra for fraud checks ( even something as basic as a blacklist, costs a percentage.) Things like that. Saying I don't want to sell to someone with this email address, shouldn't cost me anything it's a simple check and helps both parties, less fraud is good for them and me. Unless of course they like fraud because extra fees for them?
  • colesantiago 6y ago
    > Stripe, but eh, they nickel and dime you for stuff that should be included. Do you care to elaborate what stuff Stripe doesn't have that others do? I'm of the impression, that the only thing Stripe doesn't have really is Paypal integration, but that doesn't matter to me at my size.
• dbbk 6y ago
  As a one-man-band, Paddle is indispensable. Takes care of all of your tax and VAT liability globally. Not the biggest fan of the UX but this is too big a benefit to give up.
• futhey 6y ago
  I love Stripe, it's amazing. For the 95% use-case it works better than all of the alternatives for payments in North America. But it's the last 5% - 15% that will keep you up at night and/or eat up your time. Accepting payments from EU customers and international users. A typical B2B SaaS will eventually end up accepting checks in the mail, bank transfers from a half dozen countries, and (heaven forbid): PayPal. And you have to support tax compliance on top of all of that, and integrate it with your single source of truth for billing, and company accounting software. Billing is a pain. Nothing is perfect. Stripe is a wonderful component of a complete solution, and a great starting point. Most of the alternatives you listed handle a very narrow set of credit-card dunning issues, which Stripe is getting better and better at every day. One thing on my radar is Paddle. They seem to be tackling a broader set of issues upstream/downstream of actual payment processing in an integrated way.
  • kmoriarty 6y ago
    Hope you don't mind me commenting, but I'm Kelly a product manager at Stripe. You are spot on about Stripe missing tax compliance support but we've got a few things in the works to change that, especially for SaaS businesses. Happy to share more what we're working on if you're interested -- kmoriarty@stripe.com. On the payment method side of things, I'm curious what methods are being requested by buyers that we are missing? We do allow users to accept checks and bank transfers, so just wondering if there is a specific method we're missing (aside from PayPal)? All in all, just want to understand exactly what you are looking for in terms of that last mile support from Stripe! Checks: https://stripe.com/docs/billing/invoices/paper-check-payment https://stripe.com/docs/billing/invoices/paper-check-payment Payment Method Overview (incl. Bank Transfers): https://stripe.com/docs/payments/payment-methods/overview https://stripe.com/docs/payments/payment-methods/overview
    • futhey 6y ago
      Thanks for your thoughtful reply! > We do allow users to accept checks and bank transfers Some users can use the check service, but it appears very limited. I've been waiting on the invite list for 1-2 years. In that time I've set up my own workflow for handling checks, but it'll be nice when Stripe can roll that out for everyone, like US bank transfers, which work very well. But outside the US, bank transfers get complicated, partially because billing & invoicing in multiple currencies is insanely complicated. Example: we sell our product in dollars (US). Our customer is in Europe (Anywhere in Europe). They don't want to pay using US bank protocols, and even if they do, the fee is $20 per transaction. Stripe technically supports many European bank transfer scenarios, but only if you duplicate your product SKUs and convert them into multiple currencies. Now you have to maintain conversion rates manually across these SKUs as they diverge over time, and SEPA is really, really painful to set up for relatively low volumes in Europe. Then, you have to learn loads about EU tax compliance, and have a bunch of extra conversations with customers about this. Submit documents back and forth. Revise invoices, and re-create subscriptions manually when invoices need to be tweaked. For the US, Stripe has been wonderful. But for the last mile, having something like Paddle or Gumroad act as a merchant of record (which is probably outside the scope of what Stripe wants to do in 2021), is the best option for B2B SaaS founders that want to sell globally.
• smarri 6y ago
  Gocardless is built specifically for recurring payments. Former YC company.
• seanwilson 6y ago
  I use Paddle for taking subscription payments for a paid Chrome extension (https://www.checkbot.io/ https://www.checkbot.io/). The main draw for me over Stripe is Paddle handle all country specific sales tax and VAT for me. Paddle send me a single pay out every month, I file that as income in my tax return and I'm done. Without Paddle, I'd need to charge the correct VAT for sales to each country plus keep on top of the changing rules (I'm in the UK). How do other people do this? I'm curious how many people just don't know the rules around e.g. EU VAT and ignore it when they're small.
  • colesantiago 6y ago
    > I use Paddle for taking subscription payments for a paid Chrome extension (https://www.checkbot.io/ https://www.checkbot.io/). I had a look at Paddle (only heard about it just today) and seems to have an advantage with their VAT offering, (I thought Stripe does this already for you) How do payouts happen with Paddle in your experience? Stripe usually happens in a week for me. Also can't seem to see pricing on any of their pages.
    • seanwilson 6y ago
      Last time I asked Paddle was 5% with $0.50 per transaction. Fastspring is more expensive with more features, and Gumroad is cheaper with less features where both deal with sales tax like Paddle does. I'd be curious at an estimate of the accountancy costs for dealing with sales tax yourself. I'm happy to pay for less admin and peace of mind, but obviously there'd be some point where it would be a cheaper to do it yourself. > How do payouts happen with Paddle in your experience? Stripe usually happens in a week for me. Reliably once a month at the start of the month. Never had an issue.
• ThePhysicist 6y ago
  B2C? You probably need a combination of credit cards, Paypal and possible several others depending on your niche / platform (e.g. Apple Pay or Amazon Pay). B2B? I'd go with Stripe for credit cards and SEPA debit but also offer bank transfer for larger tickets / customers. For our services we offer the latter for all yearly plans as some companies don't want to pay by credit card and prefer getting an invoice that their accounting department can handle. Depending on your location there are various services that can provide you an API for your bank account balance and transfers, you can then match them against the invoices mostly automatically. There are higher-level services like Chargebee that offer multiple payment gateways and do some of the legwork for you, personally I find Stripe + some homebrew code for invoice generation and bank transfer handling easier, plus it amounts to less personal / sensitive data of your clients being stored on third-party services (if you value that kind of thing).