3 ms·

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 w

by 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.
  - clintonb 6y ago
    I work on Checks at Stripe. I'm sorry we've kept you waiting for so long. Our initial rollout has been primarily targeted toward users most likely to have a high volume of checks usage based on the number and value of invoices issued. We are now in a better position to accommodate additional users. Feel free to send me your account ID or primary account email, and I can enable the functionality for your account: clintonb@stripe.com.
enos_feedler 6y ago
I often wondered if there is an opportunity to build a fully open source stack for handling all of these issues. It isn’t a competitive advantage for anyone and its a pain to get right. It also seems like everyone wants the same thing. I could imagine it being sponsored by mid tier companies that heavily rely on subscriptions and do well (say Tinder for example). Companies like this could donate time or an engineer or two. It would save everyone having to reinvent their subscription and billing infrastructure.
- tigroferoce 6y ago
  We (Saasform - https://saasform.dev/ https://saasform.dev/) are building exactly something like that. Since payments are heavily tied with authentication (and since authentication and payments rarely are part of the core business) our idea is to delegate these two key (yet non-core) features to an external service. We are currently building our MVP and we plan to release the first part as OSS by the end of the month. Eventually the whole core will be open source and there will a version as a service (a-la GitLab). The first release will be focused on startups to help them to launch faster, in the next versions we will add more growth/enterprise features. Feel free to drop a mail to dave <at> saasform <dot> dev if you have questions, want to contribute or if you want to be among the first users.
  - enos_feedler 6y ago
    Thanks! I've signed up for the mailing list. Look forward to seeing the release.
colesantiago 6y ago
> 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. Interesting, I thought Stripe supports all of this for you? minus Paypal, I agree that it's a good starting point. Would much prefer a no-code solution too all of this but will also consider looking at Paddle, if it has Paypal support.
- futhey 6y ago
  Honestly you could call this growing pains. You probably won't have this problem at a scale that matters early enough to worry about it now. But, eventually, every B2B SaaS hits a bunch of the same payment & compliance growth blockers as they start to grow up in volume and out in reach.

by futhey 6y ago

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.
- clintonb 6y ago
  I work on Checks at Stripe. I'm sorry we've kept you waiting for so long. Our initial rollout has been primarily targeted toward users most likely to have a high volume of checks usage based on the number and value of invoices issued. We are now in a better position to accommodate additional users. Feel free to send me your account ID or primary account email, and I can enable the functionality for your account: clintonb@stripe.com.

enos_feedler 6y ago

I often wondered if there is an opportunity to build a fully open source stack for handling all of these issues. It isn’t a competitive advantage for anyone and its a pain to get right. It also seems like everyone wants the same thing. I could imagine it being sponsored by mid tier companies that heavily rely on subscriptions and do well (say Tinder for example). Companies like this could donate time or an engineer or two. It would save everyone having to reinvent their subscription and billing infrastructure.

tigroferoce 6y ago
We (Saasform - https://saasform.dev/ https://saasform.dev/) are building exactly something like that. Since payments are heavily tied with authentication (and since authentication and payments rarely are part of the core business) our idea is to delegate these two key (yet non-core) features to an external service. We are currently building our MVP and we plan to release the first part as OSS by the end of the month. Eventually the whole core will be open source and there will a version as a service (a-la GitLab). The first release will be focused on startups to help them to launch faster, in the next versions we will add more growth/enterprise features. Feel free to drop a mail to dave <at> saasform <dot> dev if you have questions, want to contribute or if you want to be among the first users.
- enos_feedler 6y ago
  Thanks! I've signed up for the mailing list. Look forward to seeing the release.

colesantiago 6y ago

> 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. Interesting, I thought Stripe supports all of this for you? minus Paypal, I agree that it's a good starting point. Would much prefer a no-code solution too all of this but will also consider looking at Paddle, if it has Paypal support.

futhey 6y ago
Honestly you could call this growing pains. You probably won't have this problem at a scale that matters early enough to worry about it now. But, eventually, every B2B SaaS hits a bunch of the same payment & compliance growth blockers as they start to grow up in volume and out in reach.