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As developers it's easy to look at these things and think "wait, that's my job". Except... it isn't. If these things can be abstracted away, made easier... tha

As developers it's easy to look at these things and think "wait, that's my job". Except... it isn't. If these things can be abstracted away, made easier... that's good. That's what we strive for. You don't have to be the millionth dev to develop invoices or shopping carts. That's wasted effort imo. These things becoming available as a service frees us up to solve more interesting problems. If devs 20 years from now still have to put deep thought into invoicing for ecommerce after we've already spent millions of hours on the problem, that would be a failure of the industry. So I guess I disagree with the other commenters and hope software service providers continue to expand their offerings to meet my technical and business needs.

nrmitchi 5y ago
I don't think there is any argument here isn't that everyone should build their own payment stack, or their own shopping card, or invoicing software. It's that other companies that have built on top of Stripe as a platform are all being eaten away at, and often done in a way that a "stripe platform" user can't compete with (either through private APIs, or across-the-board data access, etc). Stripe bills itself not just as an end-user service, but also as a "platform". The argument is if you effectively kick your "business partners" off your platform as soon as you want to do the thing they do, then you're not really a "platform".
rorykoehler 5y ago
While I understand and somewhat agree with your perspective I think the opposite can also be true. For example Stripe subscriptions. If you use them you paint yourself into a corner where you can’t innovate on that aspect of your business model. You have to take what you get but really there are many optimisations you can do you make subscriptions better or unique if you just use payment intents (or whatever preapproved cards are called) and write the subscriptions logic yourself. These will help set your business apart from the competition and provide you with more opportunities to deliver what your customers want.

nrmitchi 5y ago

I don't think there is any argument here isn't that everyone should build their own payment stack, or their own shopping card, or invoicing software. It's that other companies that have built on top of Stripe as a platform are all being eaten away at, and often done in a way that a "stripe platform" user can't compete with (either through private APIs, or across-the-board data access, etc). Stripe bills itself not just as an end-user service, but also as a "platform". The argument is if you effectively kick your "business partners" off your platform as soon as you want to do the thing they do, then you're not really a "platform".

rorykoehler 5y ago

While I understand and somewhat agree with your perspective I think the opposite can also be true. For example Stripe subscriptions. If you use them you paint yourself into a corner where you can’t innovate on that aspect of your business model. You have to take what you get but really there are many optimisations you can do you make subscriptions better or unique if you just use payment intents (or whatever preapproved cards are called) and write the subscriptions logic yourself. These will help set your business apart from the competition and provide you with more opportunities to deliver what your customers want.