5 ms·

Yes, the 0.5% adds up. 0.5% for Billing, 2.9% + 30c per transaction, more if you add e.g. fraud for teams etc. Stripe is great and I use it too, but the way th

Yes, the 0.5% adds up. 0.5% for Billing, 2.9% + 30c per transaction, more if you add e.g. fraud for teams etc. Stripe is great and I use it too, but the way they charge you (a percentage of your revenue) is simply not that fair in the long run while their workload has a fixed cost per transaction.

ttoinou 5y ago
Seems very fair pricing compared to competitors
- edwinwee 5y ago
  Yep, Stripe prices its products pretty competitively and talks to many beta testers before we settle on pricing. I think even adding all this up, it's less expensive than merchant of record providers like Paddle.
- drexlspivey 5y ago
  Why does it have to be a percentage of your revenue? It’s doing exactly the same thing for a $100 invoice and a $10000 invoice, why does the latter cost 100x more?
  - duckmysick 5y ago
    Value. A service Y makes it easier to collect that $10000 invoice. Inversely, by not using a service Y, you might not see those $10000 or it will be more difficult to do so. A glass of water has more value to you when you're thirsty.
  - ttoinou 5y ago
    Why not ? If you have small transactions you end up not paying a lot, and the more you make money the more you pay Stripe. If you make so much money that you can have your own tax system, good for you ! Implement it and don't pay Stripe :) Fixed price schemes would be less fair for small businesses that want to grow. Stripe helps you to grow, so that your company becomes the one big enough to "subsidize" the small ones after benefiting this pricing in the first stage
hardwaresofton 5y ago
Welcome to the world of saavy SaaS businesses. Smart/enterprising SaaS founders and businesses these days all know to tie their billing to whatever metric/KPI they are solving for customers -- per-seat billing, per-pageview, etc. Why make a little money (even if it's 2-10x your cost) when you can make much more by taking a small-seeming percentage of every single <whatever> that comes through your business. When your customer wins (and when they aren't winning you aren't a huge strain on their wallets) you win, and if the 0-5% eaten up by their bundle of SaaS products never matters to them, then you get wildly rich doing it and no one is angry about it, since the incentives are aligned. Then you plow that extra revenue (that you wouldn't have gotten from the simple 2x-10x your cost) into expanding your service offering so you deliver so much value (or perceived value) that moving away from your service just doesn't make sense. This is HN and just about everyone and their mother knows this at this point, and has been living it for longer than I've been writing computers but I'll say it anyway -- Stripe is the dream SaaS company, essentially a financial middleman that no one hates (yet?). The SaaS promised land is a somewhat close cousin of the dystopian everyone-is-a-renter-and-only-a-few-own-the-capital future. Maybe the hand wringing I'm doing is wrong -- maybe it should have been the case all along that solution providers should have extracted a never ending royalty on the revenue generated by the solutions they provide. Not only service providers but maybe workers should want that (no one remembers pensions, but they kind of were this) too. Who knows. If you can sell a music single album to 0.3% of America for $1, you get $1MM. If you do that with a Stripe store, Stripe gets ~$30k, for infrastructure that probably cost them less than $300 to host (for a single customer) and an ever-decreasing amortized amount to build (assuming they eventually stop growing their development workforce for growth stake). The artist that just made $1MM probably doesn't care about $30k as a millionaire (maybe they should, maybe they shouldn't). It's a win-win, and it's why Stripe's goal is to increase the GDP of the internet.
- justsomeuser 5y ago
  Apparently Buffet calls this a “toll booth” business. Once the road is built (customer integrates Stripe into their state machine), you can just keep collecting their toll for driving on the Stripe highway.
eps 5y ago
Don't forget they also force-convert payout wires to your native currency if you aren't in the US. Even if you operate mostly in USD, have USD accounts, etc.
- chinathrow 5y ago
  Yes, I omitted the 2% currency conversion fee if you payout in to another currency. I solved this partially by using Wise (formerly Transferwise) for USD->XYZ conversion and paying way less now.

ttoinou 5y ago

Seems very fair pricing compared to competitors

edwinwee 5y ago
Yep, Stripe prices its products pretty competitively and talks to many beta testers before we settle on pricing. I think even adding all this up, it's less expensive than merchant of record providers like Paddle.
drexlspivey 5y ago
Why does it have to be a percentage of your revenue? It’s doing exactly the same thing for a $100 invoice and a $10000 invoice, why does the latter cost 100x more?
- duckmysick 5y ago
  Value. A service Y makes it easier to collect that $10000 invoice. Inversely, by not using a service Y, you might not see those $10000 or it will be more difficult to do so. A glass of water has more value to you when you're thirsty.
- ttoinou 5y ago
  Why not ? If you have small transactions you end up not paying a lot, and the more you make money the more you pay Stripe. If you make so much money that you can have your own tax system, good for you ! Implement it and don't pay Stripe :) Fixed price schemes would be less fair for small businesses that want to grow. Stripe helps you to grow, so that your company becomes the one big enough to "subsidize" the small ones after benefiting this pricing in the first stage

hardwaresofton 5y ago

Welcome to the world of saavy SaaS businesses. Smart/enterprising SaaS founders and businesses these days all know to tie their billing to whatever metric/KPI they are solving for customers -- per-seat billing, per-pageview, etc. Why make a little money (even if it's 2-10x your cost) when you can make much more by taking a small-seeming percentage of every single <whatever> that comes through your business. When your customer wins (and when they aren't winning you aren't a huge strain on their wallets) you win, and if the 0-5% eaten up by their bundle of SaaS products never matters to them, then you get wildly rich doing it and no one is angry about it, since the incentives are aligned. Then you plow that extra revenue (that you wouldn't have gotten from the simple 2x-10x your cost) into expanding your service offering so you deliver so much value (or perceived value) that moving away from your service just doesn't make sense. This is HN and just about everyone and their mother knows this at this point, and has been living it for longer than I've been writing computers but I'll say it anyway -- Stripe is the dream SaaS company, essentially a financial middleman that no one hates (yet?). The SaaS promised land is a somewhat close cousin of the dystopian everyone-is-a-renter-and-only-a-few-own-the-capital future. Maybe the hand wringing I'm doing is wrong -- maybe it should have been the case all along that solution providers should have extracted a never ending royalty on the revenue generated by the solutions they provide. Not only service providers but maybe workers should want that (no one remembers pensions, but they kind of were this) too. Who knows. If you can sell a music single album to 0.3% of America for $1, you get $1MM. If you do that with a Stripe store, Stripe gets ~$30k, for infrastructure that probably cost them less than $300 to host (for a single customer) and an ever-decreasing amortized amount to build (assuming they eventually stop growing their development workforce for growth stake). The artist that just made $1MM probably doesn't care about $30k as a millionaire (maybe they should, maybe they shouldn't). It's a win-win, and it's why Stripe's goal is to increase the GDP of the internet.

justsomeuser 5y ago
Apparently Buffet calls this a “toll booth” business. Once the road is built (customer integrates Stripe into their state machine), you can just keep collecting their toll for driving on the Stripe highway.

eps 5y ago

Don't forget they also force-convert payout wires to your native currency if you aren't in the US. Even if you operate mostly in USD, have USD accounts, etc.

chinathrow 5y ago
Yes, I omitted the 2% currency conversion fee if you payout in to another currency. I solved this partially by using Wise (formerly Transferwise) for USD->XYZ conversion and paying way less now.