16 ms·

Why doesn't Stripe use Stripe Billing?

336 points by swyx 4y ago

cpursley 4y ago
What I'm interesting in is a front end where the underlying payment provider can quickly be replaced when Stripe/PayPal etc cancel you (for any reason at all).
- chucky123 4y ago
  This is something many people are interested in. Certainly helps alleviate one of the most potent problems in financial services.
- dangrossman 4y ago
  Someone should build this. I'll be customer #1. Spreedly used to be this, but they went enterprise-only, raised prices 30x, and become so customer-hostile that I recommend avoiding them now.
rlewkov 4y ago
Maybe own dogfood doesn't taste so good ... maybe
- ceejayoz 4y ago
  Stripe Billing came after Stripe, by years, and it's intended for a different purpose anyways. Stripe doesn't bill me; they take a cut of what I bill my customers. That's a very different model than Stripe Billing is for.
atian 4y ago
See how your site looks like on mobile with content blockers turned on. For me the navigation bar doesn’t collapse and covers the whole screen.
- weird-eye-issue 4y ago
  It loaded so slow I couldn't even get there. Was just a white screen for several seconds. I'm in Thailand but still this shouldn't happen
- jonas-w 4y ago
  It loaded slow but apart from that it looks normal. I use firefox on android with ublock origin.
  - AnhTho_FR 4y ago
    Thanks! we're working on this, the point is: the problem occur for a small portion of visitors, and we're iterating to reproduce that. Thanks again for the feedback!
ItMayWorkTryIt 4y ago
100 writes per second seems like a generous default rate limit. Presumably if my real traffic is above that I can ask Stripe for a higher limit
- rattray 4y ago
  You can.
scifibestfi 4y ago
Evidence of a recursion limit in the simulation?
- Traubenfuchs 4y ago
  The only damning evidence we need is quantum physic gotchas + uncertainty principle + matter/wave dualism which happen because the simulator does not have enough precision, performance or memory to fully simulate the reality within it operates and needs to cut corners. But maybe this simulation IS reality and reality is simply limited in its precision, performance and storage.
  - mananaysiempre 4y ago
    To call the uncertainty principle a precision limitation on measurement is something of an oversimplification. Passing from the general physicist's uncertainty principle to a more restricted but still physically meaningful case, the Fourier-transform version of the uncertainty principle (requires no physics to derive and) states that the narrower and less smooth a spatial representation of something is, the wider and slower-decaying its frequency representation becomes. (Sharp and abrupt sounds have wide spectra, which is why they get mangled into the strange but recognizable bubbling in low-bitrate MP3s. The two-dimensional case of the same phenomenon is well demonstrated by the JPEG "ringing" around sharp edges, with the caveat that JPEG transforms every 16x16 block of pixels independently.) Physics comes in here only when you say that position and momentum (amplitude) distributions are Fourier transforms of each other. If a single sample or the average value is all you get, then yes, the width of the peak becomes the uncertainty of your measurement. If you can get many samples, though, then you absolutely can trace the shape of that peak. It's just that the instruments used at the dawn of quantum mechanics were not built that way. (What "particle-wave dualism" means, I think nobody really understands except maybe Bohr scholars; "dualism" was his personal German-philosophy-style all-encompassing idea that he was smitten with before he even started thinking about QM. It's a wave, period, it's just that high-frequency waves can look like particle propagation if you squint, as seen in optics and acoustics.)
    - 4y ago
ekofish 4y ago
I work at an HR/Payroll company with a phenomenal app that we put our blood, sweat, and tears into every single day. And every single day I clock in with Oracle Time and Labor. There's a legal reason for this and we do it for compliance. I'm guessing Stripe is in the same boat with this product despite its flaws.
- reaperducer 4y ago
  The company where I work disallows us from using our own product because it would be considered a conflict of interest. Some co-workers say it's a federal regulation, but I've never seen that anywhere in print, so I suspect it's just a workplace rumor/justification. I've had customers complain to my face that we tailor the products to our needs, and are surprised (and sometimes vocally disbelieve) that we don't use it, ourselves. In certain industries, dogfooding is considered bad, and sometimes illegal.
  - mattkrause 4y ago
    Conflict of whose interests? You say the product is useful and other people should buy it, while you yourself use it seems pretty aligned. It cannot possibly be the case that Microsoft runs on Open Office and MacBooks.
    - Turing_Machine 4y ago
      For a long, long time Microsoft was using Unix sendmail for its own internal mail system, while touting Outlook for its customers. They only started eating their own dog food when people started making fun of them in public.
  - willio58 4y ago
    Yeah most of the time I hear conflict of interest I don’t believe it at this point. Conflict of whose interest? If you used your own product wouldn’t you learn some issues that exist within it?
    - 4y ago
thiscatis 4y ago
It’s called Stripe Billing, not Stripe MDR. What a pointless exercise but I guess someone wi have some takeaways from this, not sure which one though.
- swyx 4y ago
  what is MDR?
  - scrollaway 4y ago
    Merchant Discount Rate. Another (confusing) name for what you might know as "payment processing fee". https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/merchant-discount-rate.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/merchant-discount-rate....
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
coding123 4y ago
They tried and then got locked out.
dangus 4y ago
Seems very understandable to me that your customers' profile doesn't necessarily meet your customers' customers profile. If I sell a cash register app to indie businesses who sell trinkets at the art fair, that doesn't mean my solution meets my own needs for billing my millions of those business customers.
yucky 4y ago
Stripe is large enough to need their own dedicated merchant account, why would they use a product designed for smaller businesses?
ath0 4y ago
Several of the concerns revolve around the complexity of managing multiple IDs (product SKUs, prices, etc) for a single subscription - and the author reaches the conclusion that this is because it's optimized for "e-commerce and not B2B SaaS". While from the buyer's perspective, "single negotiated cost with overages" may appear simple - it's a single bill after all - on the accounting side for the company selling the product, I'd expect it's much more complicated; with potentially different tax rates for different products and complexity around producing an auditor-defensible determination for "cost of goods sold" and "marketing expense." So for at least some of these requests, I see Stripe's posture here as helpful - it's not "requesting a dollar figure", it's "creating a detailed enough accounting trail behind that bill to operate your business." Looking across the breadth of Stripe's products, I'd give them the benefit of the doubt here.
avidphantasm 4y ago
Is this a example problem from an updated edition of “Gödel, Escher, Bach”?
traceroute66 4y ago
Xero is the same and it really pisses me off. In Xero you've got something called a "Xero Network ID", which is an ID that you can give to other Xero users and they can link it to your contact record on their account, which means that invoices they raise are automatically posted in your Xero account without you having to lift a finger. Now, you would have thought that Xero would do the same for their subscription invoices (i.e. automatically post them to your Xero account). But no..... Instead they send you one by email which you then have to post manually onto your Xero account. And they do that every ... single ... month. If you ask them "why ?", you get an arrogant reply that along the lines of "we're too big to use Xero, so go away you silly little person". But that doesn't answer the question. Xero is their dogfood. So even if they use Sage or whatever internally, surely it is not that difficult for them to build an integration so they can post their damn invoices to the customer's accounts. Rant over. ;-)
- yeutterg 4y ago
  Slightly off-topic, IMO Xero has really gone downhill. The Yodlee integrations with banks fail so often these days, it makes it hard to use the product at all. When you refresh a bank/credit card feed or log in for the xth time, you have no expected timeline as to when the feed will update or whether it will even work. There are multiple buttons to reset a feed, and they do different things. It's nearly impossible to just log in and reconcile all your accounts because you are always fighting with unconnected bank feeds. This degrades the core value prop of making it easy to stay atop of bookkeeping—now I always have some form of "accounting debt" these days. I got so frustrated that I am in the process of migrating my personal account to Tiller + Google Sheets, and I'm still looking for a solution for our small business account. I agree about the billing issues; I waste time figuring out where the invoices live in the product and manually posting them. Otherwise, the product would be fine if outdated, if it wasn't for the unreliability of Yodlee.
  - traceroute66 4y ago
    > I'm still looking for a solution for our small business account. For a long time I resisted moving to Xero. Unfortunately my hand was forced because my existing solution (MYOB which was then bought by Mamut) stopped being Apple compatible through their own lazyness (they refused to update the software for 64-bit compatability). Apple had pre-announced the post-Catalina 64-bit requirement years in advance. Every other developer out there had made the change. But Mamut/MYOB ... nope, they sent out a long email one day basically making that absolutely clear they were not moving from 32-bit. Their answer was to offer a "cloud" version. I say "cloud" because what they offered was a remote desktop connection to a Mac running an old version of software on their side. So hence I was forced over to Xero. My accountant was pressuring me too, but Mamut/MYOB killing off their own product was the straw that broke the camels back. (I believe they may have finally relented and brought out a 64-bit version subsequently, but by that time it was too late, I'd moved already. And I had lost trust in their software support abilities anyway by then).
devmor 4y ago
This article comes at a welcome time for me. I've been building out a usage-based B2B product and have wracked my brain on how to properly implement billing (without having to pay large upfront fees or integrate a more complex gateway that I don't really need). I'd never heard of Lago before but I think I'll give it a try.
- clintonb 4y ago
  https://stripe.com/docs/billing/subscriptions/usage-based https://stripe.com/docs/billing/subscriptions/usage-based
  - devmor 4y ago
    I use Stripe for other products, and their usage-based billing is limited to specific scenarios that are not one-size fits all. This is in fact the entire subject of the post we are commenting on. Why would you assume I haven't evaluated Stripe's offering on a post that is specifically about the shortcomings of Stripe's offering.
- AnhTho_FR 4y ago
  Hi Devmor, I work at Lago. Happy to learn more and to support! My email: anhtho@getlago.com
edwinwee 4y ago
First off, yes, Stripe uses Stripe to bill our own customers. In fact, for our larger customers who have negotiated complex pricing plans, we're currently migrating much of our manual billing to a system that's inspired by Stripe Billing. Second, this article seems to miss the point of Stripe. It seems to want to build a platform, which is what Stripe Connect is designed for. For example, charging a percentage fee is just one line (https://stripe.com/docs/api/application_fees https://stripe.com/docs/api/application_fees): ` $application_fee_percent = 5` Slack, Atlassian, and Notion have all built their B2B billing on top of Stripe. But we don't target just B2B or B2C ecommerce in case a business has multiple revenue streams (which many businesses are increasingly adding). In fact, we designed Billing so it can flex across any business model—per-seat, usage-based, tiered, or even graduated. This is the point of Stripe. A single stack that flexes with your business as it grows and pricing that's public.
- tiffanyh 4y ago
  > First off, yes, Stripe uses Stripe to bill our own customers. This is confusing because you’re implying that Stripe Billing is used internally but another employee clarifies and says it’s not, it’s simply another billing service was created that predates Stripe Billing. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33193807 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33193807
  - edwinwee 4y ago
    Sorry, to be clearer—we are moving away from the old billing service my colleague mentioned and to a new one. Our new system shares similarites with the Stripe Connect + Stripe Billing flow I mention above (specifically https://stripe.com/docs/api/usage_records https://stripe.com/docs/api/usage_records).
    - blast 4y ago
      You say it shares similarities with Stripe Billing. Above, you say inspired by Stripe Billing. "Similarities" and "inspired" are weasly ways of saying that it is not Stripe Billing. It used to be that Stripe could be relied on not to do this sort of corporate doubletalk. The OP asked a direct question and you've given a misleading PR answer. I'm sure you're a nice person just trying to do your job, but your inevitable PR posts to HN, within minutes of anything Stripe-related coming up, are hurting your cause. The Stripe of the past would never have spewed propaganda like "This is the point of Stripe. A single stack that flexes with your business as it grows and pricing that's public" into HN threads. It's embarrassing, and what it's telling us is that culturally you've lost your way. Maybe that's inevitable on your way to world domination, but if you guys can no longer communicate honestly or treat readers as intelligent, you'd be better off not posting here. I like Stripe, by the way. I know this is harsh but I would like it to be helpful.
kurrik 4y ago
(I work on Stripe Billing). This is a question we raise fairly regularly internally at Stripe. The real, prosaic answer is because when we started working on Stripe Billing in 2017, Stripe had already built an internal billing system to bill its own customers. Stripe was 7 years old at that point. At the time, we got lots of feedback from the folks who had built that system. Our goal was to build a flexible billing system for all kinds of companies at different sizes, but we were definitely focused on smaller (doing maybe $100k–$10M of ARR) SaaS companies to start. We've come a long way since then and now power billing for a number of large/public companies. Atlassian, Figma, Notion and Slack are either using or migrating onto Stripe Billing today. Stripe Billing is a powerful tool with a role to play in any company's revenue management system, including Stripe's. Newer Stripe products (such as Atlas) do build on top of Stripe Billing but we haven't gotten around to migrating our existing stack. That said, I do have a personal goal of taking on more internal billing responsibilities over time (e.g. I think we could easily use Stripe Invoices internally today, and it's mostly opportunity cost keeping us from actually doing so). I do want to say that the specific use case covered in the post is something we have thought about a lot. I think about it as a pipeline with stages for collecting high volumes of usage events, aggregating them, mapping them to rate cards based on usage, and then producing recurring bills, collecting payment, dunning, etc... The post claims we don’t do a good job on the first two stages (collecting usage events and aggregating them) is perhaps missing that the style of percentage-based fees is a one-line addition to a Connect integration as my colleague edwinwee mentioned below. It is also possible to have a scalable usage event collection/aggregation pipeline integrated with Stripe Billing. You can read this AWS blog post https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/apn/building-a-third-party-saas-metering-and-billing-integration-on-aws/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/apn/building-a-third-party-saas... for information about how to build such a system according to our best practices. While I’m here, I’m always eager to hear feedback on Stripe Billing from folks who are using it. My email is ark@stripe.com.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- neosat 4y ago
  Thanks for some internal insights. I think the original post wasn't making the point that such a use case is not possible to build but rather that the architecture and design choices of Stripe Billing are not optimized for these use cases and don't make it easy.
zcombynator 4y ago
Interesting that one YC company publicly attacks another YC company. I thought there's at least some "family" vibes there, instead of bitching each other now.
- AnhTho_FR 4y ago
  Hi! I work at Lago. As we wrote in the disclaimer of the article, we're just stating how our positioning is different, extract here: "We were told recently: “We love your ‘Stripe hate’ content”. While it was intended as a compliment, ‘Stripe hate’ has never been our intention. We partner with Stripe Payments and love their products. Our own product is an alternative to Stripe Billing (and Chargebee, Recurly, etc.) but with a deep focus on B2B and product-led companies. We actually have common investors on our cap table (e.g. Y Combinator and others)."
vasco 4y ago
As the old men say at the park, there comes a moment in every SaaS's life where you need to spend a year of a team's time just adding Zuora. They are dark days but hopefully life is better on the other side.
zcombynator 4y ago
@paulg isn't it against YC guidelines to attack other YC companies?
dzink 4y ago
If I were a regulator I would be suspicious if a company runs its own billing on its own billing software and then something goes wrong with the numbers. Keeps honest executives honest in a way. Also keeps outages and hacker attack vectors somewhat contained.
bredren 4y ago
For a long time, Apple stores used mobile devices other than iPhone to process payments on the floor. Windows mobile, I think?
alfl 4y ago
Their account got banned too many times :)
- AnhTho_FR 4y ago
  Curious about which account you're mentioning?
orliesaurus 4y ago
To the author of this blogpost: you're using the wrong product. You want to use Stripe Connect.
paxys 4y ago
This isn't as much of a gotcha as they think it is. Amazon was using Oracle databases until like 2019, 13 years after the launch of AWS. Same with pretty much every large company that has a mature hand-crafted tech stack in place. Sometimes the costs and complexity of migration are simply not enough to justify switching, even if the target product is your own.
jmartens 4y ago
Never host your status page where you host your app, and never use your billing product to handle your own billing.
0_____0 4y ago
Whenever I hear about a US based payment processor, I feel compelled to mention UPI, India's Unified Payment Interface. Basically, with fairly modest investment, the Indian government put together a system to allow instant transactions between bank accounts. There are no transaction fees. We have so many companies (sometimes the same company with multiple faces - Paypal/Venmo, Stripe, Clover, Square, all of whom want a cut of transactions for the incredible service of making a number go up in one place and down in another place. Instead of fixing bank-to-bank transfers, we're stuck with ACH, which for some godforsaken reason takes days to clear. There's no technical reason why the US can't have a system like UPI. There's no reason why we MUST allow rent-seeking payment processors to take a cut when someone in Mumbai can make a peer or merchant transfer for free in seconds. UPI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Payments_Interface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Payments_Interface
- codazoda 4y ago
  I think the U.S. federal government is working on a payment system. At first it will just work between banks. I dunno if that means consumers can use it between their banks or if it means B2B bank transactions, but they are working on something (and I recall it’s close). Edit: FedNow, May 2023, pricing not yet released. It is for business and consumers
- nextaccountic 4y ago
  Brazil also has one too, Pix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pix_(payment_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pix_(payment_system)
- grecy 4y ago
  > There's no technical reason why the US can't have a system like UPI. You're right there is no technical reason, but there is a very strong political reason. They way things are now, people in the US have to pay for a lot of things that people don't pay for in other countries. Bank Transfers is just one example. Health Insurance (and care) is another. Higher education. Filing taxes. This list is endless. Making people pay for this stuff is extremely good for the economy, and probably a big part of the reason the USA has the highest GDP. It also makes many, many hundreds of billions of dollars for those entrenched in those industries, who will spend tens upon tens of billions of dollars lobbying to make sure it never changes.
a1445c8b 4y ago
Answer: because building a self-bootstrapping system is non-trivial.
jwithington 4y ago
lol at the comments that stripe “billing” wouldn’t be the right product used to bill someone—that’d be stripe “connect”

336 points by swyx 4y ago

What I'm interesting in is a front end where the underlying payment provider can quickly be replaced when Stripe/PayPal etc cancel you (for any reason at all).

chucky123 4y ago
This is something many people are interested in. Certainly helps alleviate one of the most potent problems in financial services.
dangrossman 4y ago
Someone should build this. I'll be customer #1. Spreedly used to be this, but they went enterprise-only, raised prices 30x, and become so customer-hostile that I recommend avoiding them now.

rlewkov 4y ago

Maybe own dogfood doesn't taste so good ... maybe

ceejayoz 4y ago
Stripe Billing came after Stripe, by years, and it's intended for a different purpose anyways. Stripe doesn't bill me; they take a cut of what I bill my customers. That's a very different model than Stripe Billing is for.

atian 4y ago

See how your site looks like on mobile with content blockers turned on. For me the navigation bar doesn’t collapse and covers the whole screen.

weird-eye-issue 4y ago
It loaded so slow I couldn't even get there. Was just a white screen for several seconds. I'm in Thailand but still this shouldn't happen
jonas-w 4y ago
It loaded slow but apart from that it looks normal. I use firefox on android with ublock origin.
- AnhTho_FR 4y ago
  Thanks! we're working on this, the point is: the problem occur for a small portion of visitors, and we're iterating to reproduce that. Thanks again for the feedback!

ItMayWorkTryIt 4y ago

100 writes per second seems like a generous default rate limit. Presumably if my real traffic is above that I can ask Stripe for a higher limit

rattray 4y ago
You can.

scifibestfi 4y ago

Evidence of a recursion limit in the simulation?

Traubenfuchs 4y ago
The only damning evidence we need is quantum physic gotchas + uncertainty principle + matter/wave dualism which happen because the simulator does not have enough precision, performance or memory to fully simulate the reality within it operates and needs to cut corners. But maybe this simulation IS reality and reality is simply limited in its precision, performance and storage.
- mananaysiempre 4y ago
  To call the uncertainty principle a precision limitation on measurement is something of an oversimplification. Passing from the general physicist's uncertainty principle to a more restricted but still physically meaningful case, the Fourier-transform version of the uncertainty principle (requires no physics to derive and) states that the narrower and less smooth a spatial representation of something is, the wider and slower-decaying its frequency representation becomes. (Sharp and abrupt sounds have wide spectra, which is why they get mangled into the strange but recognizable bubbling in low-bitrate MP3s. The two-dimensional case of the same phenomenon is well demonstrated by the JPEG "ringing" around sharp edges, with the caveat that JPEG transforms every 16x16 block of pixels independently.) Physics comes in here only when you say that position and momentum (amplitude) distributions are Fourier transforms of each other. If a single sample or the average value is all you get, then yes, the width of the peak becomes the uncertainty of your measurement. If you can get many samples, though, then you absolutely can trace the shape of that peak. It's just that the instruments used at the dawn of quantum mechanics were not built that way. (What "particle-wave dualism" means, I think nobody really understands except maybe Bohr scholars; "dualism" was his personal German-philosophy-style all-encompassing idea that he was smitten with before he even started thinking about QM. It's a wave, period, it's just that high-frequency waves can look like particle propagation if you squint, as seen in optics and acoustics.)
  - 4y ago

ekofish 4y ago

I work at an HR/Payroll company with a phenomenal app that we put our blood, sweat, and tears into every single day. And every single day I clock in with Oracle Time and Labor. There's a legal reason for this and we do it for compliance. I'm guessing Stripe is in the same boat with this product despite its flaws.

reaperducer 4y ago
The company where I work disallows us from using our own product because it would be considered a conflict of interest. Some co-workers say it's a federal regulation, but I've never seen that anywhere in print, so I suspect it's just a workplace rumor/justification. I've had customers complain to my face that we tailor the products to our needs, and are surprised (and sometimes vocally disbelieve) that we don't use it, ourselves. In certain industries, dogfooding is considered bad, and sometimes illegal.
- mattkrause 4y ago
  Conflict of whose interests? You say the product is useful and other people should buy it, while you yourself use it seems pretty aligned. It cannot possibly be the case that Microsoft runs on Open Office and MacBooks.
  - Turing_Machine 4y ago
    For a long, long time Microsoft was using Unix sendmail for its own internal mail system, while touting Outlook for its customers. They only started eating their own dog food when people started making fun of them in public.
- willio58 4y ago
  Yeah most of the time I hear conflict of interest I don’t believe it at this point. Conflict of whose interest? If you used your own product wouldn’t you learn some issues that exist within it?
  - 4y ago

thiscatis 4y ago

It’s called Stripe Billing, not Stripe MDR. What a pointless exercise but I guess someone wi have some takeaways from this, not sure which one though.

swyx 4y ago
what is MDR?
- scrollaway 4y ago
  Merchant Discount Rate. Another (confusing) name for what you might know as "payment processing fee". https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/merchant-discount-rate.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/merchant-discount-rate....
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

coding123 4y ago

They tried and then got locked out.

dangus 4y ago

Seems very understandable to me that your customers' profile doesn't necessarily meet your customers' customers profile. If I sell a cash register app to indie businesses who sell trinkets at the art fair, that doesn't mean my solution meets my own needs for billing my millions of those business customers.

yucky 4y ago

Stripe is large enough to need their own dedicated merchant account, why would they use a product designed for smaller businesses?

ath0 4y ago

Several of the concerns revolve around the complexity of managing multiple IDs (product SKUs, prices, etc) for a single subscription - and the author reaches the conclusion that this is because it's optimized for "e-commerce and not B2B SaaS". While from the buyer's perspective, "single negotiated cost with overages" may appear simple - it's a single bill after all - on the accounting side for the company selling the product, I'd expect it's much more complicated; with potentially different tax rates for different products and complexity around producing an auditor-defensible determination for "cost of goods sold" and "marketing expense." So for at least some of these requests, I see Stripe's posture here as helpful - it's not "requesting a dollar figure", it's "creating a detailed enough accounting trail behind that bill to operate your business." Looking across the breadth of Stripe's products, I'd give them the benefit of the doubt here.

avidphantasm 4y ago

Is this a example problem from an updated edition of “Gödel, Escher, Bach”?

traceroute66 4y ago

Xero is the same and it really pisses me off. In Xero you've got something called a "Xero Network ID", which is an ID that you can give to other Xero users and they can link it to your contact record on their account, which means that invoices they raise are automatically posted in your Xero account without you having to lift a finger. Now, you would have thought that Xero would do the same for their subscription invoices (i.e. automatically post them to your Xero account). But no..... Instead they send you one by email which you then have to post manually onto your Xero account. And they do that every ... single ... month. If you ask them "why ?", you get an arrogant reply that along the lines of "we're too big to use Xero, so go away you silly little person". But that doesn't answer the question. Xero is their dogfood. So even if they use Sage or whatever internally, surely it is not that difficult for them to build an integration so they can post their damn invoices to the customer's accounts. Rant over. ;-)

yeutterg 4y ago
Slightly off-topic, IMO Xero has really gone downhill. The Yodlee integrations with banks fail so often these days, it makes it hard to use the product at all. When you refresh a bank/credit card feed or log in for the xth time, you have no expected timeline as to when the feed will update or whether it will even work. There are multiple buttons to reset a feed, and they do different things. It's nearly impossible to just log in and reconcile all your accounts because you are always fighting with unconnected bank feeds. This degrades the core value prop of making it easy to stay atop of bookkeeping—now I always have some form of "accounting debt" these days. I got so frustrated that I am in the process of migrating my personal account to Tiller + Google Sheets, and I'm still looking for a solution for our small business account. I agree about the billing issues; I waste time figuring out where the invoices live in the product and manually posting them. Otherwise, the product would be fine if outdated, if it wasn't for the unreliability of Yodlee.
- traceroute66 4y ago
  > I'm still looking for a solution for our small business account. For a long time I resisted moving to Xero. Unfortunately my hand was forced because my existing solution (MYOB which was then bought by Mamut) stopped being Apple compatible through their own lazyness (they refused to update the software for 64-bit compatability). Apple had pre-announced the post-Catalina 64-bit requirement years in advance. Every other developer out there had made the change. But Mamut/MYOB ... nope, they sent out a long email one day basically making that absolutely clear they were not moving from 32-bit. Their answer was to offer a "cloud" version. I say "cloud" because what they offered was a remote desktop connection to a Mac running an old version of software on their side. So hence I was forced over to Xero. My accountant was pressuring me too, but Mamut/MYOB killing off their own product was the straw that broke the camels back. (I believe they may have finally relented and brought out a 64-bit version subsequently, but by that time it was too late, I'd moved already. And I had lost trust in their software support abilities anyway by then).

devmor 4y ago

This article comes at a welcome time for me. I've been building out a usage-based B2B product and have wracked my brain on how to properly implement billing (without having to pay large upfront fees or integrate a more complex gateway that I don't really need). I'd never heard of Lago before but I think I'll give it a try.

clintonb 4y ago
https://stripe.com/docs/billing/subscriptions/usage-based https://stripe.com/docs/billing/subscriptions/usage-based
- devmor 4y ago
  I use Stripe for other products, and their usage-based billing is limited to specific scenarios that are not one-size fits all. This is in fact the entire subject of the post we are commenting on. Why would you assume I haven't evaluated Stripe's offering on a post that is specifically about the shortcomings of Stripe's offering.
AnhTho_FR 4y ago
Hi Devmor, I work at Lago. Happy to learn more and to support! My email: anhtho@getlago.com

edwinwee 4y ago

First off, yes, Stripe uses Stripe to bill our own customers. In fact, for our larger customers who have negotiated complex pricing plans, we're currently migrating much of our manual billing to a system that's inspired by Stripe Billing. Second, this article seems to miss the point of Stripe. It seems to want to build a platform, which is what Stripe Connect is designed for. For example, charging a percentage fee is just one line (https://stripe.com/docs/api/application_fees https://stripe.com/docs/api/application_fees): ` $application_fee_percent = 5` Slack, Atlassian, and Notion have all built their B2B billing on top of Stripe. But we don't target just B2B or B2C ecommerce in case a business has multiple revenue streams (which many businesses are increasingly adding). In fact, we designed Billing so it can flex across any business model—per-seat, usage-based, tiered, or even graduated. This is the point of Stripe. A single stack that flexes with your business as it grows and pricing that's public.

tiffanyh 4y ago
> First off, yes, Stripe uses Stripe to bill our own customers. This is confusing because you’re implying that Stripe Billing is used internally but another employee clarifies and says it’s not, it’s simply another billing service was created that predates Stripe Billing. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33193807 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33193807
- edwinwee 4y ago
  Sorry, to be clearer—we are moving away from the old billing service my colleague mentioned and to a new one. Our new system shares similarites with the Stripe Connect + Stripe Billing flow I mention above (specifically https://stripe.com/docs/api/usage_records https://stripe.com/docs/api/usage_records).
  - blast 4y ago
    You say it shares similarities with Stripe Billing. Above, you say inspired by Stripe Billing. "Similarities" and "inspired" are weasly ways of saying that it is not Stripe Billing. It used to be that Stripe could be relied on not to do this sort of corporate doubletalk. The OP asked a direct question and you've given a misleading PR answer. I'm sure you're a nice person just trying to do your job, but your inevitable PR posts to HN, within minutes of anything Stripe-related coming up, are hurting your cause. The Stripe of the past would never have spewed propaganda like "This is the point of Stripe. A single stack that flexes with your business as it grows and pricing that's public" into HN threads. It's embarrassing, and what it's telling us is that culturally you've lost your way. Maybe that's inevitable on your way to world domination, but if you guys can no longer communicate honestly or treat readers as intelligent, you'd be better off not posting here. I like Stripe, by the way. I know this is harsh but I would like it to be helpful.

kurrik 4y ago

(I work on Stripe Billing). This is a question we raise fairly regularly internally at Stripe. The real, prosaic answer is because when we started working on Stripe Billing in 2017, Stripe had already built an internal billing system to bill its own customers. Stripe was 7 years old at that point. At the time, we got lots of feedback from the folks who had built that system. Our goal was to build a flexible billing system for all kinds of companies at different sizes, but we were definitely focused on smaller (doing maybe $100k–$10M of ARR) SaaS companies to start. We've come a long way since then and now power billing for a number of large/public companies. Atlassian, Figma, Notion and Slack are either using or migrating onto Stripe Billing today. Stripe Billing is a powerful tool with a role to play in any company's revenue management system, including Stripe's. Newer Stripe products (such as Atlas) do build on top of Stripe Billing but we haven't gotten around to migrating our existing stack. That said, I do have a personal goal of taking on more internal billing responsibilities over time (e.g. I think we could easily use Stripe Invoices internally today, and it's mostly opportunity cost keeping us from actually doing so). I do want to say that the specific use case covered in the post is something we have thought about a lot. I think about it as a pipeline with stages for collecting high volumes of usage events, aggregating them, mapping them to rate cards based on usage, and then producing recurring bills, collecting payment, dunning, etc... The post claims we don’t do a good job on the first two stages (collecting usage events and aggregating them) is perhaps missing that the style of percentage-based fees is a one-line addition to a Connect integration as my colleague edwinwee mentioned below. It is also possible to have a scalable usage event collection/aggregation pipeline integrated with Stripe Billing. You can read this AWS blog post https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/apn/building-a-third-party-saas-metering-and-billing-integration-on-aws/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/apn/building-a-third-party-saas... for information about how to build such a system according to our best practices. While I’m here, I’m always eager to hear feedback on Stripe Billing from folks who are using it. My email is ark@stripe.com.

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neosat 4y ago
Thanks for some internal insights. I think the original post wasn't making the point that such a use case is not possible to build but rather that the architecture and design choices of Stripe Billing are not optimized for these use cases and don't make it easy.

zcombynator 4y ago

Interesting that one YC company publicly attacks another YC company. I thought there's at least some "family" vibes there, instead of bitching each other now.

AnhTho_FR 4y ago
Hi! I work at Lago. As we wrote in the disclaimer of the article, we're just stating how our positioning is different, extract here: "We were told recently: “We love your ‘Stripe hate’ content”. While it was intended as a compliment, ‘Stripe hate’ has never been our intention. We partner with Stripe Payments and love their products. Our own product is an alternative to Stripe Billing (and Chargebee, Recurly, etc.) but with a deep focus on B2B and product-led companies. We actually have common investors on our cap table (e.g. Y Combinator and others)."

vasco 4y ago

As the old men say at the park, there comes a moment in every SaaS's life where you need to spend a year of a team's time just adding Zuora. They are dark days but hopefully life is better on the other side.

zcombynator 4y ago

@paulg isn't it against YC guidelines to attack other YC companies?

dzink 4y ago

If I were a regulator I would be suspicious if a company runs its own billing on its own billing software and then something goes wrong with the numbers. Keeps honest executives honest in a way. Also keeps outages and hacker attack vectors somewhat contained.

bredren 4y ago

For a long time, Apple stores used mobile devices other than iPhone to process payments on the floor. Windows mobile, I think?

alfl 4y ago

Their account got banned too many times :)

AnhTho_FR 4y ago
Curious about which account you're mentioning?

orliesaurus 4y ago

To the author of this blogpost: you're using the wrong product. You want to use Stripe Connect.

paxys 4y ago

This isn't as much of a gotcha as they think it is. Amazon was using Oracle databases until like 2019, 13 years after the launch of AWS. Same with pretty much every large company that has a mature hand-crafted tech stack in place. Sometimes the costs and complexity of migration are simply not enough to justify switching, even if the target product is your own.

jmartens 4y ago

Never host your status page where you host your app, and never use your billing product to handle your own billing.

0_____0 4y ago

Whenever I hear about a US based payment processor, I feel compelled to mention UPI, India's Unified Payment Interface. Basically, with fairly modest investment, the Indian government put together a system to allow instant transactions between bank accounts. There are no transaction fees. We have so many companies (sometimes the same company with multiple faces - Paypal/Venmo, Stripe, Clover, Square, all of whom want a cut of transactions for the incredible service of making a number go up in one place and down in another place. Instead of fixing bank-to-bank transfers, we're stuck with ACH, which for some godforsaken reason takes days to clear. There's no technical reason why the US can't have a system like UPI. There's no reason why we MUST allow rent-seeking payment processors to take a cut when someone in Mumbai can make a peer or merchant transfer for free in seconds. UPI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Payments_Interface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Payments_Interface

codazoda 4y ago
I think the U.S. federal government is working on a payment system. At first it will just work between banks. I dunno if that means consumers can use it between their banks or if it means B2B bank transactions, but they are working on something (and I recall it’s close). Edit: FedNow, May 2023, pricing not yet released. It is for business and consumers
nextaccountic 4y ago
Brazil also has one too, Pix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pix_(payment_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pix_(payment_system)
grecy 4y ago
> There's no technical reason why the US can't have a system like UPI. You're right there is no technical reason, but there is a very strong political reason. They way things are now, people in the US have to pay for a lot of things that people don't pay for in other countries. Bank Transfers is just one example. Health Insurance (and care) is another. Higher education. Filing taxes. This list is endless. Making people pay for this stuff is extremely good for the economy, and probably a big part of the reason the USA has the highest GDP. It also makes many, many hundreds of billions of dollars for those entrenched in those industries, who will spend tens upon tens of billions of dollars lobbying to make sure it never changes.

a1445c8b 4y ago

Answer: because building a self-bootstrapping system is non-trivial.

jwithington 4y ago

lol at the comments that stripe “billing” wouldn’t be the right product used to bill someone—that’d be stripe “connect”