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Small bills are cool, until it's too small. I remember having to negotiate with Stripe the removal of their lowest limits. The quantum of unit I was billing on

Small bills are cool, until it's too small. I remember having to negotiate with Stripe the removal of their lowest limits. The quantum of unit I was billing on my cloud platform was such that you could consume just enough CPU and storage to end up with a $0.01 invoice at the end of the month. It was impossible for Stripe to process this payment. IIRC their lowest limit was $0.50 or $0.10. I guess they had this limit in place to prevent abuse and limit fraud. As we had similar hard-coded heuristics for the same reasons.

paulgb 4y ago
Small bills are funny. I'm surprised if the interchange fees don't net out negative for the biller. My most recent Rackspace bill was $0.05. I don't even remember what I'm using it for any more, but it's not worth it to check out. My last Pulumi bill was $0.86.
- kdeldycke 4y ago
  > surprised if the interchange fees don't net out negative for the biller That's worth investigating! Now in a fictional, adversarial way, you can think of a bot exploiting this discrepancy to bankrupt a competitor: create dozens of fake accounts, consume just shy of $0.01 of resources, and have the platform pays 30x more in payment fees (public Stripe price is 30¢/transaction). To incur a net loss of $1,000,000, you’ll have to find an antagonist ready to create 3,448,276 accounts (1_000_000 / (0.30 - 0.01)), each with their own identity and mean of payment, for a total of $34,482.76. Fortunately this is highly impractical and will be caught real fast by your internal anti-abuse systems (you have those in place right?).
  - karambahh 4y ago
    Is it that impratical? Small players would be impacted by a 100k$ net loss...and you could even spread it out over several months to be less likely to be caught by anti-abuse systems...
jrockway 4y ago
I was in this position and Stripe let me carry over the line items until eventually an invoice was billable, if I recall correctly. Though I might have just manually waived these charges as a courtesy.

paulgb 4y ago

Small bills are funny. I'm surprised if the interchange fees don't net out negative for the biller. My most recent Rackspace bill was $0.05. I don't even remember what I'm using it for any more, but it's not worth it to check out. My last Pulumi bill was $0.86.

kdeldycke 4y ago
> surprised if the interchange fees don't net out negative for the biller That's worth investigating! Now in a fictional, adversarial way, you can think of a bot exploiting this discrepancy to bankrupt a competitor: create dozens of fake accounts, consume just shy of $0.01 of resources, and have the platform pays 30x more in payment fees (public Stripe price is 30¢/transaction). To incur a net loss of $1,000,000, you’ll have to find an antagonist ready to create 3,448,276 accounts (1_000_000 / (0.30 - 0.01)), each with their own identity and mean of payment, for a total of $34,482.76. Fortunately this is highly impractical and will be caught real fast by your internal anti-abuse systems (you have those in place right?).
- karambahh 4y ago
  Is it that impratical? Small players would be impacted by a 100k$ net loss...and you could even spread it out over several months to be less likely to be caught by anti-abuse systems...

jrockway 4y ago

I was in this position and Stripe let me carry over the line items until eventually an invoice was billable, if I recall correctly. Though I might have just manually waived these charges as a courtesy.