Hi folks -- as Edwin points out elsewhere in the thread, the article title isn't accurate. (I'll update or delete my comment if it's fixed.)
[Update: it was changed. It used to read "Stripe is now charging 0.5% more for recurring charges."]
You can happily make recurring charges yourself and no additional fees are incurred. Lots of Stripe customers do this and we don't charge anything extra for it.
If you decide to use Stripe Billing, which is a separate product, we charge for that. Stripe Billing's pricing hasn't changed in a few years. What's changing is that we're ending the several-year grace period where we didn't charge anything for Stripe Billing for businesses who started to use this functionality before 2018.
Charging for Billing helps us fund a lot more investment in it -- we've gone from very basic cron-like functionality to a pretty full-featured subscriptions management tool. (You can read more at https://stripe.com/billing.) Billing is now sophisticated enough that companies like Slack and Atlassian are using and paying for it. We've built things like "Smart Dunning" (which improves revenue recovery for failed charges by about 14%), better analytics, international payment method and invoicing support, and a whole host of other features. There are now more than 30 people working on improving Billing.
Importantly, Stripe Billing is (and will remain) significantly cheaper than most of the other competitors in the space.
I feel that spinning this as a several-year grace period is a bit disingenuous. I'm a huge Stripe fan, but this is leaving a bad taste in my mouth. Here's the exact notification that went out on April 6, 2018 in the dashboard:
"As a user of Stripe Subscriptions, you will get all the functionality of Stripe Billing's starter plan with no change in price. You can continue using it free of charge on your existing Stripe pricing, even beyond the $1M free threshold. This will be automatically applied to your account. Contact support@stripe.come with any pricing questions"
As far as I can see, the Billing Starter plan has not changed and still applies. Not only that, it claims we get "all the functionality of Stripe Billing.." when this hasn't been the case for a few months. New features have been gated recently, ie. the new customer portal.
You have every right to change your pricing how you see fit. However, if this message was worded as it being a grace period, we would have taken steps two years ago to consider other tools or building something in-house.
You're right. It would have been a lot better if we'd made explicit that we weren't intending to make a permanent commitment. This is good feedback for the next time we do something like this.
(Our actual thinking was that we'd iterate on the product for a few years until we were confident it was good and worth paying for -- with both large and small companies using and paying for it -- and then revisit.)
When I first signed up with Stripe years ago, it was a breath of fresh air. Stripe did one thing exceedingly well, at an understandable price and took minutes to integrate with.
I could sell Stripe to my developer friends (and did, a lot!) in a single sentence: "You can add credit card charging to your site in about 15 minutes for 2.9% + 30¢ per transaction." I can't do that anymore. Stripe is no longer a single-sentence sell.
Stripe still does good work. But the air is getting murkier. I'll point to some objective changes, but mostly Stripe is just starting to feel different.
- Several years ago, when I saw announcements that Stripe started supporting ACH payments (and later international payments), I thought, "Great! This is Stripe! I'll just be able to flick a switch and turn those on." Not so. I understand that it's complicated from their end. It's just not the same "Stripe is so easy" experience. "Stripe is supposed to abstract away the complexity, not expose it to me."
- The pricing page is a big sign of the added complexity. There used to just be one or two numbers on that page [1]. Compare that with the current pricing page [2]
My suggestion to you, pc: Start a little company within Stripe to disrupt Stripe (i.e. re-simplify) in the same way Stripe disrupted the industry 10 years ago. Or keep getting bigger and become just as complex as the things Stripe replaced.
I agree. I feel like good companies like Stripe want to keep growing. With this, comes the need to increase revenue to cover the extra costs. I don't know if it's investor pressure, or the fear of being stagnant, but some companies are arguably better off the way they are. There's no need to grow at all costs.
If you want more users, double down on marketing to existing users instead of pissing them off. Although it's really hard to measure, happy users do the marketing for you and bring in more customers.
First they started charging for international cards (with the "grandfathering" for years excuse), now this. I've already migrated off of Stripe and now actively recommend people think twice about going with them. Instead, I'm recommending Braintree... aka Paypal. It seems we've come full circle already.
Even more confusing, it's showing me (in NZ) prices in GBP, which I have no use for, and talking about European cards as somehow special. They seem to think currency and language are the same thing (NZ English is pretty close to British English for computer purposes, so it redirects me to en-gb?). But https://stripe.com/en-nz/pricing#pricing-details actually exists! Weird.
Charging one rate for all payments sounds nice. But not all payments cost the same for Stripe. One rate for all customers means that you are breaking even / losing money on some transactions and making money on others. In other words, you're asking some of your customers to subsidize others, because.... it makes the product simpler to sell. Why would anyone agree to the wrong side of that bargain as a customer?
This is an excellent Suggestion: My suggestion to you, pc: Start a little company within Stripe to disrupt Stripe (i.e. re-simplify) in the same way Stripe disrupted the industry 10 years ago. Or keep getting bigger and become just as complex as the things Stripe replaced.
Kind of agree with cabolos here. When we signed up for Stripe, the fees included access to Strip Subscriptions. We chose Stripe in part because of that. Now we either have to pay more for the same functionality or migrate of.
We'd be totally happy keeping the old functionality of Stripe subscriptions and not getting any of the new hotness. I think Stripe has done a great job supporting old versions of the API, seems like we should just be able to stay on our old pricing / subscriptions functionality as well.
Saying that we can build the infra ourselves to do reoccurring kind of goes against what we purchased Stripe for initially. I know technically you can change your pricing/billing however you want but this is more of "let's capture more revenue from old customers" than it is "we launched a bunch of stuff thats new so pay for the new stuff".
We've been testing this change for a few months to make sure that, broadly speaking, the vast majority of current customers are willing to pay for the new functionality. We don't want to even try to charge for things that customers don't feel they're getting good value from.
There's obviously heterogeneity, though, and we'll be as reasonable as possible. If this would be really disruptive for your business, or if you need more time to plan a migration (if you don't think Billing makes sense for you), or something like that, I'd be happy to connect you with the team -- we could extend your current pricing through the end of 2021.
I think Stripe does a lot of things right, but your comments back in 2018 certainly indicated that Billing could be used in perpetuity:
"- For existing customers, there's no pricing change. You just get more functionality than before for free. This is what we generally try to do: we want Stripe to continually become better value for you over time, as you get more functionality for the same price."
I specifically reached out to Stripe support back then to verify this would be the case and they confirmed. If you've since changed your mind, I think you should come out and say that's the case as opposed to saying this is a communications issue.
Long term Stripe customer across multiple companies here.
I'm ok with paying for services like this that provide loads of value. I expect there's increasing diversity in terms of Stripe's customer base and how they use the product, and trying to pick a single percentage price point that works across all of them is no longer feasible.
That said, I'm quite unhappy with Stripe's pricing as an AU customer. We're paying exorbitant rates to convert USD to AUD (think retail bank rates despite transacting multiple millions a year, ~3x what we'd pay Transferwise). There's no option to settle in USD, and a lot of our expenses are in USD, so we then pay another currency conversion fee when we spend.
It's problematic to the extent that we're considering whether the ongoing costs and hassle of setting up a US entity, dealing with international tax, compliance, parent companies etc. would be worthwhile.
This is infuriating. I've been told so many times that it's 'coming'. 5% of top line revenue is pretty significant and now an added 0.5% feels like a slap in the face.
Braintree have offered it for years so this might be the final motivation to switch over.
It's been around 7 or 8 years with Stripe now and it just seems like they are prioritising heavily increasing their average revenue per user at all costs.
Yep, heard loud and clear. We've been investing a lot in USD (and other currency settlement) in various markets (and actually just released it in Singapore). We're working on it in Australia too.
Do you really need to set up a US entity just to open a US bank account?
If not, I would set up a US checking account and settle some portion stripe transactions there. Take that revenue and pay your US vendors. No currency conversions.
We process a significant amount of charges through Stripe and this is hitting us hard. We’re basically being told that you’d like to keep some of our money for yourself. We were never told that we should expect such a fee increase. This smells a lot like bait and switch.
I'm sorry that it feels that way. Stripe Billing's pricing has been public since 2018. (We didn't charge any of our existing users from the outset precisely because we wanted to avoid any sense that there's a bait-and-switch. We wanted to wait until we really were confident that we had a good product that businesses are willing to pay for.)
Patrick, Thanks for building a great product. I'm happy to pay for continued feature + new product development ...
... What I'm not so happy about is:
* we have asked Stripe to sign a contract for years (something requested by our institutional investors but have always been just pointed to an online MSA URL
* we are now being asked to sign a contract suddenly w/new line-item charges and no ramp-up or notice period
Most companies (especially those that are PE backed) have already done year end planning + budgetting.
Happy to provide the details of our timeline but so far at a high-level:
* contacted by a new account rep 11-days ago about signing a contract
* still have not received the proposed rates for billing, processing, rev rec, sigma etc ...
* ... but have been told that Billing charging needs to kick off 1/1/2021 (which is essentially 45-days away)
Thanks pc! OT: You're very active, and usually one of the first to get involved, in Stripe-related discussions on HN. I'm curious how you manage this. Do you lurk HN all day like me and spot the new Stripe-related threads, or do others at Stripe let you know when they see a Stripe-related thread?
I've always wondered if there is a business opportunity here: a company that monitors social media for all mentions of your business and pings you about it. Maybe this already exists?
Patrick, i am trying to build a partnership with you guys and can't get anyone to contact me back. We are a venture backed startup in the veterinary telemedicine space - how do I get in contact with someone senior to explore an enterprise level partnership?
Edwin from Stripe here. It’s worth distinguishing between charging money on Stripe (for which you incur payments pricing) and using Stripe Billing (which is a separately-paid product).
Stripe Billing has had this pricing for a few years. For some longtime users of Subscriptions, we originally didn’t change their pricing but are doing so now. We think charging a separate fee for our Billing product is fair, given comparable products in the market (say, Recurly or Chargebee) charge something similar. (Generally more!)
We’ve been investing a ton in making Stripe Billing better. For example, from talking to users we learned people needed it be significantly easier to get up and running with subscriptions. So in the last year we built the Customer Portal[0]. (We’ve also listened to you and improved the analytics[1].) Payments is a low-margin business and our customers are (quite reasonably) very price sensitive. So to be able to make Billing a great product, we realized it was going to have to charge a fee commensurate with the product scope.
Thanks for jumping in here so quick. I'm sure it'll be a tough thread, but something about this response rubs me the wrong way. It doesn't seem like it's really addressing the change (eg. why is it worth _existing_ customers to be paying an extra 0.5%? The fact that Stripe added features for new customers doesn't really impact those of us who have been with you for 5-10 years). Additionally, I don't recall getting an email about the price increase.
I genuinely don't even know: am I going to be seeing this price increase? Would have liked getting an email about something like this, rather than finding out on HN, and now having to dig into things to figure out if I'm actually affected (which I presume I am).
To give you a comparison: if my bank or credit card company increased their rate, I'd expect to be (and am) notified of that.
I don't think this is a pricing increase? It's just their pricing for Stripe Billing. It's been 0.5% since at least 2018 which is when I started using it. I'm not sure why this has suddenly exploded on HN.
Careful. They might want to develop one more dashboard - showing you structure of the fees and their changes. Brace yourself for another 0.5% fee to pay for it
Yes, you'll be emailed—if you were on the old Subscriptions pricing and are using Billing now, the emails are going out now (most have already been sent). Email me at edwin@stripe.com and we can also check.
We think charging a separate fee for our Billing product is fair, given comparable products in the market (say, Recurly or Chargebee) charge something similar.
Copying what other people in the market are doing is the antithesis of what made Stripe so important when it first launched.
Processing margins are thin and they have a valuation ($36B) to justify, so they have to grow product margins where they can ("going upmarket"). Market realities/constraints.
Well, if you start comparing yourselves to chargebee, they have a far more complex product - and really impressive traction in terms of new features being released regularly - combined with a really super support. I have not even seen a single company that deliver on the same level as chargebee does.
I've had to run a number of price changes (mostly increases) over the years. In case the folks with pitchforks are unclear, your mistake was not clearly communicating to your customers. Every impacted customer should have received an email that explained the change, how much their bill would increase, and a timeline for the increase that would give them a few months of runway make other plans.
How about: they're increasing the price to X because that's what they want to charge. They think price X will help maximize the long-term value of the company.
Yeah I mean, maybe being larger as a financial institution has some costs also. Primarily that it sucks. I interviewed at a hedge fund that had to submit (something) to (some regulatory body, don’t remember) because it was too systemically important. But they required dedicated staff to handle the regulatory burden. Given how tightly staffed that place was it was actually a meaningful portion of headcount measured as a percentage.
Maybe some of those economies of scale are only 80% realized if you’re a financial institution. And rightfully so.
Don’t have a horse in the game here re: Stripe, just hoping the damn kids will go on someone else’s lawn.
AWS doesn't charge anything for elastic beanstalk beyond the standard price for resources, even though of course competing products like heroku charge a lot more. I'm not arguing about fairness, I'm sure that's not a concern for AWS either, but if you have a basic product with solid margins, doesn't it make sense to account something you build on top of that product as marketing or documentation, rather then as a distinct product that has to pay for itself?
Awesome, I setup subscriptions using Stripe for a website a few months ago for the first time and was so turned off by how convoluted the process was I was actually thinking about emailing Stripe to suggest they take a hard look at the process and how to make it easier. Glad to see that was already underway, great work!
At the end of the day, you're using electricity to send around a bunch of 1's and 0's. The amount of electricity used doesn't change much whether it represents $10 or $100,000...so why do you need a percentage of the total?
I understand existing banking structures already work on the percentage model (so there's probably downstream percentage-based charges Stripe must pay), but why can't this entire banking structure be disrupted to transfer that value back to society?
Cost-based pricing rarely makes sense for software products, as almost all products are just “sending around a bunch of 1’s and 0’s”. If that were the case, almost all software would cost just pennies a month.
I’m not a fan of Stripe’s price increase for recurring plans either, and I think they could’ve communicated it better, but their pricing is far from unreasonable given the amount of research and engineering effort they put into the product that I don’t have to do myself.
Correct — Subscriptions was the really old one. Two years ago Billing was rolled out as Stripe's separate product for recurring charges and invoice management (https://stripe.com/billing).
We (Streak yc s11) signed up for Stripe way back in the day and have just been paying their standard payment processing fees for years. We haven't upgraded our API version or used any of their new billing features or anything like that. Basically we get the same value from Stripe we did from the day we integrated. I thought our pricing was going to be grandfathered but this change will cost us tens of thousands of dollars. Unfortunately, we're kind of hostage to it.
Anyone else at scale and have an old integration? How are you handling the fee increase?
If you're doing significant volume, which I assume Streak does, you can negotiate significant volume discounts. You have been leaving a ton of money on the table if you have not done that.
Maybe - they seemed really not interested in negotiating much at all and I got the impression they feel that their customers should be lucky enough to be allowed to use Stripe as a processor.
My company went through negotiations with Stripe earlier this year. We were more than 1.5% + $0.10 away from our current processor, and they wouldn't budge to even match our existing rates. They kept saying they are a better value, and offer more things for the price - except most of the "value-adds" we didn't care about (their only interesting things was the Stripe Checkout with Fraud detection - which requires you to use their hosted checkout page... which is a complete non-starter for a serious eCommerce operation).
Perhaps not a good fit - but paying a ton more per year in CC processing fees just because Stripe uses "AI!!!!" wasn't something we could swallow.
Could you define "significant volume" a bit more specifically? Wondering if I too, have been leaving a ton of money on the table. What is the approximate scale that this makes sense at?
Same thing has happened for Radar for example. We set up our whole infrastructure with their beta 3DS and Radar products, and then one day (a few months back), it is $ 0.07 per txn in Radar as well as no returned fees on refunds.
Stuck with nowhere to go.
Not against improving margins, but customers that have walked hand in hand with Stripe for so long and seen them thru their early growing pains should definitely be grandfathered.
The day you decided to go with Stripe you started being hostage of them, but this is not a bad thing, this is business, you choose a partner, they are allowed to change the terms if the contract permit it.
People on HN always think they deserve to be treated better than others
>People on HN always think they deserve to be treated better than others
I have noticed a significant attitude of, "I originally signed up for this product with 'x' cost and 'x' features, and you have zero right to change anything about that."
It seems like a basic contract negotiation process would ferret that out - I thought that was a business thing to do. I work in higher ed, and we absolutely have to have contracts for all third-party vendors; any changes are negotiated with the start of new contracts. If we can figure it out, surely startups can - we're not really all that good at efficiency.
That's why we integrated with 4 payment providers. We use a common Quote object that knows how to "apply" itself to subscriptions on all 3 (GitHub is inverse) providers.
I have to believe this is Stripe leadership pumping up the revenues/profits to look peachy for their IPO, so they can all get a considerable exit while raising a war chest - meanwhile competitors will come along and try to take market share while Stripe can spend more on acquisitions and feature development for the same price. I think this play as part of the VC industrial complex leaves them more vulnerable than is obvious - but leadership won't ultimately care because they're set for generations.
Without knowing their business model, it really doesn't matter how much money is moving through their system. It could very well be that they have a lot of buyers because of a very low profit margin and this actually has a notable impact on the company's finances.
Saying you are "held hostage" might be a bit of a dramatic way to phrase it, but for some companies a change like this actually makes a difference. Such is the life of relying on any third-party services though.
Also, pointing out "faults" is not helpful. It's unproductive conversation. Many companies are built upon third-party services that they are (probably falsely) under the impression will not change. It's not your "fault" if you decide to use AWS services and become deeply integrated and they increase their prices by 10% and you can no longer afford their services... It's no one's fault. It's just unfortunate and all you can do is try to work around it, or close the company.
> You're not a hostage. You're deeply integrated through nobody's fault but your own.
Exactly this. We started being Stripe customers after they bought some third party several years ago. While Stripe maintained the deal it was good for our business but recently they decided to end the deal we had (I don't blame them, it was a very sweet deal for us). Fortunately my startup always have had more than one provider and now we can calculate a "least cost routing" process, which will definitely move a lot of our volume outside of Stripe.
But it is just that, business. You should not trust any one provider with your business, not even AWS (i.e. not even at that level).
Move to another solution? I have no idea on pricing but maybe NMI, Braintree, etc. Also play hardball with the account manager if you're comfortable with that.
Why are you hostage to it? How much dev time would switching to a different transaction processor take? This seems like it should be a very competitive space.
It’s not just dev time, that would be easy. It’s getting every customer to re-enter their credit card details which won’t happen without a significant uptick in arrears, and depending on the type of customer, churn.
We recently finished moving our "Recurring Billing" stack from Stripe to Recurly after we found a tonne of problems with the Stripe billing setup. We still use Stripe as a Payment Gateway but we migrated off of their "Billing" product.
I think a lot of those problems related to us being a European business and Stripe not quite being there yet in regards to Tax and Invoicing but now we have switched it's really shocking to me how steep of a price Stripe is placing on a somewhat lacking billing system here. I always assumed their Billing product was there to lock people in to the payment gateway and make it harder to have Interchange++ pricing negotiations.
What's particularly sad is that I have fond memories of the early days of Stripe when I was genuinely excited to use their recurring charge product because the developer experience was so nice.
Today with VAT MOSS, SCA and a larger team the Billing product is neither easy nor powerful for us.
One saving grace for anyone else who finds themselves with an expensive / insufficient Stripe integration is that they make migration out very easy. We were able to get the whole process done with no downtime or missed billing - so it's definitely possible even when dealing with complex billing arrangements.
Stay tuned on the European tax stuff—we're working on that now. (And if you want to talk more about it, feel free to email kmoriarty@stripe.com and me at edwin@stripe.com.)
This is funny timing for us - we are currently looking at implementing a subscription service and were already looking at this price. Even so, 0.5% fee is miles away the cheapest option. (Most others want a fixed fee per month plus .8%).
Is there reason for us to be scoffing at the new price? This is still a fraction even of processing the credit card.
Is there any downside (other than a little more work for the implementer) to just using their main payment processing API, and to implement subscription billing with a cronjob? This is what sr.ht does [1], at least as of a year ago. If doing it manually now means saving a bunch of money, seems like a no-brainer.
We did that for a couple of SAAS. In fact, we even extracted this out to an internal library with a web UI. If anyone is interested, let me know and I’d be happy to open source it. It’ll have to be run in its own server and process.
But for full disclosure, my latest project just bit the bullet and accepted the extra 0.5%. Wanted to see how it goes. Could always switch if I found the need.
The downside is that you have to write and maintain the code and infrastructure to do it. You have to do the math for your business to decide if those costs are lower than the 0.5% fee.
Stripe still doesn’t support settling USD payments into a USD bank account on an Australian Stripe account, instead forcing their 2% currency conversion fee on top.
So my fee for every subscription charge is increasing to a an even more ridiculous A0.30 + 5.4%.
Our users have been asking for PayPal for years, and I had always put off integrating because of how frustrating their API was. But it feels like the Stripe developer dream is over. Fine, I’m adding PayPal support. :(
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Hi folks -- as Edwin points out elsewhere in the thread, the article title isn't accurate. (I'll update or delete my comment if it's fixed.)
[Update: it was changed. It used to read "Stripe is now charging 0.5% more for recurring charges."]
You can happily make recurring charges yourself and no additional fees are incurred. Lots of Stripe customers do this and we don't charge anything extra for it.
If you decide to use Stripe Billing, which is a separate product, we charge for that. Stripe Billing's pricing hasn't changed in a few years. What's changing is that we're ending the several-year grace period where we didn't charge anything for Stripe Billing for businesses who started to use this functionality before 2018.
Charging for Billing helps us fund a lot more investment in it -- we've gone from very basic cron-like functionality to a pretty full-featured subscriptions management tool. (You can read more at https://stripe.com/billing.) Billing is now sophisticated enough that companies like Slack and Atlassian are using and paying for it. We've built things like "Smart Dunning" (which improves revenue recovery for failed charges by about 14%), better analytics, international payment method and invoicing support, and a whole host of other features. There are now more than 30 people working on improving Billing.
Importantly, Stripe Billing is (and will remain) significantly cheaper than most of the other competitors in the space.
"As a user of Stripe Subscriptions, you will get all the functionality of Stripe Billing's starter plan with no change in price. You can continue using it free of charge on your existing Stripe pricing, even beyond the $1M free threshold. This will be automatically applied to your account. Contact support@stripe.come with any pricing questions"
As far as I can see, the Billing Starter plan has not changed and still applies. Not only that, it claims we get "all the functionality of Stripe Billing.." when this hasn't been the case for a few months. New features have been gated recently, ie. the new customer portal.
You have every right to change your pricing how you see fit. However, if this message was worded as it being a grace period, we would have taken steps two years ago to consider other tools or building something in-house.
(Our actual thinking was that we'd iterate on the product for a few years until we were confident it was good and worth paying for -- with both large and small companies using and paying for it -- and then revisit.)
I could sell Stripe to my developer friends (and did, a lot!) in a single sentence: "You can add credit card charging to your site in about 15 minutes for 2.9% + 30¢ per transaction." I can't do that anymore. Stripe is no longer a single-sentence sell.
Stripe still does good work. But the air is getting murkier. I'll point to some objective changes, but mostly Stripe is just starting to feel different.
- Several years ago, when I saw announcements that Stripe started supporting ACH payments (and later international payments), I thought, "Great! This is Stripe! I'll just be able to flick a switch and turn those on." Not so. I understand that it's complicated from their end. It's just not the same "Stripe is so easy" experience. "Stripe is supposed to abstract away the complexity, not expose it to me."
- The pricing page is a big sign of the added complexity. There used to just be one or two numbers on that page [1]. Compare that with the current pricing page [2]
My suggestion to you, pc: Start a little company within Stripe to disrupt Stripe (i.e. re-simplify) in the same way Stripe disrupted the industry 10 years ago. Or keep getting bigger and become just as complex as the things Stripe replaced.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20111216054911/https://stripe.co...
[2] https://stripe.com/pricing#pricing-details
If you want more users, double down on marketing to existing users instead of pissing them off. Although it's really hard to measure, happy users do the marketing for you and bring in more customers.
First they started charging for international cards (with the "grandfathering" for years excuse), now this. I've already migrated off of Stripe and now actively recommend people think twice about going with them. Instead, I'm recommending Braintree... aka Paypal. It seems we've come full circle already.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20111216054911/https://stripe.co...
[2] https://stripe.com/pricing#pricing-details
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would second this VERY strongly
We'd be totally happy keeping the old functionality of Stripe subscriptions and not getting any of the new hotness. I think Stripe has done a great job supporting old versions of the API, seems like we should just be able to stay on our old pricing / subscriptions functionality as well.
Saying that we can build the infra ourselves to do reoccurring kind of goes against what we purchased Stripe for initially. I know technically you can change your pricing/billing however you want but this is more of "let's capture more revenue from old customers" than it is "we launched a bunch of stuff thats new so pay for the new stuff".
There's obviously heterogeneity, though, and we'll be as reasonable as possible. If this would be really disruptive for your business, or if you need more time to plan a migration (if you don't think Billing makes sense for you), or something like that, I'd be happy to connect you with the team -- we could extend your current pricing through the end of 2021.
I think Stripe does a lot of things right, but your comments back in 2018 certainly indicated that Billing could be used in perpetuity:
"- For existing customers, there's no pricing change. You just get more functionality than before for free. This is what we generally try to do: we want Stripe to continually become better value for you over time, as you get more functionality for the same price."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16766846
I specifically reached out to Stripe support back then to verify this would be the case and they confirmed. If you've since changed your mind, I think you should come out and say that's the case as opposed to saying this is a communications issue.
I'm ok with paying for services like this that provide loads of value. I expect there's increasing diversity in terms of Stripe's customer base and how they use the product, and trying to pick a single percentage price point that works across all of them is no longer feasible.
That said, I'm quite unhappy with Stripe's pricing as an AU customer. We're paying exorbitant rates to convert USD to AUD (think retail bank rates despite transacting multiple millions a year, ~3x what we'd pay Transferwise). There's no option to settle in USD, and a lot of our expenses are in USD, so we then pay another currency conversion fee when we spend.
It's problematic to the extent that we're considering whether the ongoing costs and hassle of setting up a US entity, dealing with international tax, compliance, parent companies etc. would be worthwhile.
Braintree have offered it for years so this might be the final motivation to switch over.
It's been around 7 or 8 years with Stripe now and it just seems like they are prioritising heavily increasing their average revenue per user at all costs.
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If not, I would set up a US checking account and settle some portion stripe transactions there. Take that revenue and pay your US vendors. No currency conversions.
For some reason your designers have decided that your website should pick a language based on the ip address.
Stop guessing a language :)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23216502
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14175238
[1] In Stripe's API, the subscriptions section is nested under "Billing"
[2] https://www.stripe.com/billing is all about handling subscriptions through Stripe
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... What I'm not so happy about is: * we have asked Stripe to sign a contract for years (something requested by our institutional investors but have always been just pointed to an online MSA URL * we are now being asked to sign a contract suddenly w/new line-item charges and no ramp-up or notice period
Most companies (especially those that are PE backed) have already done year end planning + budgetting.
Happy to provide the details of our timeline but so far at a high-level: * contacted by a new account rep 11-days ago about signing a contract * still have not received the proposed rates for billing, processing, rev rec, sigma etc ... * ... but have been told that Billing charging needs to kick off 1/1/2021 (which is essentially 45-days away)
Thanks, JE
btw there's a small bug on the storage part of the pricing plan calculation. It shows 5,525 GB units but then the calculation is for 10,100 units.
While you are here:
Any update on when Stripe will be available in South Africa ? We really need some alternatives to PayPal.
Stripe Billing has had this pricing for a few years. For some longtime users of Subscriptions, we originally didn’t change their pricing but are doing so now. We think charging a separate fee for our Billing product is fair, given comparable products in the market (say, Recurly or Chargebee) charge something similar. (Generally more!)
We’ve been investing a ton in making Stripe Billing better. For example, from talking to users we learned people needed it be significantly easier to get up and running with subscriptions. So in the last year we built the Customer Portal[0]. (We’ve also listened to you and improved the analytics[1].) Payments is a low-margin business and our customers are (quite reasonably) very price sensitive. So to be able to make Billing a great product, we realized it was going to have to charge a fee commensurate with the product scope.
[0] https://stripe.com/docs/billing/subscriptions/customer-porta...
[1] https://support.stripe.com/questions/billing-analytics-dashb...
I genuinely don't even know: am I going to be seeing this price increase? Would have liked getting an email about something like this, rather than finding out on HN, and now having to dig into things to figure out if I'm actually affected (which I presume I am).
To give you a comparison: if my bank or credit card company increased their rate, I'd expect to be (and am) notified of that.
My two cents :)
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Copying what other people in the market are doing is the antithesis of what made Stripe so important when it first launched.
Hopefully this triggers more competition.
At least this was true last time I looked into this.
Maybe some of those economies of scale are only 80% realized if you’re a financial institution. And rightfully so.
Don’t have a horse in the game here re: Stripe, just hoping the damn kids will go on someone else’s lawn.
Thanks for tackling a low margin business!
I always look at people like they have two heads when they pitch something like that.
I understand existing banking structures already work on the percentage model (so there's probably downstream percentage-based charges Stripe must pay), but why can't this entire banking structure be disrupted to transfer that value back to society?
I’m not a fan of Stripe’s price increase for recurring plans either, and I think they could’ve communicated it better, but their pricing is far from unreasonable given the amount of research and engineering effort they put into the product that I don’t have to do myself.
Anyone else at scale and have an old integration? How are you handling the fee increase?
My company went through negotiations with Stripe earlier this year. We were more than 1.5% + $0.10 away from our current processor, and they wouldn't budge to even match our existing rates. They kept saying they are a better value, and offer more things for the price - except most of the "value-adds" we didn't care about (their only interesting things was the Stripe Checkout with Fraud detection - which requires you to use their hosted checkout page... which is a complete non-starter for a serious eCommerce operation).
Perhaps not a good fit - but paying a ton more per year in CC processing fees just because Stripe uses "AI!!!!" wasn't something we could swallow.
Stuck with nowhere to go.
Not against improving margins, but customers that have walked hand in hand with Stripe for so long and seen them thru their early growing pains should definitely be grandfathered.
Grandfathering would be the cool thing to do.
The day you decided to go with Stripe you started being hostage of them, but this is not a bad thing, this is business, you choose a partner, they are allowed to change the terms if the contract permit it.
People on HN always think they deserve to be treated better than others
I have noticed a significant attitude of, "I originally signed up for this product with 'x' cost and 'x' features, and you have zero right to change anything about that."
It seems like a basic contract negotiation process would ferret that out - I thought that was a business thing to do. I work in higher ed, and we absolutely have to have contracts for all third-party vendors; any changes are negotiated with the start of new contracts. If we can figure it out, surely startups can - we're not really all that good at efficiency.
1. Stripe
2. Braintree
3. Coinbase Commerce
4. GitHub Marketplace
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22177088
Dead Comment
- increased fees for non-US payments (3.9% + 30 cents)
- did not refund fees when you refund customers
If there was a compelling alternative that isn't PayPal we'd jump in a heartbeat
You're literally moving millions of dollars a year through your billing platform. That's not a little bit of money. That's a lot. Own it.
You're not a hostage. You're deeply integrated through nobody's fault but your own.
Saying you are "held hostage" might be a bit of a dramatic way to phrase it, but for some companies a change like this actually makes a difference. Such is the life of relying on any third-party services though.
Also, pointing out "faults" is not helpful. It's unproductive conversation. Many companies are built upon third-party services that they are (probably falsely) under the impression will not change. It's not your "fault" if you decide to use AWS services and become deeply integrated and they increase their prices by 10% and you can no longer afford their services... It's no one's fault. It's just unfortunate and all you can do is try to work around it, or close the company.
Nobody said it was a little bit of money? Where is this comment coming from?
Exactly this. We started being Stripe customers after they bought some third party several years ago. While Stripe maintained the deal it was good for our business but recently they decided to end the deal we had (I don't blame them, it was a very sweet deal for us). Fortunately my startup always have had more than one provider and now we can calculate a "least cost routing" process, which will definitely move a lot of our volume outside of Stripe.
But it is just that, business. You should not trust any one provider with your business, not even AWS (i.e. not even at that level).
I think a lot of those problems related to us being a European business and Stripe not quite being there yet in regards to Tax and Invoicing but now we have switched it's really shocking to me how steep of a price Stripe is placing on a somewhat lacking billing system here. I always assumed their Billing product was there to lock people in to the payment gateway and make it harder to have Interchange++ pricing negotiations.
What's particularly sad is that I have fond memories of the early days of Stripe when I was genuinely excited to use their recurring charge product because the developer experience was so nice.
Today with VAT MOSS, SCA and a larger team the Billing product is neither easy nor powerful for us.
One saving grace for anyone else who finds themselves with an expensive / insufficient Stripe integration is that they make migration out very easy. We were able to get the whole process done with no downtime or missed billing - so it's definitely possible even when dealing with complex billing arrangements.
Is there reason for us to be scoffing at the new price? This is still a fraction even of processing the credit card.
[1] https://cmpwn.com/@sir/103074952842876982
But for full disclosure, my latest project just bit the bullet and accepted the extra 0.5%. Wanted to see how it goes. Could always switch if I found the need.
So my fee for every subscription charge is increasing to a an even more ridiculous A0.30 + 5.4%.
Our users have been asking for PayPal for years, and I had always put off integrating because of how frustrating their API was. But it feels like the Stripe developer dream is over. Fine, I’m adding PayPal support. :(
I have spoken to a few small businesses that are going down the path of opening up a US based subsidiary to avoid these charges.
Do you have any indication from these small businesses what the setup and compliance costs are like?