A great idea! I'd love to run stuff in this zone. Rotate through a bunch of errors, unavailability, latency spikes, power outages etc every day, make it a 12 hour torture test cycle.
Readit Newsthere’s probably very little fraud with touchless payments like Apple Pay - most issuers require some verification to add the card to a phone in the first place. if that becomes a growing % of in person payments i don’t see the justification for high card present rates.
also some data suggests people have moved to more debit transactions during Covid over credit which are cheaper to process anyway and usually means less fraud - so maintaining a fixed processing rate means margins for processors are probably even better right now
I wonder if Apple and Google and Facebook and Microsoft and Stripe had just done something "anti competitive" and entered the payment space squarely themselves if rates would come down. They seem more consumer experience directed than other players.
The security they can deploy (apple pay seems pretty good now as long as card onboarding isn't broken) seems like they could drive down to basically low interchange?
Yes. I once calculated that AWS is the fastest ever b2b in history. Only marginally slower than FB, which is a consumer business (and the fastest ever).
One more thing I'd like to mention in this context: ask 100 people why AWS has been so successful.
Think of your answer.
My answer (6 years at AWS; met with ~5,000 AWS customers, so big data set): lowest barrier of entry (swipe credit card, EC2 is up in 2-3 minutes), and lowest barrier of pausing the service (and the billing).
Most people would say any other thing, but not this one. In fact, EC2, S2, EBS were initially quite bad, in terms of performance or price/quality, compared to pretty much anything out there. But you needed 2 minutes to spin up an EC2 instance, vs 2-3 weeks anywhere else.
The other thing is trust. They have (yet) to screw customers on pricing that I've seen. Has amazon ever raised prices on an existing service? I'm not saying the prices are any good, but they don't seem to go up.
So you can spin up in a few seconds, scale, stop and even invest in the platform without worrying too much. Also - they don't seem to discontinue services that quickly, again, doesn't feel like you will be screwed.
I just had a call TODAY with a vendor, the price could be as low as $30/unit or $120/unit - that's a near 4x delta from sure to hell no for our use case. Sales guy needs to go talk to their manager to see if they can get us the lower pricing. And who knows if next year (it's annual) we'll again get their "manager" to sign off on the lower pricing.
Something about enterprise sales folks thinking is very short term. No price transparency - maybe we can qualify and squeeze them for more per unit. Or maybe get them in low and squeeze them on renewal once they've invested. The overhead of dealing with them is so high too. Show me actual product screens (not talking heads and bullet points). By the time you get to the demo you have wasted a week of your life.
So big thumbs up to AWS here. You can see baseline pricing up to huge traffic. You can see savings plans discounts up to large amounts etc.
Just me or does anyone else think there’s going to be a reckoning in interchange regulation in the US like Europe soon?
Merchants are hurting, and now the pandemic has forced cashless transaction adoption at an accelerating pace.
The egregiousness of both exempt debit interchange and credit interchange fees is almost laughingly insane compared to Europe, where it is heavily regulated. Would be surprised not to see bi-partisan action sooner rather than later addressing this very question eg Durbin Amendment Part 2.
My requests - pass interchange onto the customer - and allow merchant to do so explicitly at whatever rate they want (not cash discount or anything). Ie, merchant might cover first 1% of interchange, pass rest on (so "premium" card holders with high interchange and high rewards pay the big price). We do have to get to chip+pin so the fraud issues diminish.
There is a pretty simple feature that would alleviate a lot of pain with Stripe’s billing service when invoicing enterprises - allow for attaching a pdf of the invoice in the automated email.
Many enterprise A/P departments require it. The lack of this feature has prevented us from moving off our existing invoicing system to Stripe. I’m guessing we are not unique.
It's not just enterprise - many small / mid size places are much much happier (myself included) with an invoice attached.
AWS gets this right (even though invoice is high level). You get something that can be quickly forwarded down / up and around and end up in the AP system / accounting system etc in good shape (ie, vs a 6 page PDF of an email chain). They just care that third party invoice is there in good shape with approval by whoever owns the expense line its hitting.
thoraway1010 commented on Google’s search monopoly complicates a mental health crisis bloombergquint.com/busine... · Posted by u/woldemariam
This is kind of a deep question, and not meant to cast aspersions on what you're doing, because it's perfectly rational. The world of private doctors who don't accept patients paying with insurance (government or otherwise) is very interesting to me.
Do you think there's a major difference in expected outcome for the average patient, between your wife's practice and a hospital/clinic?
I can totally grok how a patient would find her services valuable enough to pay a much higher rate, out of pocket; but I'm trying to figure out if the payer's arbitrary cut-offs are rational.
Maybe 60/hr is close to the price-point of exponentially-diminishing returns, from the risk-carrier's perspective?
Obviously, institutional payers are way more conservative with risk than financially-well-off individuals, so maybe they're making mistakes on the margin.
Anyways, hope I'm making sense. It's a fascinating topic.
No insurance hassles - I did medical billing for a bit. The insurance co's basically just run around doctors because they KNOW folks give up. You could absolutely force the $40 extra payment if dr + patient etc proved it out / appealed it - but often not worth it. Also govt billing into central county system for the poor - ugh - the bureaucracy / overhead was a nightmare (always having to recertify to financial need / paperwork this and that - 50% of time was on stuff I'd consider no value add).
For a while I had individual insurance (prior to obamacare). Because it had pretty high deductibles, I would just do a private pay / cash doctor for primary care etc.
Some big wins:
NO discussion about whether something was covered or not! You want to get service, just call.
No crazy surprise bills - yes - I once tried to go to urgent care for something at the main hospital, but NO ONE would tell me what I would be charged as a cash pay client. Yes, it can be expensive to do cash pay, but with a doctor billing by the time you can basically predict / know your cost.
Service - you are paying by the hour. I never felt pressured out the door (no surprise). The service is good to great.
Convenience - I got someone close who used his downstairs as his office. Have a problem, go in and get checked out. Because you don't need the huge billing infrastructure I think you can get away with smaller office sizes. To pay for a full time biller you need a few doctors, who then need a receptionist etc etc.
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This is a great example of unequal prosecution. A startup that has its IP copied illegally would be lucky to not be ignored by the feds. Even if it was the proximate cause of a startup’s failure (which is admittedly rare).
But for Google and Goldman Sachs which never suffer any real damage in these cases, the feds are their private army capable of raiding and imprisoning anyone who copies some files illegally, even if they suffer no actual harm whatsoever.
There is no question Google should be able to use the law to stop someone from using their IP illegally and be compensated for any damages. But this attempt to make an example out of someone just because they’re powerful is despicable.
The combination of powerful corporations with vendettas and prosecutors out to make their bones is a huge flaw in our system.
Most startups IP is not worth $200M no matter what they think.
This guy was a grade A jerk too - if he doesn't do time then white collar crime is going to be even more unfairly under-enforced.
thoraway1010 commented on You don’t need SMS-2FA blog.cmpxchg8b.com/2020/0... · Posted by u/beefhash
I've got the dual yubico key thing going. It seems to work fine. I don't need to pick overly complex passwords if I don't want to.
Google does this well. Yubico Security Key + they seem to monitor my logins / rate limits etc.
I deal as do many folks with relatively to extremely sensitive info (yes, also have stuff on auto-delete).
Complex passwords require a password manager - if those get updated and rooted then my yubico seems to save me again.
In fact, with yubico I have a few passwords I memorized that aren't TOO crazy long - with a 2FA hardware key you may be able to SIMPLIFY passwords and still have good security.
And the yubico is EASY! Clip it to your keychain and go.
Customers shouldn't be billed to fix mistakes that aren't their fault. In a functioning market, money is supposed to flow away from faults, not towards them.
Currently because the volume of bogus support requests is so enourmously high, and the fraud attempts also very high - the cost to properly do something like handle account lockout requests properly (on the scale of billions of users) would be EXTREMELY high.
Google is actually pretty clear for consumer accounts, if you lock yourself out your content is lost and they suggest setting up a new account.
Cell phone companies do handle this, you can do things like sim swaps etc with a real person - but you are usually paying $50 - $100 per MONTH with them. And even there plenty of folks have complained of having 2FA codes stolen as a result of this convenience.
If they could charge $50 or $100 to provide paid support (a situation that is actually very COMMON at the enterprise level) for at least some people this will be worth doing. Then the business case is there to staff / resource etc the fix.
Currently, with youtube / gmail etc, the revenue per user is so low it will NEVER make economic sense to have humans dealing with an account.
But keep on banning paid support and you'll keep on getting no support.