

Stripe's New Recurring Billing Features - noinput
https://stripe.com/blog/new-recurring-billing-features

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kristofferR
It pains me to see all this awesome stuff (CTF, Apps, improvements) from
Stripe all the time here on HN only to be reminded that I can't use it and
that my only actual option is Paypal or really expensive and cumbersome
merchant accounts.

I hope Stripe, Braintree or another 2.0 payment solution will launch here in
Norway soon.

~~~
namityadav
Didn't Braintree just expand to a lot of countries:
<https://www.braintreepayments.com/tour/international>

~~~
damncabbage
I signed up for the rollout to Australia, but it requires a merchant account
with Westpac (!) first.

(It almost defeats the point of using it at all over one of the existing
merchant-account-requiring solutions here.)

~~~
zhoutong
I thought it was a merchant account with NAB? (According to the application
forms I have received.)

AFAIK only NAB has multi-currency acquiring solution at the moment.

It seems that Braintree's pricing isn't attractive at all, so I'll probably
still go for eWay.

~~~
damncabbage
Ah! Sorry, I misremembered. You're right, it's NAB.

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jasonkester
Groovy. Not sure I'll actually use any of these particular features, but it's
good to see they're moving forward.

The one feature I'm still waiting for is prorated refunds on cancellation. As
it stands, they'll prorate plan changes, but not cancellations.

I actually had to change my policy on that so that I could switch off my old
payment provider and onto Stripe. I can only imagine that it's not Stripe's
plan to force policy changes like that onto their customers, so hopefully they
have this feature in their pipeline.

~~~
pc86
This is an excellent point and one you should send to Stripe if you haven't
already.

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the_bear
These seem like good improvements, although I'm still not really clear on the
benefits of using Stripe's recurring billing system rather than building your
own. Given that you still have to send out your own emails and handle
adjustments to the plans, it seems like basically the same amount of work
either way.

I built my own recurring billing system using Stripe about 9 months ago
because I need the per-seat pricing. It was incredibly easy, it gave me access
to functionality that Stripe will probably never offer, and it allows me to
plug in other payment providers if I ever need to.

~~~
jpadvo
Anything Stripe builds is going to be orders of magnitude more battle-tested
and reliable than anything I could possibly build. This is such a mission
critical piece of an application, _I don't want to avoid touching it as much
as possible_.

Now it will take a couple lines of code to add another unit to a customer's
monthly bill instead of dozens of lines of code and an extra database table.
It's not too complicated, but it's enough to make it much likelier that I'd
introduce a stupid bug.

For me, that's the benefit.

Context -- I'm a young programmer and don't trust my own code as a matter of
course, and I'm working in a bootstrapped-to-the-hilt startup where any ounce
of effort saved is gold.

~~~
spitfire
"Context -- I'm a young programmer and don't trust my own code as a matter of
course, and I'm working in a bootstrapped-to-the-hilt startup where any ounce
of effort saved is gold."

Seeing this on a young developers resume will get you an interview immediately
with me.

This sort of concern is a mature trait to exhibit. It's also risky to exhibit
when around the unskilled (It's very subtle), which makes it an even more
potent indicator.

~~~
jpadvo
Thanks spitfire, kind and encouraging words. Most of my understanding of
programming as a craft I've picked up here, probably from people who are like
you (and maybe you yourself).

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galactus
(sorry for the offtopic). Any news from the beta version of Stripe in Canada?
Has any canadian here used it? Edit: hadnt seen this
<https://twitter.com/stripe/status/245159999674933249>

~~~
timfletcher
I bugged them on Twitter and they let me on. Everything's working really well,
a pleasure to use. No AMEX yet though.

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bdunn
The new quantity option for per-seat pricing is a welcome relief. I was soon
thinking of setting up N number of plans (1 User, 2 User, etc.) and this
eliminates that headache.

~~~
csallen
It was actually possible to use per-seat pricing with Stripe before this
without creating numerous plans. You'd just have to do most of the work in the
application layer, adding/removing individual charges to an invoice when seats
are added/removed, and calculating the pro-rating charges on your own. I did
this for TaskforceApp.com over a year ago.

------
yesimahuman
Great additions, I know I'll be using the arbitrary pay period feature.

On my wishlist is more recurring billing analytics, on top of the simple
"volume" metrics.

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buro9
Any news of a UK beta?

Would love to give this a go, only today did I experience yet another PayPal
mishap that leaves me desperate to try something else (preferably something
much better).

~~~
anthonyherron
I think I signed up to hear about the UK rollout 12 months ago. Any year now I
reckon ;)

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marcamillion
Stripe should write a gem or a plugin for the most common recurring billing
functionalities in a SaaS app.

I imagine that many of their customers need this functionality - and while I
know different apps have different needs, there must be some conventions they
can adopt and enforce that will make building such a system much easier.

I imagine something like that might even drive adoption of their service -
like they need anything to do that.

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chrismealy
I tried Stripe for a while and thought it was great, but AMEX charges kept
getting flagged, so I had to go back to authorize.net. How's it going for
everybody else?

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swlkr
I first saw the arbitrary billing intervals and then realized they still don't
do what I need (weekly billing).

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atldev
Chargify user here. Love chargify, hate the merchant account fees I pay each
month. For subscription SaaS products, is this now a viable alternative to a
merchanct account with a recurring payment service on top?

~~~
pc86
No sarcasm intended, but how can you justify paying $65/mo for something like
Chargify? Does it offer some value that I'm not seeing on their site?

~~~
MichaelApproved
I use Recurly, which is similar to all these guys and they have a monthly fee.
What makes it with paying is: Easier PCI, prebuilt code to process cards
against different merchants and more code that handles the whole billing
process which I don't have to write.

~~~
pc86
That is a good point; having some code to look at (or even copy) before
writing my first ticketing application could have easily saved me a few
hundred hours. Still, $65/mo seems a bit much. Best of luck, though.

~~~
cstejerean
"could have easily saved me a few hundred hours. Still, $65/mo seems a bit
much"

I'm curious about the scenarios in which saving a few hundred hours is not
worth $65/month.

~~~
redguava
Exactly. If you value yourself at $65 p/hour or more, that's a few hundred
months of paying Chargify to break even.

I am as optimistic about my software product as anyone, but I need the break
even point to be sooner than that if I am going to spend the time coding.

This is also completely discounting the fact that they probably have a more
comprehensive system that you wrote, it's all they do. They keep updating it
too.

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aaronpk
Awesome updates, thanks guys!

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thegoodlab
Glad to see progress, but the big gotcha is that even though you can specify
quantity of subscriptions, you still can't subscribe them to multiple types of
plans. Seems like thats the next step...

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adambenayoun
I think stripe should make it 1st priority to invest in anti-fraud tools.
Right now almost none of the frauds we had were stopped by them but rather by
a 3rd party API we use.

~~~
jonknee
How did you confirm they were fraud?

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heimidal
Maybe I'm missing something, but what about a flat price + per seat? For
example, what if I want to offer a three user plan for $30 and each additional
user is $5?

