
Stripe refunds: fees from the original charge are not returned - tumblen
https://stripe.com/docs/refunds
======
mchusma
Note: this is different than Braintree and Amazon payments, which either
refund in full or simply charge only the $0.30 fee. Stripe is now at or near
the most expensive here relative to the competition. The idea that they have
been doing customers a favor is not accurate.

I have used stripe for years, but they are a company that has continued to
make things worse with every update, versus AWS which has my trust they won't
increase rates. If AWS ever offered a true competitor, we would switch.

They invest in publishing books, but they still miss basic features like a way
to test credit cards in the production system for QA purposes. It's an easily
solved problem (let you generate one time fake card numbers programmatically
that stripe "pretends" to charge). I have been trying to test checkout flows
with them for years and their official stance is "don't test production
checkout flows", which is insane.

I hope stripe changes it's ways here, but they have been a large
disappointment over the last 4 years or so after a solid start.

~~~
pc
(I'm one of Stripe's cofounders.)

Thanks for the candid feedback. A few quick thoughts --

\- This is not a new policy change -- it's been our pricing for all new users
since 2017. (The news is that we're now applying this pricing to Stripe's
older users, in part as a response to some price increases that the card
networks are making.)

\- Our policy on refunds is pretty much the same as Braintree's.

\- We've added a lot of new functionality to Stripe since we launched in 2011.
(The Stripe that launched back then did not support any non-card payment
methods, non-USD currencies, non-US users, etc.) The vast majority of new
features come with no new fees -- the Stripe package just gets better. For
improvements that don't represent discrete new features, the changes can be
non-obvious. Our goal is to quietly optimize things so that Stripe
integrations continually get better without your code having to change. For
example, Radar is _far_ more effective at preventing fraud and chargebacks
than it's ever been. Or, last year, we built an ML engine to automatically
optimize the bitfields of card network requests. This has already generated an
incremental $1 billion of revenue for Stripe users (with no additional cost).

\- Testing production flows with fake numbers is tricky. (How should these
charges show up for reporting purposes? If we exclude them, that introduces
another discrepancy. If we include them, that means you have to then handle
the downstream _cash_ discrepancy.) It's not an intrinsically unsolvable
problem but we have not yet seen a clean solution that we feel good about. As
other commenters point out, making sure they're sufficiently secure is also a
challenge.

\- While we're proud of our books, I can assure you that the ratio of people
working on improving our payments stack to publishing is about 1000:1.

All that said, it's helpful to hear how it seems from your standpoint. We're
acutely aware of how much Stripe has yet to do/build. We'll continue to work
hard, and I hope we can support your business for many years to come.

~~~
totalZero
If I may make a sincere criticism, as a person who knows nothing about either
side of this conversation....

We should all delete "I'm sorry you feel that way" from our mental
phrasebooks. It is a phrase that always falls flat, comes across as
potentially sarcastic, and is the textbook definition of a non-apology
apology.

If you want to clarify something, go for it. If you don't want to apologize,
don't feel obligated to do so. But please, for your own benefit, steer clear
of this no-good phrase.

~~~
echelon
To be fair, this is the CEO personally reaching out. I think that's beyond
awesome.

~~~
dontdoitpls
Yeah this is damage control.

I recommended stripe to a friend because a hn (ad?) That mentioned the
documentation was great. He struggled and I couldn't help him without a deep
dive.

To be fair, my WordPress website has no problem with stripe.

~~~
iratewizard
I've got to disagree on the stripe documentation. They set the bar for
exemplary documentation.

~~~
NicoJuicy
> That mentioned the documentation was great

;)

~~~
iratewizard
Whoops, I completely misunderstood your post.

------
btown
There's a vast payments ecosystem beyond Stripe that lets you avoid this.

With companies like Spreedly to provide almost-Stripe-quality APIs and PCI-
compliant card vaulting at only a flat cost, and a massive amount of "merchant
account providers" a quick Google away that can hook into Authorize.net and
then into Spreedly, you can end up at 1.75% or less depending on your
industry, and the flexibility to _dynamically_ route transactions to merchant
accounts (including Stripe itself) based on anything from geography to your
own notion of fraud/return risk.

Stripe has far and away the best developer and administrator experience in the
industry - it surprises and delights. But this doesn't make it the right
solution for all businesses. Its genius was that it entered the zeitgeist as
such.

~~~
hawkice
Wow, Stripe is the best developer experience? When I integrated a few months
ago their documentation was so confusing I ended up giving up and not using it
at all, relying on using a library for laborious guess and check, and watching
the JSON responses. I suspect my product can still be purchased for free if
you use that EU security feature because nothing could help me figure out when
I need to use it or how to do so, so it just looks like the payment succeeded.
So much documentation recommends you use a totally different system I felt
like I was caught in a loop.

~~~
NicoJuicy
Euh, you are talking about EU security features?

So,

if(IsInEurope(Customer.Country) || IpAnalyzer.IsInEurope(visitor.Ip))

{

//Enable something

}

Should do it. But fallback method should be implemented, took me 3 minutes of
reading documentation + googling.

Between all those tax regulation differences, I think this one is mostly
straightforward for handling global payments.

Ps. Don't forget to encrypt your actual data, I think you will be amazed at
what needs to happen for selling in EU ;)

~~~
hawkice
Nah there's some credit card security thing in the EU they talk about in the
Stripe API. No comprehension of what it is, but I'm not talking about GDPR or
anything, just weird credit cards.

~~~
NicoJuicy
GDPR, I think, is the root cause for the more complex PSD2 flow.

[https://www.insideprivacy.com/financial-
institutions/overlap...](https://www.insideprivacy.com/financial-
institutions/overlap-between-the-gdpr-and-psd2/)

------
edwinwee
Some more context: this has been around for a couple years (for only new
Stripe users). Payments are costing more to process. Card network fees have
been gradually increasing over the years.

Stripe has kept this at bay for its longtime users for as long as we could,
even as it's been getting more expensive. But with the water rising across the
whole pond, we sadly have to start charging for some of these things.

~~~
sergiotapia
Why are payments costing more? Isn't technology lowering costs more and more
for these companies? Is this just execs needing another summer home so they
raise the prices to whatever they like?

~~~
privateSFacct
Actually - it's mostly because of cost / benefit shifting.

A card can attract USERS by increasing the rewards it offers -> and charging
MERCHANTS for the reward.

So visa infinite cards might charge a much higher swipe fee to a merchant, and
then make available cash back + first party car insurance + lots of bennies to
the holders of these "elite" cards.

They justify this to merchants by claiming that these "elite" users spend big
bucks.

The reality - if users of cards were charged the actual swipe fee their card
incurred -> they would push for SUPER low fees or switch to debit cards.

Many lucrative business depend on the person picking the service not being the
one paying for it or the kickback going to someone other than one paying.

~~~
officeplant
Meanwhile it's become the new hot thing locally (Southern USA) to charge
credit and debit card users a "convenience fee" sometimes as high as 35 cents
a transaction. Everyone went from offering discounts to cash users to simply
charging card users more.

~~~
crazygringo
Interestingly, in 2013 both credit card minimums (up to a maximum of $10) and
surcharges (up to a maximum of 4%) became legally federally, although there
are 10 states that still prohibit surcharges (including New York, California,
and Texas).

So seems like $0.35 is allowable on any transaction of $8.75 or more.

[1] [https://www.thebalance.com/credit-card-
surcharges-315423](https://www.thebalance.com/credit-card-surcharges-315423)

~~~
velosol
I think it's also worth noting that many of those states allow cash discounts.

[https://www.ncsl.org/research/financial-services-and-
commerc...](https://www.ncsl.org/research/financial-services-and-
commerce/credit-or-debit-card-surcharges-statutes.aspx)

------
nickjj
Hasn't this been the case for 4-5 months? I remember getting an email from
Stripe about this back in September or October 2019, or was that PayPal?

The only thing that really bugs me a lot about Stripe (to the point where I've
considered moving to Braintree for my next project) is how they handle fraud
detection.

Stripe has all the power to prevent many forms of fraud and provides this as a
service as long as you pay a premium for it in the form of Radar. You have to
pay extra on top of the 2.9% + 30c per transaction to get this protection.

But instead of providing Radar as a base service to all customers for the
standard rates, they would rather you have fraudulent transactions against
your account because they profit from "dispute fees", which is usually $17 or
so per dispute that the merchant has to pay out of pocket, where Stripe takes
some cut of that and the bank takes the rest of the cut.

It just feels super scammy of Stripe to not offer Radar as a thing you get by
default, since it's so beneficial to have and business owners are powerless in
preventing fraud on their own because they don't have hundreds of millions of
transactions of data to lean against and a way to perform analysis on the
transaction before it happens since merchants aren't directly in contact with
credit card vendors (that's why we use Stripe).

I actually talked to support about this once in an email a few weeks ago, and
the email began with them saying it's the merchant's responsibility to deal
with fraud but by the end of the email discussion, support completely switched
their position and said Stripe has the power to prevent it and they will pass
my feedback to their product team. Which of course really means "ok, you win,
Stripe is really responsible for fraud detection and we can totally do it, but
we're never going to give it to customers out of the box because we profit
from fraud regardless of you paying for Radar".

~~~
pc
> _Stripe has all the power to prevent many forms of fraud and provides this
> as a service as long as you pay a premium for it in the form of Radar. You
> have to pay extra on top of the 2.9% + 30c per transaction to get this
> protection._

Radar's ML-based shield is free for all accounts on standard pricing. See
[https://stripe.com/pricing#radar-pricing](https://stripe.com/pricing#radar-
pricing). (We only charge if you want to set custom rules etc.)

~~~
nickjj
> (We only charge if you want to set custom rules etc.)

The rules are what really allows merchants to protect themselves against fraud
but this information isn't possible to obtain without help from their payment
gateway (ie. Stripe).

In other words, merchants have no reasonable options to set up rules like what
Radar does while using our own custom logic because there's no API that Stripe
provides for us to get things like the risk score before the transaction takes
place.

If Stripe had an API endpoint where developers could get the risk level of a
transaction before the payment intent was put into motion then we could in
theory build our own risk management tool at our app level by saying "if
$risk_score > X then deny transaction".

But AFAIK nothing like this is possible, so our only option is to pay the
extra transaction cost for Radar or deal with a less than ideal fraud
protection even though Stripe can technically do this already. It just feels
really dirty. It feels like instead of optimizing for the greater good and
making the developer / business experience awesome, Stripe would rather pivot
from being a payment gateway to an insurance company and then nickel and dime
the businesses that helped build Stripe initially.

It's one of those things where it's like, we've been using you for years
(quite happily in fact), but you collected all of this data from us and now
instead of helping us by offering fraud detection across the board, you'd
rather sell our data back to us in the form of insurance.

~~~
patio11
You're welcome to do your own risk scoring on any signals you want prior to
directing us to charge a credit card for you. You're also welcome to do post-
charge processing using our risk scores. Some companies will e.g. do post-
transaction reviews prior to shipping; some write their own workflow SaaS into
their admins to do this.

If you don't choose to write your own software using your own data, that's
cool; you can buy that software from us, for two cents a transaction (or
less).

We're a software company selling to software developers. We're cool with you
writing your own software with your own data if you think your engineers are
sufficiently efficient at this to make that the best possible use of their
time. (The businessman in me suggests that it is extremely unlikely you can
profitably employ engineers to write this software at most likely scales of
your business and, contingent on being able to do that, it is quite likely
there are a hundred better projects not upper bounded at 2 cents a
transaction, but you are a project away from constructively disproving this if
you strongly disagree.)

~~~
nickjj
> You're also welcome to do post-charge processing using our risk scores.

But if it's a post-charge operation, then the transaction already took place
and it's too late.

If I need to refund a transaction after the fact because the transaction looks
risky, then I lose out on the non-refundable processing fee that you now take,
so I lose there.

Can you lay out a 100% exact work flow of how I can implement what Radar for
teams does without losing money to extra transaction fees through either
paying insurance on each transaction, or losing refund / dispute fees?

~~~
patio11
I understand that you are contemplating a build-or-buy decision and do not
want to purchase the software which we sell. You can ask the engineering teams
that you want to dedicate to this to scope out the build option; there are
likely tradeoffs you can make which would make this a 3 engineer-year project
or 30 engineer-year project. It is implausible that their design document for
the build option will conveniently fit into an HN comment. I cannot write that
design document for you as I do not have a good understanding of what data you
believe you possess at the moment or e.g. the margin characteristics of your
business, which would likely determine your tolerances with respect to some
tradeoffs to make at design stage.

I wish your teams the best of luck and skill in this project. If in the
alternative you would like to dedicate their time and attention to more
pressing concerns in your business, our software is available for 2 cents a
transaction.

~~~
nickjj
> I wish your teams the best of luck and skill in this project. If in the
> alternative you would like to dedicate their time and attention to more
> pressing concerns in your business, our software is available for 2 cents a
> transaction.

Do you happen to work for Stripe support?

I'm just asking because your response reminds me of how they addressed my
questions in email. It's very dismissive of my original questions, and then
tries to guide the conversation away from my question into some type of "hey,
good luck with whatever you do" response.

I'm not asking for an evaluation of whether or not it's a good use of
engineering time for me to implement this feature. I'm just asking how I can
do risk score assessment on my own without paying your extra transaction fees,
or be forced into doing a post-transaction refund (and then lose the
transaction fee on the refund).

You mentioned I'm free to do my own risk assessment, but I'm trying to say
that's not possible to do in such a way that doesn't involve me paying extra
money to Stripe since your API purposely goes out of its way to remove
critical information unless you pay extra for Radar for teams (in which case
using your API for this info wouldn't be necessary since your platform would
provide that functionality in your dashboard).

~~~
commoner
> Do you happen to work for Stripe support?

He does work for Stripe. There are at least 4 Stripe employees in this
discussion performing damage control: pc, patio11, nkohari, edwinwee, and
anyone who has not yet self-disclosed.

------
Trias11
With more competition coming into marketplace the costs of transactions
inevitably goes down.

Charging more for transactions (in either direction) has nothing to do with
"payments are costing more to process" lie.

This has everything to do with hook-and-charge business approach relying on
majority of customers swallowing the arbitrary higher costs because it's more
hassles to switch provider, especially for non-technical business owners.

~~~
brunoTbear
I think you don’t understand the card ecosystem particularly well.

My impression (ex Stripe with no inside knowledge) is that Visa has been
raising rates. Stripe are doing their best to avoid passing it on. This is one
place where it surely became egregious not to.

I’ve never seen a company as averse to squeezing users as I had when I was
there. The finance guy I worked with produced analysis for the team showing
ways to reduce pricing more often than ways to increase it.

Your skepticism is warranted against most businesses. From my experience as a
PM at Stripe, it is unwarranted in this case.

Disclosure: ex Stripe, own stock. No inside knowledge.

~~~
commoner
> Stripe are doing their best to avoid passing it on. This is one place where
> it surely became egregious not to.

According to the rest of the discussion on this page, Visa and other payment
networks refund the interchange fee to payment processors (including Stripe)
on refunded transactions.

There is no evidence that Stripe is any more charitable to their users than
other payment processors. Stripe offers a commodity service, and increased the
cost of using their service. Perhaps Stripe is "doing their best", but their
competitors (e.g. Square and Amazon Pay) are doing even better by refunding
the processing fee for refunded transactions.

~~~
quelltext
> According to the rest of the discussion on this page, Visa and other payment
> networks refund the interchange fee to payment processors (including Stripe)
> on refunded transactions.

So far said that the refund fees on the brand side specifically increased or
came into existence. I don't know if they did or not. I imagine though that
transaction fees rising (which people do mention in the discussion) has an
effect here. If you were able to make a given margin before while still
allowing refund fees to be returned. Now transaction fees increase. As a PSP
you can either choose to increase your processing fees or find other ways to
make even. If you can achieve that by not returning fees on refunds (and make
a bit more money along the way) that makes sense to me.

My main point is that rising fees in general can be a reason here even if the
card brands didn't specifically add a new cost to refunds per se.

------
ikeboy
Recently got hit with this with QuickBooks. They actually charged me a fee to
refund that was higher than the original fee charged. They think they deserve
3.5% on top of the initial 2.9% to send money back.

------
chrishynes
This is pretty standard for flat pricing nowadays, but hits certain types of
merchants really hard.

It's a double whammy when you have a cancellation and have to refund and then
lose 3% on top of that. Stripe should keep the fixed fee, sure, but keeping
interchange doesn't seem right.

Why doesn't Stripe offer the option to do simple interchange+ pricing to all
instead of restricting that option to 6 figure volume accounts with negotiated
agreements?

That would cleanly solve the issue and be fair on both sides.

------
PerfectElement
We are doing 200k+ in MRR and looking to move from Stripe because the cost is
starting to hurt, and this change feels unfair. Our use-case is pretty simple
(capture card and manage subscriptions) and we don't need all the features
they have built in the last 5 years or are planing to build.

We are looking into Spreedly. Does anyone have other suggestions of Stripe
alternatives that are not so expensive?

~~~
danpalmer
Have you negotiated with Stripe? Pretty much all of their pricing is
negotiable.

Particularly if most of your customers are in the EU where interchange fees
are capped at something like 0.3%, so their cost base is much lower.

------
elijahparker
There are multiple little things that make me feel less trusting of stripe and
that it’s shifting away to be more profit focused instead of customer
oriented. One change that was unannounced (to my knowledge — maybe I missed
something) was the payout schedule. It’s still two days technically, but at
some point last year they started delaying the payout in their end if it was a
weekend or holiday.

It used to be like this: income from Thursday, Friday and Saturday all arrived
Monday, so Monday was a big payout day and this was good since it was often a
higher expense day as well due to weekend charges being delayed to Monday.

Now, Thursday‘s sales arrive Monday (same), Friday’s Tuesday (a day later),
and Saturday’s arrive on Wednesday (two days later), and any holidays further
delay it.

This could be ok, but the unexpected change from what I had come to expect,
and noting that it seems to be intentional design change on their end make it
feel like they’re trying to delay the payout schedule while still claiming the
same rolling 2-day, and in the end not really putting the customer first.

~~~
pc
We're actually working on speeding up payouts, for free. They're currently
faster than they've ever been and will continue to get faster.

~~~
elijahparker
That sounds great! But they’re currently faster than they’ve ever been? I
don’t see how that reconciles with my experience I just described...

------
vfclists
They are doing a Paypal. How long have they been doing this?

Louis Rossmann won't be happy -
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1WPDVjXDj0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1WPDVjXDj0)

~~~
Meekro
I'm a long-time Stripe user who processes ~$40k per month, and I think you're
being too harsh. From a business owner's perspective, PayPal is the kind of
company that would shut down your account and steal the balance for 6 months
if their shitty algorithm detects anything "suspicious." Your attempts to
contact them can be ignored or given generic responses that tell you nothing.
PayPal just doesn't care, and it shows.

That's what "doing a PayPal" means to me.

But this fee increase? I'm actually grandfathered in so it doesn't apply to
me, but if it did, it would amount to a 0.6% price increase in my typical
monthly Stripe fees. So for example, if I paid $1000/mo in Stripe fees before
this change, it would be $1006/mo now.

~~~
ValentineC
> _From a business owner 's perspective, PayPal is the kind of company that
> would shut down your account and steal the balance for 6 months if their
> shitty algorithm detects anything "suspicious." Your attempts to contact
> them can be ignored or given generic responses that tell you nothing._

Heh, PayPal just this month asked me to provide _charity_ information for my
personal account, and subsequently limited my receiving/sending privileges.

Phone calls to them trying to sort this out have always ended up at some call
centre in the Philippines, where the agents can only tell their users that the
account limitation is "for their safety".

They've also limited the personal account of a friend of mine (who's
interestingly enough ex-PayPal) before, also asking for charity information.

~~~
slenk
What do you mean by charity information? What charities he likes to give to? I
have never heard that phrase before.

~~~
ValentineC
For my case, their Resolution Centre asked me to provide "DD Business
Information" — which I obviously won't have.

A quick search suggests that this incident isn't uncommon:

[1] Paypal Thinks I am a Charity Organisation: [https://www.paypal-
community.com/t5/Disputes-and-Limitations...](https://www.paypal-
community.com/t5/Disputes-and-Limitations/Paypal-Thinks-I-am-a-Charity-
Organisation/td-p/1672496)

[2] Provide charity info - DD Business Inormation: [https://www.paypal-
community.com/t5/Disputes-and-Limitations...](https://www.paypal-
community.com/t5/Disputes-and-Limitations/Provide-charity-info-DD-Business-
Inormation/td-p/1789263)

[3] What's DD Business Information: [https://www.paypal-
community.com/t5/Disputes-and-Limitations...](https://www.paypal-
community.com/t5/Disputes-and-Limitations/What-s-DD-Business-
Information/td-p/1893921)

------
frank086
My expectation has long been for Stripe to bring in more and higher fees. They
offer a lot of top shelf free tooling that either brings their models into
your code or moves the bookkeeping up to their system entirely, ex
subscriptions.

Smart companies have their own bookkeeping system in house and thus can
potentially negotiate better terms with Stripe, assuming they are big enough
Stripe cares to retain them. Plenty of other places are looking at massive
costs to move off Stripe and I am sure someone at Stripe is aware of that.

The first hit is always free.

~~~
droopyEyelids
You're right about everything, but I disagree with your characterization of
'the first hit is always free'.

The lock-in features you describe are Stripe doing development work for your
business.

With an addictive substance, the addiction gains control orthogonally to the
'benefit' it provides. When Stripe writes your recurring billing and
bookkeeping system, they're straight up doing your work for you. Thats the
desired effect– not a side-effect!

------
jv22222
Just clarifying. If I refund a $2,000 charge it costs me the seller approx.
$58?

~~~
danpalmer
Not an extra $58. By the time you refund you’ve already paid the fee, stripe
just don’t refund your fee to you.

------
ValentineC
This has been the case since early 2018.

Accounts created before that were grandfathered in for fee refunds, but I
don't have a grandfathered account, and therefore can't verify if that's still
the case.

~~~
adtac
I created my account before 2018, but my domain/product was registered with
Stripe in 2018. Which side do I fall in?

Alternatively, how do I check this myself?

~~~
edwinwee
Email support@stripe.com (feel free to CC edwin@stripe.com) and we can check.

~~~
adtac
Sent an email!

------
whynotnowha
Here is our response to this ruthless and disrespectful decision by Stripe:

Hello,

We have just read your price changes to the grandfathered accounts and wanted
to pass our discontent with Stripe's decision. Currently, we are weighing our
options to move our business to other partners; however, as a small business
that mainly operates in non-US currencies, the changes to your refund policies
AND the non-US bank policies will effectively kill our partnership with
Stripe.

We do not have tens of thousands of dollars per month worth of processing
capabilities; however, we are a growing company as can be seen from our all
time graphs on Stripe. We have used Stripe since the beginning and never
considered alternatives. Your support team have always been helpful and your
capabilities satisfied our needs. Until now.

The price hike to a grandfathered account is utterly unacceptable and
looks/smells like a cheap attempt to make more money for the company. Stripe
is also a rapidly growing company and grandfathered accounts could not have
been hurting its business model. "Grandfathering" has an implied meaning that
these people/companies/parties have been together since the beginning and a
one-sided breach of this understanding is deeply damaging and distasteful.

In any way, unless Stripe can take steps to show sincerity towards our
partnership from early on and rescind the changes to its fee policies, we will
move our business out of Stripe before March 15th, 2020.

Thanks for the ride and have a great day.

------
brianwawok
What is the least expensive payment gateway these days for a SaaS business? My
stripe costs keep going up, happy to write the code to switch... what’s the
lowest rate processor?

------
NightlyDev
I haven't actively used stripe more than half a year, and I've really enjoyed
it so far, except for some translation issues on stripe's checkout page. This
change makes me somewhat uncomfortable using stripe.

Nordic countries has really good consumer protection laws and users can ask to
cancel the purchase for any or no reason. Its also not allowed to charge the
customer the fee, so this can become a issue.

It also sucks that the pricing for Norway is 1 % higher than our neighbours.

------
poxrud
This is a disaster. Simply put, this change makes Stripe a nonviable option as
an e-commerce payment processor. The modern consumer expects easy, no
questions asked refunds. How many people buy a few shirts/shoes of different
sizes knowing that they will return the ones that do not fit? How can a
retailer provide that when there is now a 2.9% (in our case 3.5%) charge added
on every item refunded?

This change directly hurts smaller retailers/e-commerce sites who are not big
enough to negotiate smaller processing fees with Stripe.

I run a niche e-commerce site in Canada where the majority of my customers are
located in the US. This puts my processing rate at 3.5%. My products are
priced anywhere from $1k to $6k. So now with this change, I could pay up to
$210 for when a customer simply changes their mind. I guess I could enact a
strict NO REFUNDS policy but that will put me at a severe disadvantage vs the
bigger retailers.

As things stand I would only recommend Stripe for recurring subscription
billing.

------
icelancer
I honestly didn't understand why they did in the first place. Doesn't really
bother me.

------
kuon
A few companies do charge fees on the end user now. I did a refund on a plane
ticket within the 24h grace period (basically refunded no question asked) but
I had to pay the credit cards fee anyway. I don't do refund often, but it
might become more common.

------
m3kw9
The power of lock in. They know this from analytics.

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intopieces
Seems reasonable to me. The payment was successful, which is the service
Stripe provides. Is this out of step with the industry at large?

~~~
zaroth
It’s not reasonable because the cost which the fee is covering is _not_ the
cost to process the transaction.

It’s three things, in order of their share of the total cost;

1) Rewards programs

2) Fraud risk

3) Interest expense

The rewards are negated, because a refunded transaction earns no points. The
fraud risk is zero, because the merchant has returned the funds. This leaves
only a portion of the interest expense, assuming the transaction balance was
even paid into the merchant account at that point, but then the refund acts to
reduce the card balance so that might even cancel out too.

Basically it’s justifiable to hold into the flat fee (e.g. $0.20) but to hold
onto the 3% is an absolute scam.

~~~
intopieces
> It’s not reasonable because the cost which the fee is covering is not the
> cost to process the transaction.

Who says it has to be? Businesses have all kinds of costs not directly related
to the day to day transactions with customers.

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anonsivalley652
Makes me pine for FeeFighter's card processor comparator that GroupOn bought
and killed.

But in reality, even with their high charges, Stripe makes it easy to get
started, but startups can and should change vendors when the need arises. If
other processors with lower fees for the particular volume a startup is doing
and better APIs, it's worth considering them too.

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rush86999
I have one really annoying complaint with stripe connect. Its authentication
work flow using oauth is conflicting with aws amplify authentication for
social providers. Both of these are pretty much essential nowadays. I hope
someone picks up on this comment and considers finding a solution

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kundiis
Looks similar? [https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/20/20876570/paypal-refund-
fe...](https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/20/20876570/paypal-refund-fee-policy-
change-sellers-controversy)

------
robbyt
Stripe has the ability to negotiate with their upstream processors that we end
users do not. Instead of trying to reduce their costs by pressuring their
providers, they're passing along the fees to their customers.

~~~
ValentineC
Some of the other comments in this very post [1][2][3] suggest that Stripe
isn't being charged the full fee by other parts of the network.

If they're intent on working with the customer to keep prices down, they
should only charge a fixed fee for refunds (to pay for overheads), and not the
interchange fee.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22371571](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22371571)

[2]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22371746](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22371746)

[3]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22371626](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22371626)

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jijji
i dont really see the value in stripe compared to any other payment
processor... they still do all the dirty tricks that everyone else does, like
hold your money, cancel your account, hold your money.

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jklepatch
In an industry where costs have been amortized for a long time, fees should
normally decrease...

DeFi (Decentralized Finance) is coming for you guys.

It might take some time, but we’ll get there.

------
chmaynard
See [https://stripe.com/docs/refunds](https://stripe.com/docs/refunds)

------
stevedwell
Can we get a clarification? Are they keeping the 2.9% and the 30 cents or
what?

------
asdfq1234
Just a price increase. Time for some competition for these people.

------
hackin247
The struggle is real. Small fees add up for smaller startups and that used to
be their bread and butter--it was so much easier to get payments up and
running. We eventually switched to paypal and never looked back.

~~~
dawnerd
I sell a lot on eBay and thought the fees were going to hurt - but really it's
been a non issue. It sucks especially on a high ticket item but end of the day
it ends up on my taxes and I recoup some of it. Cost of business.

