

Billing with Stripe - dwynings
http://railscasts.com/episodes/288-billing-with-stripe

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aculver
My bare minimum recurring expense with Braintree is $130/mo. That's our
largest recurring expense. What's wonderful about Stripe is that there is no
"minimum" service charge. If you don't do a lot of transactions, you don't pay
a lot of fees. That makes it very low risk to spin up a service and give it a
little time to see if it works. When I've talked to people with day jobs about
their SaaS side-projects, it's common to hear people aiming for "an extra $500
a month." That's a respectable goal for a side-project, considering that sort
of money could trim most people's mortgages by a decade or more, but it makes
Braintree (developer friendly as they are) a huge expense. Thankfully for me
Braintree was one of the first payment gateways to promote the idea of data
portability, so getting my subscribers into Stripe from Braintree should not
be a huge hassle.

~~~
damoncali
Does this fact cause you any concern over stripe's decision to serve small
companies for whom 130 dollars is a significant amount over large customers
who will be turned off by their percentage fees? My main resistance to
switching to stripe is that I can't figure out how they are going to make any
money. I'd like the extra 130 dollars each month, too, but will it last?

~~~
diolpah
What exactly do you mean by "large customers"? We run several million dollars
worth of credit card transactions per year( through cybersource and
authorize.net right now ), and we pay at or near the wholesale interchange
rate.

Even so, our accounting department still can't fully untangle the mess of
foreign transfer and conversion fees, float-related costs, gateway fees, amex
vs visa discount rate differentials, pci compliance service fees, and all the
other horrible shit that Stripe eats for you, in order to give me a straight
answer as to whether or not we currently pay more or less than 0.30 + 2.9%.

This is not a hit on our accountants, cybersource, stripe, or our merchant
bank - just making the point that it's not so easy to state categorically that
Stripe's fees will turn off somewhat larger volume customers.

~~~
fastspring
Generally you end up paying 3.5-4% assuming you accept foreign credit card
transactions, Amex, corporate cards, rewards cards, etc. There's a
misconception that it's around 2%, but if you do these types of transactions
and look closely at your statements, 3.5-4% is the normal range, including a
few chargebacks.

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marcamillion
Testament to how easy and well-done Stripe's API is, that Ryan can make a 16
minute Railscast about it's integration.

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thibaut_barrere
I can't wait for them to come to Europe, really.

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hoopti
Does anyone know why I should not use stripe as compared to Braintree, etc.?
Is there a fundamental issue, that I have missed, or is most of the discussion
surrounding price and volume.... as it stands, it seems like a no-brainer to
use stripe for any new projects.

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LaunchAlready
It's very neat and simple. Would love to see some one do a python or a php
version.

~~~
PostOnce
I tested out Stripe last weekend. It's really, really simple. You can be up
and running and billing shit inside of an hour, HTML and all, depending on how
quick you are. The tutorial is dead simple and so are the docs.

You should go check it out, if you're interested. You'll see that there's
really no need to wait for a video.

(I set stripe up in both PHP and Python, did the HTML and CSS and everything
in a couple of hours. Was easy. I like things to be easy. -- Now I just need
something to charge for... :P)

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tren
Very easy to integrate, so far we've had no problems at all. I've been
recommending stripe to any startup looking for a payment solution.

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d3x
I just integrated stripe on <http://i.crowdfunded.it> last week. Super awesome
and easy to use.

~~~
ahemphill
"We're sorry, but something went wrong.

We've been notified about this issue and we'll take a look at it shortly."

~~~
pc
Sorry about that -- momentary bug during a deploy of the dashboard.

~~~
d3x
HAHA man.. was that you guys or me? Either way it all seems to be working now.
BTW: Great job on Stripe.

~~~
pc
Cheers. Would love to hear if you notice anything we should improve; I'm
patrick@stripe.com.

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fastspring
Missing various elements that most SaaS companies need or will need; API-based
vs. UI with complete functionality; lots of development work still necessary
to have the type of e-commerce subscription management infrastructure that a
serious company needs. Cant work with non-US clients. A comparison between
SaaSy.com and other services which illustrates some of the missing global
subscription e-commerce functionality: <http://bit.ly/nSKT7J>

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dustineichler
I love Railscasts, but this seems a little premature even by Rbates standards
or popularity. Generally, Railscasts revolve around industry standards. I'm
not saying Stripe won't be, it probably will... but man, this is some front
running.

