
Stripe Billing - craigkerstiens
https://stripe.com/blog/billing
======
pc
Stripe cofounder here.

For anyone wondering about pricing, here's our approach.

\- For new Stripe customers, this is free up to the first (lifetime) $1M of
payments.

\- 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.

\- What we've seen over Stripe's history is that customers handling _large_
amounts of revenue have been forced to pay substantial amounts for expensive
third-party systems. So, we've decided to build something that we think will
be better and cheaper -- and that will, over time, _increase_ the net revenue
of businesses built on Stripe.

I'm sorry about any confusion in our communication around this!

~~~
Improvotter
Any information on support for Europe? And if support for Europe were to be in
the pipeline, would it be for the whole of Europe or only specific countries?
We'd love to use Stripe for billing as well, but because Stripe is an American
company, we feel like as Europeans we're constantly an afterthought and would
therefore prefer a European provider. What's your opinion on this?

Btw, I was at the Stripe offices 2 years ago and it was an amazing experience.
I really like what Stripe has done over the years. Keep it going and thanks!

~~~
tarstarr
The core Stripe Billing features actually work in the EU: flexible billing,
our recovery tools, and invoicing. You can use subscriptions with all of the
payment methods on Stripe, including SEPA DD, ideal, and more. But as Patrick
mentioned, there's a lot we can do to make the experience great for European
companies and that's what we're focusing on right now. We're thinking about
ways to localize the invoices, add EU specific payment methods to invoices,
improve tax support, make default invoice templates EU compliant with VAT ID,
and more. If you'd like to try early betas, let me know!

~~~
jbrooksuk
We're about to re-evaluate our billing system for StyleCI and as we're based
in the EU, we'd love to give this a go. My email is james [at] alt-three.com

------
brianwawok
I see a new 0.4% to 0.7% fee, that is enough to make me start shopping
competitors on Monday. The stripe processing fee is already high. It seems
that all I get is some hosted invoice stuff.. which I could build in a weekend
and not have to pay a fee on?

Thinking about it, a medium sized SaaS company billing 15 million a year.
14,000,000 *.004 = 56k a year? For the same product they already had?

Obviously it is cool if you want metering and the advanced features, but I
wonder if there is a way to opt out and use the old simple stripe without the
new fee - or if this is to push those users into braintree / etc?

~~~
softwarefounder
"build in a weekend"

~~~
dboreham
I'm working in my spare time on a series of articles about the curious
psychology of the software development world. This one is near the top of my
list!

~~~
positivejam
Got an email signup for that?

------
trotzke
CEO of Cheddar here.

I think this is a big step in the right direction for Stripe (unclear pricing
aside). We’ve been thinking about usage based billing for a long time now. We
built a bunch of apps using Stripe and found there was a lot missing if you
wanted to track activity and bill for it, as well as with reporting and
revenue optimization. Having not dug into the platform too far, this
definitely looks like it could fill some gaps.

I will say I’m not a fan of taking a percentage for billing on top of taking a
percentage on payments, though. There is risk involved for payments
(chargebacks, fraud, etc), but billing is transactional. A percent there feels
like a money grab to me.

The only other problem I see with this is that it all seems a bit convoluted.
I get that it has to be tacked on to their existing platform. But we’ve found
that the secret to an awesome usage based billing system was to track activity
in real time, then apply automated billing to that tracked activity. It’s a
different approach and we’re working on polishing that up and bringing it to
market over the next few months.

Would love to hear more about how folks are thinking about consumption and
usage based billing and pricing. I think it’s the next big wave in Internet
monetization, so it’s important to get right.

~~~
tarstarr
Appreciate the kind words! To the point on pricing: believe in revenue-based
business models because it's the clearest way to align our incentives with
those of our customers. We want to be forced to find ways to generate more
revenue, via smart recovery, better invoice payment methods, more payment
method support, etc. Our fees are actually significantly less expensive than
those of our competitors, and we only make money when our users make money
here (instead of charging a flat fee, which can penalize companies that are
bootstrapping.)

Excited to check out Cheddar when it launches!

------
shekyboy
Billing (recurring or one time) is a transactional activity and should be
monetized as such. There should be a per invoice or per customer type of rate.
This whole % of revenue seems crazy to me. There is no inherent risk involved
like payment processing. You can get paid no matter what in a tx model...

Based on what I see in the market with other billing/subscription providers,
they all do the same thing (rev share). Since these businesses are not the
payment gateway they try to do a revenue grab with the % share.

I hoped Stripe would be able to disrupt this by already being positioned as a
payment gateway and offer this on top in a transactional model....

Hope they rethink this strategy. And no first $1MM isnt going to cut it. Any
serious business will see this as a growth challenge. Backend billing flows
are challenging to build and once you are committed to this you are locked in
for quite sometime from the roadmap perspective.

~~~
tarstarr
Thanks for the feedback. To your risk point -- there _is_ often risk involved,
as businesses that have worked with large ACH payments know.

More broadly, we believe in revenue-based business models because it's the
clearest way to align our incentives with those of our customers. We want to
be forced to find ways to generate more revenue, via smart recovery, better
invoice payment methods, more payment method support, etc.

~~~
shekyboy
Maybe you can provide clarity on ACH risk. Seems like businesses have most of
the risk there.. and not the billing system (keeping the gateway out of this).

Secondly, transaction/user based models are also aligned with customer
incentives. With growth, customers will execute more transactions on the
system.

Frankly, Smart recovery is an area where I can see you can ask for % share.
Other features like payment methods etc sound transactional again.

Finally, Stripe has a payment gateway business already. This will ensure
growth on that side of the business. Optically this seems like a revenue grab.
You have the opportunity to disrupt the ecosystem.

Thanks for responding to my comment. Appreciate the interaction.

~~~
loceng
Lowering revenues doesn't really align with IPO'ing, though. The issue is the
VC model that will keep us trapped in this, until there are less greedy given
the resources to disrupt these systems. Capitalism works well, it shouldn't
necessarily have a stake in foundational systems - which is why we need
governance to manage.

------
acabal
Yikes, I've been using Stripe subscriptions happily for a few years and now
I'm upset to see they're going to be charging a fee. It's unclear if the fee
starts at $1MM total revenue or $1MM/year. $1MM/total would hurt a lot of the
small lifestyle businesses for no gain in service--we already had
subscriptions built in to the cost and we don't need invoicing or any of the
other new-fangled stuff :(

Paypal has free recurring billing. Sure it's a pain to set up but once you've
built it in it works pretty damn well with little to no maintenance. If you do
even a smallish amount of business through them you can set up daily sweeps
into your bank account to stave off the famous Paypal "random freezing of
funds" nonsense.

~~~
anthony_franco
Did they email the announcement to you? If you already used Stripe
subscriptions in the past, you'll be grandfathered in for free. This is the
relevant line:

"Since you used Stripe Subscriptions in the past year, the Stripe Billing
Starter plan is included in your current pricing."

~~~
acabal
Yeah, but the Starter Plan starts charging an additional fee after $1MM
(yearly? total?) revenue. So it's not grandfathering in at all, we just get
shunted to the temporarily-free plan that everyone else has to start on.

Edit: Since my posting this Stripe has clarified that existing customers get
the Starter package at no further cost, we we _are_ grandfathered in.

~~~
tarstarr
(PM from Stripe) If you're an existing user of Stripe Subscriptions, you get
Stripe Billing features included in your current price. (To be clear, there's
no extra fees for existing users.)

~~~
rectang
No extra fees for the first million, or no extra fees period?

~~~
pc
Period!

~~~
foobarbazetc
Dude.. you need to communicate this better to existing customers and
preferably not on HN.

------
dboreham
This thread highlights the following lesson:

When communicating important and potentially difficult to understand
information: have some non-insiders read the text and ask them what they think
it means.

------
tnorthcutt
_Free for the first $1 million of recurring charges.

After that, 0.4% on recurring charges_

Does this mean recurring charges don't carry Stripe's standard 2.9% + $0.30
charge? Or is the free at first/then 0.4% _on top of_ the 2.9% + $0.30 charge?

~~~
gargarplex
That's better than Recurly. They take 1% plus $99/month or $299/month if you
want accounting software integration. And there's no free tier.

I'm game.

~~~
brianwawok
Stripe already did recurring billing without a 1% though

~~~
gargarplex
Yeah, but now Stripe is adding in features like email invoices, presumably the
ability to for customers to update payment info, etc. I don't know how much
exactly has been added incrementally and how much is available in this
release, but I'm optimistic that soon I will be able to phase Recurly out of
our stack...If someone from Stripe wants to build a Recurly -> Stripe
migration toolset, I'd love that!

~~~
digitalbase
As we speak, we are writing code to move from stripe to recurly/adyen.

The analytics/easy plan mgmt and email invoicing in recurly is something
stripe doesn't have.

Would you advise against that ?

~~~
gargarplex
No, I would not advise against that. There is a reason I pay the (annoying) 1%
+ $99/$299 fee to Recurly.

I was hoping that this signaled that Stripe was beginning to integrate that
valuable featureset into the Stripe platform.

------
citizens
Looks buggy to me. I created a test invoice and specified that it should be
payable at a later date and only via ACH.

I checked the preview link and the only option to pay was by credit card. I
sent the invoice anyway and the test user's credit card was immediately
charged.

~~~
kurrik
(Engineering Manager at Stripe Billing) Ah - sorry about that, a last minute
fix caused a bug. This is now fixed in production. Thank you so much for
reporting!

~~~
citizens
Thanks for the update. Am I understanding the ACH payment flow correctly:

1) Send a user an invoice

2) The user copies the auto-generated bank details and manually initiates a
transfer from their bank?

~~~
kurrik
That's correct - if you want to learn more specifics, we wrote a guide which
is available at
[https://stripe.com/docs/billing/invoices/reconciliation](https://stripe.com/docs/billing/invoices/reconciliation)

~~~
citizens
Thank you for the link.

------
mstefff
How is this any different than the subscriptions they previously offered? And
what do services like Recurly do that Stripe subscriptions don't? And when is
Stripe going to automatically handle sales tax?

~~~
mstefff
I still have not found a single subscription solution that seamlessly handles
adding sales tax and properly reporting it. Stripe does not. Recurly does not.
TaxJar does not work with subscriptions. Avalara does not work with
subscriptions...

What are people doing?

~~~
Silhouette
_What are people doing?_

With my UK small business hat on: Sometimes, it is just easier and cheaper to
build it yourself than to rely on an outsourced service that doesn't do
exactly what you need.

We have a database table of VAT rates per country with starting dates when
they come into effect. All customer accounts are tied to a specific country,
so all payments or subscriptions for an account can look up the current rate
from the database and apply tax as necessary.

All successful payments (one-off or recurring) are recorded in our DB,
triggered by webhooks from the various payment services we use. The DB records
include all the tax information that applied at the time of the payment,
including things like country and proof-of-location as required under EU VAT
rules, and also including generating a sequential ID for each payment to
comply with the rules there. This is also the point at which we do any
necessary currency conversion calculations, and we then generate and send
customers an email automatically with all the same details.

A little scripting looks up the necessary sales and tax figures from the
database for the various VAT returns we are required to file for UK and for
other EU customers.

The significant limitations are mostly around keeping that VAT rates table up-
to-date (I know of no acceptable automated method for doing this, so we just
have to review the information manually at frequent intervals) and around
handling money repaid (refunds, or if we do ever get a chargeback or similar).
As far as I'm aware, none of the automated services is even close to getting
these things right either, so we're still no worse off having to do a few
things by hand in these relatively rare situations.

Setting that lot up was a decent chunk of work, particularly all the hassle
around EU VAT, which we had to retrofit in at least one case I can recall.
However, it's certainly achievable for an average developer within a few days.

~~~
flurdy
Smells like a service someone should make and sell. VAAS - VAT-as-a-service

~~~
Silhouette
That's what businesses like Avalara are trying to do, but the EU VAT rules are
such a mess that even the specialist businesses trying to do it still haven't
nailed it several years later.

------
drinchev
I think most difficult problem is still proper accounting. I'm with a client
right now, based in Europe and we had >really good time< integrating Recurly
with Stripe and use it as their payment provider, but we got stuck when we
figured out that there was a need to hire an accountant to handle the
cancelations for us.

Having a service like Cleverbridge [1] / Avangate [2], where they end-up
having someone to manage this for them for a bigger % of the sale, was the
better deal.

Not sure how the startup-scene will solve this, but it's actually still really
hard to do this properly.

My best solution would be to have Stripe doing whole-sale solution, where they
invoice customers and you simply invoice them each month.

It just takes too much efforts to do this >legally< in Europe if you are on
your own.

1 :
[https://www.cleverbridge.com/corporate/](https://www.cleverbridge.com/corporate/)

2 : [http://www.avangate.com](http://www.avangate.com)

~~~
tarstarr
(Stripe PM here) We're actually working on exactly this problem right now. :)
More to come in the next couple months, if you're interested in beta testing
let me know! (tara@stripe.com)

------
TheSoftwareGuy
>We're also introducing a new feature: smart retry logic. It’s powered by the
same machine learning infrastructure behind Stripe Radar. Our algorithms train
on data across the billions of payments in the Stripe network to predict the
right way to retry failed payments.

As someone who is completely oblivious to how payments work behind the scenes
(for the most part) could someone please explain how this became necessary?

~~~
tschwimmer
I used to work on billing and a bit of payments stuff for a large SaaS
company, so I have some experience with this.

When you charge a credit or debit card, send a bunch of messages that end up
going to an organization called a payment processor. Payment processors do
stuff like make sure your account has enough money/remaining credit and also
have fraud checks and other security features. Sometimes, the payment
processor rejects a payment because of insufficient funds, suspected fraud,
their system being down or a malformed request. Unfortunately, a lot of this
stuff is pretty archaic and there are a few layers between your servers and
the processor, so it's very hard to debug. On your end, you could simply retry
payments if they get rejected, but that might lead to a set of ping pong
failures that might even trip fraud alerts to the customer. You can also have
retry logic that uses an exponential backoff, just like any other request.
That's a reasonable strategy, but you can probably do better.If you're a big
company, involuntary credit card churn is actually a pretty sizeable source of
churn for you. 99% transaction completion rate sounds pretty good until you
realize it means a guaranteed 1% churn rate (assuming people don't sign up
again), which is not insignificant. You really want to get this as low as
possible.

Enter Stripe: Stripe has handled a very very large number of payments, and
they probably have really comprehensive data about failure rates. This allows
them to identify patterns and come up with some rules around retries. A simple
(fully hypothetical) example is: If a transaction is declined for insufficient
funds, retry again on the 15th and the last day of the month (usually when
people get paid). These rules can get really complicated. We had some rules
that were as complex as "If the cardholder is in Spain, and the card is Amex,
retry in three days before 5pm if it's a weekday, otherwise wait until
Tuesday."

Overall, this is a pretty nice feature for large customers with high
transaction volumes. We did the data analysis/rule generation ourselves and
hand rolled the retry logic in our system, but offering it as a built-in
service is a convenient (albiet probably expensive) perk.

~~~
izzygomez
Woah, TIL. Thanks for the comprehensive response, tschwimmer.

------
encoderer
People are focusing a lot on invoicing but the real power here is that you can
create multi-part and tiered billing schemes now. Imagine something like "$100
a month and $10 per user" \-- that was not possible using Stripe subscriptions
without your customer getting two invoices. Honestly, it was laughably bad.

~~~
_kyran
It was possible, using one off charges with a webhook.

------
ninjalupo
If anyone from Stripe is here, question: We currently use Chargebee for all
our subscription and Stripe to actually process the payments. With Chargebee
V3 [1] we've just dropped in their js and then we get an overlay/pop-up for
both subscription and then subscription management, like editing subscription,
invoicing etc. Is this a replacement for Chargebee on the integration and
coding side that we get without work? [2] We'd like to reduce the number of
services we integrate with and if Stripe Billing provides this, then we would
like to directly use it.

[1]
[https://www.chargebee.com/docs/checkout-v3.html](https://www.chargebee.com/docs/checkout-v3.html)
[2]
[https://www.chargebee.com/docs/assets/screenshots/images/cha...](https://www.chargebee.com/docs/assets/screenshots/images/chargebee-
checkout-portal-v3/why-checkout.png)

~~~
StefanPretty
As far as I can tell this is just dashboard and api only. But I guess they're
moving towards that. Ironic as the connect partners that helped them grow are
now having their toes be stepped on. Not a nice way to play. Burn the
community who helped you get there in the first place.

Turn and burn it seems

~~~
philfreo
You can't expect that Stripe doesn't expand their feature set. Seeing that
there are hundreds of services built around stripe ([https://stripe.com/works-
with/types/stripe-extensions](https://stripe.com/works-with/types/stripe-
extensions)) it's really expected that some of them will be cannibalized
eventually.

Subscription billing has been in Stripe for many years... it's just been very
weak until now. Totally makes sense for them to work on this and if you built
a subscription billing company on top of Stripe you should have known it was
only a matter of time before theirs got better.

~~~
StefanPretty
They’re also shooting themselves in the foot. They’re without a doubt less
competitively positioned from a developer POV now. In my opinion. Even from a
startup who isn’t technical. More percentages just get scary when you have
people like Braintree keeping it simple...

Also Stripe still rely on their partners to drive business to them at the end
of the day. No denying that it’s a big part of their funnel. A startup looking
at their offering cold now will just be confused as well. What even is it?
Some people think it’s a checkout when it’s not. It’s just s slightly more
advanced subscription api with a price tag.

Also by cannibalising their partners will dry up their eco system. Chances are
the partners do a better job as they’re focused on it. Can’t be perfect at
everything.

I’ll see what they have to say on the call I have with them tomorrow.

~~~
StefanPretty
To be clear there is no doubt it’s a sensible direction and a great product
but charging for it is not IMO. Superior product will drive more business to
them regardless. The market of payment gateways is competitive already.

But congrats and good job Stripe. Just reconsider the pricing.

------
mythz
Just received an Email saying this "replaces Stripe Subscriptions", what does
that mean exactly? e.g. what happens with our existing Customers and their
active subscriptions?

IMO this is a poor communication and confusing announcement with lots of
open/unanswered questions for existing Customers, which is unlike what I've
come to expect from Stripe.

~~~
tarstarr
(PM for Stripe Billing here!) If you’re an existing user of Stripe
Subscriptions, you can continue as you were! Your existing integration will
still work as before and your customers won’t be impacted.

That said, you’ll also get access to all of the new tools as well -- would
love for you to try them (and see if it improves your experience!) If you go
to the Dashboard, we walk you through what changed in detail -- let me know if
that helps, or feel free to send me an email at any point: tara@stripe.com

~~~
amelius
> If you’re an existing user of Stripe Subscriptions, you can continue as you
> were!

But what if I'm an existing user, and about to start a new business? Honestly,
this sucks.

~~~
tarstarr
Shoot me an email with the details? I'll see what we can do!

------
nhangen
Current Stripe customer that is now very confused.

~~~
raiyu
It's basically an automated recurring billing service that you can use whether
you run a static monthly subscription service ($9/mo per user), or if you are
using a metered approach, such as $0.02 cents per SMS, and then do that on a
recurring basis.

So if you think about the 3 or so standard business models for SaaS, per user,
per usage, or per tier (standard, pro, advanced) - this provides for all of
that in an automated fashion.

~~~
nhangen
Stripe is supposed to be a back-end API, not a front-end API. I don't want
them taking over my payflows and confusing users.

~~~
scrollaway
So don't use it? _shrugs_

------
brianbreslin
What companies does this hurt? Recurly? Zuora (which recently had an IPO)?
Chargify? The truly interesting feature to me is the credit card recapture
part which updates automatically cards that are re-issued.

~~~
TimothyBJacobs
Hasn't Stripe supported updating card expirations for a while now?

~~~
scrollaway
It does. [https://stripe.com/blog/smarter-saved-
cards](https://stripe.com/blog/smarter-saved-cards)

------
pg_bot
This is extremely disappointing. For my business this means an additional
0.4%-0.7% fee added onto a service I currently use for free justified by
features that I cannot use for compliance purposes. This new invoicing process
does not qualify as an exempt financial service for a covered entity. (see
subsection 1179 of HIPAA)

So unless they are now willing to sign a business associates agreement I just
got a price hike for a feature that would cause fines so large they would
close my business. This is going to be a PR nightmare for stripe. They have
destroyed all of their goodwill, and now I will have to start considering
competitors. If anyone from Stripe is here in the comments I would love to
chat (email is in profile)

~~~
tarstarr
(PM from Stripe) If you're an existing user, there's no extra fees, even if
you are past the $1M lifetime threshold. For existing Stripe Subscriptions
users, Stripe Billing is included in your current price. (You should have
received an email about this earlier today, but you can always ping me
(tara@stripe.com))

~~~
pg_bot
Tara as a forewarning gmail marked your message as spam in my inbox. I would
expect a lot of people to have the same experience. Second the messaging is
not clear if you are indeed offering a grandfather clause for existing
customers you need to state that clearly. Using the term "included" is
ambiguous and I interpreted it in the same manner as a tip being included on a
check. (meaning we've already added it, not that we didn't charge you)

~~~
tarstarr
Appreciate the heads up, we definitely should have improved the email wording
here. In case the email went to spam, there's also two notifications on this
in the Dashboard -- check in your notifications section.

------
disillusioned
So... "Subscriptions" is now 3.3% + 30c for new clients, for a bunch of
features that used to be 2.9% + 30c, along with different billing models,
"smart recovery," and automatic card updater (which I swear was already a
feature they'd implemented.)

This feels like a very backdoor way to raise their rates for their
subscription service because they felt like they were undercharging and they
need more margin, and masking it with a couple of features that they're
claiming can help make it worth it. (And sure, first $1M free, but still.)

I kind of wish there was a "standard" tier that kept it at the normal rate and
maintained parity with the features we had yesterday for 2.9%...

------
StefanPretty
As a connect platform partner this is a bit of a blow as this impacts our
customer acquisition funnel, we drive customers to Stripe and then they use
us.

I have been talking with Tara who has been very helpful on this matter but
wanted to pitch in here.

I think from a connect platform partner stand point it comes across as a bit
inconsiderate almost.

I have already seen some people immediately put off considering using Stripe
now due to the additional fees and complexity. It just doesn't seem to sit
well.

The Subscriptions API was the main reason for Stripe's success and now it's
being charged for, why not charge for the dashboard usage and leave the api
users alone?

------
aeharding
First $1 million for the lifetime of the account I assume, not per year?

Seems odd that they announce a fee increase without any notice to existing
customers.

Also I found their wording very confusing - I had a few seconds that I was
very worried I'd have to migrate something or other. Poor communication
wording on Stripe's part. C'mon, guys.

------
aidos
Having used Chargebee for a long time I would say that this problem space is
much larger than it first appears. There are a lot of boxes to tick before a
solution like this does all the stuff you’ll need it to (but have no idea
about).

~~~
cmer
I'm in the midst of integrating Chargebee. Do you feel like this new offering
is a good replacement for Chargebee? I don't know what I don't know yet.

~~~
aidos
Nothing is a good replacement for Chargebee - stay the course there!

Don't get me wrong. I love Stripe, and we use it for handling all the
payments. Over time I'm sure this billing offering will grow in functionality
but it's unlikely to even get close to feature parity with Chargebee.

Many days from now you're going to have this internal monologue while in
Chargebee; _" Noooo, I have to do this really weird thing with promotional
credits and coupons and pro-rating and adjusting subscriptions all at the same
time and there's no way... oh, wait, that all works. And it showed me
everything that was going to happen on screen before hand so I could double
check. Just. Amazing."_

------
lossolo
Can anyone explain me why Stripe is so hyped on HN ? It's the most expensive
card processing service I know. I am using one where I pay 1.9% for all my
clients and another for EU clients where I pay only 1.7%.

I don't see anything in their offer that is worth paying additional 1.2% of my
business to card payment processor.

~~~
cristinacordova
(Stripe here) Stripe's pricing varies depending on the country you're doing
business from. If useful, you can see our pricing for businesses in the UK
here, which starts at 1.4% + 20p for European cards:
[https://stripe.com/gb/pricing](https://stripe.com/gb/pricing)

~~~
lossolo
I am not from UK but I live in EU. I can't use Stripe at all:

"Once Stripe is supported in your country, you’ll be able to accept payments
from customers anywhere in the world."

~~~
cristinacordova
We operate in 25 countries today and our pricing varies by country. We're not
everywhere yet, but we're working on it:
[https://stripe.com/global](https://stripe.com/global)

------
simonw
OK, this is brilliant:

"Behind the scenes, Stripe now generates a unique virtual bank account number
for each of your customers, which keeps your company’s banking details
private. Any payments received appear in your Stripe balance and invoices are
automatically reconciled and marked as closed."

------
PerfectElement
I have 1000+ active customer subscriptions on Stripe. Does it mean that my
fees have just increased 0.4%?

------
robbiemitchell
Everyone here is complaining about price, so let me offer a counterpoint.

My understanding is that 2.9% + 30 cents is barely above what you would expect
the credit card networks themselves to be charging Stripe. The margins are
razor thin. If you have beef with this percentage of your revenue being taken,
it's with the credit cards.

Adding a .4% fee on top is likely cheaper than using a separate service on
top, like Chargify/Recurly/Chargebee. (Sure, if you had already built your own
stuff on top of Stripe, you don't see this tradeoff as real. But all of those
are legitimate businesses, suggesting there's a huge market out there of
people who don't prioritize eng time like you.)

.4% isn't nothing, but put it in context of a functioning SaaS business with
product priorities, especially when you think about expensive it is to hire
software engineering talent. It's going to be a fraction of a fully loaded
engineer's time that is probably best dedicated to other parts of the
business. (Fully loaded = take a salary, add 30% for taxes and benefits, plus
ammortized recruiting fees.) A one-time or occasional integration project
frees up engineering to focus on other stuff and enables other teams to work
on their own.

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joshpadnick
Somewhat off-topic question, but how do others handle the need to create an
invoice that corresponds to a Stripe charge? We've been using Stripe
Subscriptions (I guess, now Stripe Billing) to auto-charge customers, and we
separately define recurring invoices in QuickBooks Online. It's a clumsy
process, but I'm assuming all Stripes Billing users have to solve it. Is there
a better way to handle?

~~~
stevoski
We use Quaderno to generate invoices for our Stripe charges. Quaderno
integrates well with Stripe.

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tjholowaychuk
This is awesome, congrats! I'd love to be able to send invoice emails, and/or
retrieve links for invoice PDFs and list those in your application for
download (or re-sending of email). Seems a bit bizarre as the infrastructure
for emails, and generation of the PDFs are clearly in place, just missing the
bits to tie those two together.

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inertial
Awesome job on making it easy to add usage based plans. I've found Stripe's
customer service to be a notch above the rest.

Request to folks at Stripe ( @pc / @tarstarr ) : Please do something to
protect small business owners against fraudulent payments (i.e. with stolen
cards). Even if they follow all recommended practices by Stripe, it's very
likely that there are a handful of stolen cards that will fly under the radar
and hit them negatively.

I'd say if the merchant is not at fault due to a stolen card being used on
their site, they should not get penalized for it. The chargeback fee is one
thing, the worse part is the dispute rate going up. This threatens the
existence of any business if their account is suspended by Stripe.

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joking
I understand how handy are solutions like stripe, but at least in Europe you
can have a payment gateway from your bank just like they can give you a
handheld device, and the rates are way cheaper, I just looked one which is
0.50%, six time less than stripe.

~~~
gamzer
Can you name some payment gateways from banks? I would like to read up on
this.

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tschellenbach
I'm so excited about this. We were looking into Recurly, but the migration
from Stripe to them seemed like a huge hassle. Not sure yet, but it looks like
this will allow us to unify all billing in 1 place, without a large dev or
monthly cost. #awesome

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flibble
If I may take advantage of the numerous highly knowledgeable people in the
industry here — has anyone recommendations for accepting payments from the
UAE?

We use Stripe to receive card payments there in AED and then need to pay this
money out again in AED. As Stripe don’t settle in AED the funds get converted
to USD and then we have to convert them to AED again to pay out.

Stripe charge 2% conversion fee over market rates to convert the funds. What’s
most annoying is AED is pegged to USD and there’s no conversion risk, yet
Stripe charge the conversion fee anyway. So we pay 2.9% or 3.4% (can’t
remember which it is off the top of my head) international card fee, 2% Fx to
USD and another few % back to AED :-€

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universenz
Well, this is all a bit cheeky. Backed Stripe for so long now, kinda lost
touch with the options. What are some other decent recurring payment
processors that support Asia Pacific, specifically Australia/New Zealand?

~~~
_kyran
Pin Payments for a local solution or Braintree?

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usaphp
A really cool touch is that those animated examples of pricing and other
elements are actually animated html elements, not GIFs or video files. Again
really slick touch from designers at Stripe.

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EatonZ
Looks like a nice improvement. There's some very bizzare design decisions with
Subscriptions, so hopefully this will start making things more flexible.

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rodh257
I'd love something like this that handled in-app purchased subscriptions.
There's a bunch of annoying parts of dealing with the app store SDK's &
verifying transactions, handling refunds etc. We have a combination of online
credit card purchases and in-app ones, it seems like there's an opening for
some tool to handle the in-app part as well.

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chromaton
I've been waiting for the invoicing piece for a long time. We currently use
PayPal invoices (and will probably continue to do so), but for those customers
who can't use PayPal, this is fantastic!

We've been using Plasso's payment form service, but they just changed how that
works, so this came along at exactly the right time.

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CoachRufus87
Billing systems are hard. Building a system to serve as the billing system for
N clients? Wow. Kudos to all involved.

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wakeless
How does this work in the case where the majority of your customers currently
pay by direct-debit/cheque? This is certainly the case for us, but we have
long been looking for a affordable solution to have them managed with some
sort of managed subscription engine

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Remnant44
Does this support international wire transfers as an invoice payment method?

If so, that's a killer feature for us, as US-based customers have other
options including simply mailing a check; it is our international customers
exclusively who are interested in wire transfer...

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klinskyc
How does Stripe auto-recovery compare to a service like Stunning? Does it make
it redundant?

~~~
tarstarr
(PM of Billing from Stripe here) Tools like Stunning, and the many other
extensions that work with Stripe, are very complementary to Stripe Billing. As
you’d expect from Stripe, we’ve taken an API-first approach, so that our
partners can actually take advantage of our recovery tools when building their
solutions. We expect that particular businesses will want to use both!

~~~
digitalbase
@tarstarr can you email invoices?

Also do you have multi currency subscriptions? Or do i need to create a
pro_monthly_euro, expert_yearly_dollar subscription ?

~~~
tarstarr
Hey! Yes you can email invoices to your users (finally!) We heard that feature
request so many times. :)

Re: multicurrency subs -- we thought about this quite a bit. At the moment
you'd need to create a plan per currency, with our reasoning being that you'd
want to control the FX rates on your own (and setting a price internationally
is a very intentional decision.) That said, how can we make this easier? This
launch is a start of our investment in this space, really interested in
feature requests.

~~~
throwawayf9axI
Would be great if the "Pay in Full" button on the invoices used the same color
that is set under Business Settings > Customer Emails > Customize Design.

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nodesocket
Under invoices there are two new documents "Invoice PDF" and "Receipt PDF"
which are different from the standard e-mail receipts. Are these documents
emailed to the customer automatically? Is there a way to control this?

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hartator
Not sure how I feel about it. One of my existing plan got duplicated for some
reason.

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SuperGoodJared
This seems like an excellent move for Stripe. Lowering the barrier to entry
for anyone trying to get into the SaaS (or really Anything-aaS) field by
making recurring billing easier strikes me a great move for their bottom line.

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intrasight
I see interest here in the new invoicing feature. My question is, if your
accounting system can send electronic invoices (Quickbooks does), why do you
need Stripe? Especially if it's more expensive?

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TheForumTroll
Woaah there! 2.9% + $0.30?! I just changed my provider because their 1.45% (+
$0!) was way too expensive compared to the competition. Do Stripe provide a
bag of gold at every Christmas?!

~~~
epa
Where were you getting 1.45% fixed, and where did you get a cheaper rate (for
USD transactions).

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thedangler
Sweet another service I can't use because I'm Canadian, but wont get access to
their Atlas program because I don't qualify. I'll have to take another
approach.

~~~
pokoleo
(I work at Stripe and am also Canadian!) It looks like you might have applied
for Stripe Atlas when we were in a small private beta and we’ve greatly
expanded the businesses we can support. Please feel free to apply to Atlas
again, or you can email me us at atlas@stripe.com.

~~~
thedangler
Thank you, I sent an email with some questions.

Thanks

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fooey
I wish this had existed a year ago when we shifted from primarily doing
everything through Stripe to Chargify for metered billing, invoicing and
dunning.

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whitepoplar
Will Stripe include free Billing for companies that have negotiated a volume
discount?

~~~
tarstarr
Yes, if you're an existing user, no matter your current rate, you'll get
Billing for free at your current price.

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laurentb
can anyone comment on support for purchase orders which a lot of companies use
to recognise or initiate a purchase? it seems to still be the only thing that
needs to be manual in that process....

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enraged_camel
Still no way to cleanly pause/unpause subscriptions? Why not?

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zwendkos
Skeptical a bit about "usage-based" billing and interested to hear others'
thoughts. Isn't a major profit-driver for many subscription-based businesses
the breakage?

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sakabaro
That’s really awesome. Chargebee is spammy in my experience. Bad kind of spam.
Glad Stripe is replacing them.

~~~
wane_linning
care explaining how?

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artur_makly
how does this compare to ChargeBee?

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fiatjaf
Stripe now begins to turn into Paypal.

Soon: 4 versions of APIs working simultaneously, with a different mix of
missing features in each one of them, and no docs.

~~~
scrollaway
Bit quick on the slippery slope are you?

Whatever makes you say something so absurd?

