

Stealth Payment Startup Stripe Backed By PayPal Founders - parth16
http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/28/stealth-payment-startup-stripe-paypal/

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seldo
We (awe.sm) have been using Stripe for our payments since last November. They
are great: a simple, tiny API that abstracts away huge chunks of the
complications around taking credit cards -- you don't need a merchant account,
they handle 99% of PCI compliance, they handle pro-rating and recurring
billing natively. We got our payments system to market way faster than we
could have otherwise.

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lux
Anywhere us HN folks can go to request early access? :)

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pc
Mention that you're a HN user when you email us :)

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whatusername
Any chance you're international or is it just US only for now?

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3kMarlin
It's only US right now.

Moving to other countries will take time as each country has their own
banking/financial/etc issues that need to be dealt with.

It took years for PayPal's Web Payments Pro to go from US only to US, UK. And
then a few more years to go to US, UK and Canada.

Amazon FPS has been around for ages and is still US only.

So it may be a while.

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bigiain
Can I suggest you announce loudly and publicly when you're ready to roll out
in non-US countries (in my case, Australia), remembering that many of us will
have already written you off as "US only" in our heads and will skip straight
past future mentions of you, expecting to be disappointed.

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pc
3kMarlin isn't involved with Stripe. collision and I are the founders. (Good
point, though.)

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3kMarlin
The lowdown on Stripe:

JSON-based HTTP API

PHP, Ruby, Python and JavaScript Support

Setup in 5 minutes.

No branding requirements or redirects.

5% + $0.30 per transaction.

US Based Sellers Only.

Recurring Billing Support.

Data Portability if you ever want to leave.

You pay all initial fees (5% + $0.30) if you issue a refund.

You will only receive money at the end of the next month.

~~~
haploid
5% is horrendously expensive. Just the other week I was ragging on Braintree
for being very slighty above wholesale merchant rates.

Stripe is quite literally _double_ Braintree's rates, with no value-add.

And on top of that, they hold the float for up to _thirty days_?

Good luck, guys. You're going to need it.

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Scramblejams
Does Braintree eliminate the need for a merchant account, with all the
complexity that entails? Do they offer a developer API that's super-friendly
to write for, allowing for weird use cases like processing payments from
native BlackBerry apps without exposing you to PCI requirements or risks of
publicly exposing your API keys by shipping them in apps?[1] And most
importantly, is it a piece of cake to communicate directly with Braintree's
founders?

'Cause that's what I've seen so far from Stripe. They're incredibly responsive
and helpful. They even changed their SSL cert provider for me because older
BlackBerries had a rough time with their prior cert provider.

Not to rag on Braintree, they've sounded like a good choice for a long time,
but Stripe's changing some of the rules of the game. Killing the need for a
merchant account is a really big deal and I'm happy to pay their rate.

[1] This isn't a rhetorical question, actually. I'd be interested in whether
you can do this with Braintree.

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haploid
I can't speak to Braintree because we don't use them. I do believe that they
will set up a merchant account for you as a proxy or agent, IIRC.

But I can speak to the economics of all this "complexity" of which you speak.

We currently use CyberSource for our gateway and associated banks for our
Merchant Accounts, and we maintain several accounts. Each account takes less
than a day to set up, with our representatives at each company.

Integrating with the CyberSource API takes roughly 20 developer-hours.

An increase in transaction costs to 5%+0.30, would cost us roughly the
salary+benefits+taxes+overhead of two fulltime developers, _per year_. That's
a cost that's simply unacceptable.

There is also the issue of "killing the need for a merchant account", being
problematic from a number of legal/accounting angles( tracing this transaction
from A to M, entity separation and identifcation ), as well as customer
service angles( what is this PAYCSTRIPE_TCMERCH charge on my card?? ).

~~~
Scramblejams
You've got what's called a nice problem to have. At that rate you must be
charging many millions per year, so sure, it's all about minimizing your fees.
But for those of us with much smaller-to-nonexistent revenues, wondering
whether our app will even make money at all, Stripe makes all kinds of sense
and is a prefect place to start.

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mef
If that logo in the TC article is accurate, you may be getting a call from
Deutsche Bank <http://www.db.com/en/img/logo.gif>

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nelhage
I'm pretty sure TC just made up that logo because they couldn't find one on
the Stripe website. These guys are too canny to come up with a logo that
shitty.

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ecksor
We (Simplenote) have been using Stripe since summer also, it's awesome. At
least an order of magnitude easier than Paypal api and the merchant account
process was completely transparent, we actually have no idea what's involved
with getting a merchant account because they just handle it all and payments
show up in our bank account.

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johnrob
Do you know if you actually have a merchant account somewhere (created by
stripe)? Or does everything go through stripe?

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3kMarlin
Everything goes through Stripe.

There is no way that any merchant account provider would allow you to sign up
and start charging customers in 5 minutes like Stripe lets you.

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rgrieselhuber
We've been using Stripe since August and couldn't be happier. They are super-
responsive, do things right and make it incredibly easy to get up and running.

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mhb
What did that domain cost?

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staunch
Since they're not answering I'll take a guess: $80k - $140k

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staunch
They went through YCombinator for Auctomatic, but not to for this company it
appears. I wonder what what led them to that decision.

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pc
For Stripe, YC was actually the first firm we took investment from. Doing so
was a very easy decision.

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staunch
Well there ya go.

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rabble
So i'm assuming this is the YC company in this batch that didn't present in
Demo Day?

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BenWGarton
I would be interested to know how the rates look for high dollar transactions.

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zby
It's not really about 'stealth payment' but rather a startup in a 'stealth'
mode (for those confused by the title as myself).

