For a lot of small or medium businesses 4.2% + $.30 is about 1.5-2% more than they would pay for barebones card service. But the addition of tax reporting, and periodic billing more than make up for the cost of having to hire an employee or other service to handle this. PCI compliance, advanced fraud detection, etc...
As you scale, sure, you should maybe think about in-sourcing this, but how many hours per year of employee time do these services save.
This is a great article for comparison, but I think a lot of people who haven't run businesses would be shocked at the cost of handling money. Having worked at a bank I would not be surprised if cash is more expensive than credit card fees.
I think an interesting comparison now is between payment service providers (including Stripe) and all-in merchant of record services (like Paddle).
At some point all the extra fees for additional services add up and using a PSP isn't so attractive financially any more.
All the extra admin and integration work you still need to do with a payment service provider can also be a barrier.
I'm surprised the MoR market hasn't become more crowded and competitive already. It's often suggested around here that if something is core to the purpose of your business then you should do it and if not then you should outsource it as much as possible. MoR seems like the logical conclusion of that argument for a lot of financial activities.
Written by a company who has their current pricing defined as:
> Lago was born to enable any company to build a great pricing stack, starting with billing. However, we haven’t communicated about our own pricing yet
The company is open source, so the pricing is… free!
We’ve written this only for the fully cloud hosted solution. As we are in alpha, we haven’t figured out our pricing grid yet. You will be the first to know!
I'd give them some time to figure out pricing since they seem to be in early alpha. At least they've articulated pricing they don't like and acknowledged they're still thinking about it
I would not say it's hidden, everything is public, but honestly even I wasn't 200% sure about which product we used / were charged for before writing this post!
For a lot of small or medium businesses 4.2% + $.30 is about 1.5-2% more than they would pay for barebones card service. But the addition of tax reporting, and periodic billing more than make up for the cost of having to hire an employee or other service to handle this. PCI compliance, advanced fraud detection, etc...
As you scale, sure, you should maybe think about in-sourcing this, but how many hours per year of employee time do these services save.
This is a great article for comparison, but I think a lot of people who haven't run businesses would be shocked at the cost of handling money. Having worked at a bank I would not be surprised if cash is more expensive than credit card fees.