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Comment by creichert | Hacker News Reader

I've used plain Stripe for SaaS product payments with two products (most recently https://assertible.com)

Stripe is very simple and has a very high quality API. They recently made some improvements to their dashboard for subscription management.

I've never used a service on top of Stripe for handling payments but I'd love to hear what others use.

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The main issue I see for us with plain Stripe is the EU VAT handling. If we could add a VAT field on the stripe checkout, that'd be neat

The other issue I saw with EU data is the EU privacy laws about where the Stripe data is stored. Stripe don't mention about where they store data in their privacy statement (https://stripe.com/gb/privacy).

However as far as I can tell - Stripe stores no customer details except for email and information that would be on a card.

You can use Quaderno for that https://quaderno.io/stripe-vat-subscriptions/

As far as I can tell - Stripe doesn't store anything like addresses. So does this mean that you handle this yourself or just not store customer addresses?

Stripe allows you to store 'metadata' (key/value pairs of arbitrary data) with customers. Wouldn't that work for storing addresses?

https://stripe.com/docs/api#metadata

This just seems like a really bad idea. I remember shaking my head when people started injecting various extra information in a general field in a application I was working on a decade ago. There's no validation, no sensible structure, just a free for all. I just use some separate application on top of Stripe that stores this meta data in a sane way.

Check out https://www.chargify.com/stripe/

stripe also has a history or turning peoples processing off randomly, categorizing businesses incorrectly and generally not being agreeable or showing the ability to be worked with at times. in fact, on my personal card, almost every time ive used stripe it was declined or scrubbed in some way... sure makes your life easier, but you leave a lot of $$$ on the table.

We work hard to avoid ever inconveniencing legitimate businesses (and are constantly iterating on our processes to make it less likely that we do so). I suffered at the hands of many of these processes from other companies in the past; part of the point of starting Stripe was to do a better job on this front. However, thousands of new companies launch on Stripe every week and many of them do intentionally breach our terms of service (or commit outright fraud). So, it's a tricky exercise. I pay a lot of attention to individual cases where we ever make mistakes (and make my email address very public) to try to ensure that we rapidly repair any false positives that do occur.

We'd love to investigate any issues you may have had with your card. Feel free to email me and/or mlm@stripe.com (who helps to build our machine learning fraud models that detect our merchants from fraud) and we'll take a look.

While there's someone from Stripe there, are you planning to add VAT in the checkout widget? That's the main blocker for its use in Europe.

There are existing solutions for this such as https://quaderno.io/stripe-vat-subscriptions/

I mentioned 2 of them in the OP, but having that built-in into Stripe would be great imo

thanks for the reply, i have actually not had the opportunity personally use stripe(aside from making payments) due to so many colleagues that have used it always advise me to write my own or avoid stripe(i've written a few over the years).

next time i use stripe and have issues i will certainly send in the data to mlm@. i reckon if i have time to bitch about it, i have time to help you solve it. transaction security is important, sounds like that team has fun work/problems to solve.

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