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Comment by tnorthcutt | Hacker News Reader

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?

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It seems to me that Stripe has gone from easy to cheer for underdog, to payment processor that wants to eat the world (ala Facebook).

I love that they are constantly innovating, but every time they do, I have to refactor my product, and then decide how much of my current product's custom functionality can be replaced by Stripe. Then I have to decide if I want to double down on Stripe (at the peril of other integrations), or create a wacky payflow that acknowledges dozens of additional gateways.

I don't want a single product that does everything. I want a great product that does a few things really well. This is starting to kill my love affair with Stripe.

>This is starting to kill my love affair with Stripe.

More and more I feel Stripe catering to the non-engineers who just want a simple workflow at the expense of customization.

I still dislike v3 for the fact it tries to push me to use their own interface.

I was happy hooking your library up to my form. I know I can "customize" it (change the css classes... wooo) but it completely replaced v2 with no way to get that functionality back.

I wish Stripe would have "full tricycle wheels, we charge a bunch" or "barebones, we get out of the way and charge you very little".

I think the changes in v3 might have been for PCI compliance reason as much as anything

payment processors such as Stripe use this strategy to make even harder for you to switch for a different provider, if you ever feel like it. (payments industry expert here)

Does this mean I can still create classic subscriptions (that are free of the 0.4% surcharge) and process them myself?

Edit: The answer is no.

This announcement has burnt through a lot of goodwill that’s accumulated over the years. Not cool!

If you're an existing user, you do get this without the additional fee: classic subs are free forever for existing users.

I just signed up a few weeks ago with the intent of using the subscriptions feature, but since I haven't actually processed any yet, I guess I don't get the feature as advertised when I signed up. Great.

> 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?

Charges do carry the standard fee.

There are two different products, each with different pricing models.

Billing - tools to manage reoccuring subscriptions. Payments - tools to accept/charge a credit card.

Payments pricing: 2.9%+ $0.30 per-charge.

Billing pricing: 0.4% after the first $1M in reoccurring subscription charges.

To me, it looks like the 0.4% is on top of the 2.9% + $0.30. There is a "Looking for payment fees?" section on the pricing page.

I have the same question.

"Free for the first $1 million of recurring charges." would actually be a better deal for early startups than their standard pricing of "2.9% + $0.30 charge".

Also, since they've migrated old subscriptions into this new "Billing" product, does that mean I'll start NOT paying fees on existing recurring subscriptions?

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.

Stripe already did recurring billing without a 1% though

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!

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 ?

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.

But I don't want invoices?

Stripe needs to decide if they are a b2b API, or b2c checkout and invoicing product.

Last time I looked, which was several years ago, recurly was shockingly expensive. Over the top outrageous that it was an automatic no go for my business. PayPal, which I personally hate was a better option

Recurly is actually 1.25% plus $0.10 per transaction plus $99/month (core) or plus $299/month (professional).

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