Hacker News Reader

Comment by lossolo | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

It's YC backed and run by two very popular HN'ers, the Collison brothers.

https://www.startupgrind.com/blog/the-collison-brothers-and-...

Also, payments is something that every real start-up will hit sooner or later.

Stripe received seed funding from Y Combinator.

http://www.ycombinator.com/ - second quote, at the bottom

This website, Hacker News, is essentially the community site for companies emerging from Y Combinator. (Hence the Y icon in the upper left corner of the page.)

https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

if it helps, all YC graduates are hyped... on the YC 'news' site.

Can anyone explain me why Stripe is so hyped on HN ?

When Stripe launched, the alternatives for a new or small business that wanted to charge cards online were basically traditional merchant account and payment gateway integration (terrible developer experience, excruciating long process, often borderline abusive conditions for merchants) or PayPal (terrible developer experience, faster experience for as long as it lasted, countless nightmare stories of frozen funds etc.).

Stripe came along and let you add that functionality within a few hours, and it did so while also providing excellent and highly developer-friendly documentation and support, which obviously plays very well to the typical HN reader. It wasn't about slightly higher fees vs. slightly lower fees, it was about whether it was possible and worth doing at all.

Stripe today is not as good as Stripe in the early days for many reasons, but it's still better than almost anyone else I've used on all of those scores. Presumably I'm not the only one on HN who has had that experience. It's reassuring that there are several more businesses now starting up in this area, but I haven't yet seen anyone significantly better that didn't also seem to have at least one significant drawback for any business I'm involved with that uses Stripe today.

(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

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."

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

I work at Accumulus which has a recurring billing platform that de-couples payment processors from recurring billing, i.e. invoicing, price plans, customer management and notifications, etc. The thing is that you don't want to be locked into a particular payment processor long term. Convenience sells, but be mindful of lock-in. As companies grow, they get better rates with different merchant account providers. As a company, you want maximum flexibility and negotiation ability to take your business to those who give you the best value, globally.

We are putting together an offer specifically for Stripe users who want to avoid lock-in and save money long term. If you are interested, you can get on the list here https://accumulus.com/it-is-your-revenue

but now how do we eliminate lock in to billing platforms which also have their own rates that vary with provider?

What are you using?

"another for EU clients where I pay only 1.7%"

May I ask which payment processor you're using in the EU?

Cardinity.

Comparison with Stripe here:

https://cardinity.com/stripe-alternative

Thank you for the information!

What are you using for just 1.9%? No flat fee on top of that?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com