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Comment by acabal | Hacker News Reader

Yikes, I've been using Stripe subscriptions happily for a few years and now I'm upset to see they're going to be charging a fee. It's unclear if the fee starts at $1MM total revenue or $1MM/year. $1MM/total would hurt a lot of the small lifestyle businesses for no gain in service--we already had subscriptions built in to the cost and we don't need invoicing or any of the other new-fangled stuff :(

Paypal has free recurring billing. Sure it's a pain to set up but once you've built it in it works pretty damn well with little to no maintenance. If you do even a smallish amount of business through them you can set up daily sweeps into your bank account to stave off the famous Paypal "random freezing of funds" nonsense.

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Did they email the announcement to you? If you already used Stripe subscriptions in the past, you'll be grandfathered in for free. This is the relevant line:

"Since you used Stripe Subscriptions in the past year, the Stripe Billing Starter plan is included in your current pricing."

Yeah, but the Starter Plan starts charging an additional fee after $1MM (yearly? total?) revenue. So it's not grandfathering in at all, we just get shunted to the temporarily-free plan that everyone else has to start on.

Edit: Since my posting this Stripe has clarified that existing customers get the Starter package at no further cost, we we are grandfathered in.

(PM from Stripe) If you're an existing user of Stripe Subscriptions, you get Stripe Billing features included in your current price. (To be clear, there's no extra fees for existing users.)

No extra fees for the first million, or no extra fees period?

Period!

Dude.. you need to communicate this better to existing customers and preferably not on HN.

I have a Stripe account with several sub-accounts (different apps). If I create an additional sub-account, will it be subject to the new fees?

Everyone is on the starter plan though. That makes no sense.

(PM from Stripe) If you're an existing user, there's no extra fees, even if you are past the $1M threshold. For existing Stripe Subscriptions users, Stripe Billing is included in your current price. (You should have received an email about this earlier today)

This was very unclear from the email. Here's what I got:

> Since you used Stripe Subscriptions in the past year, the Stripe Billing Starter plan is included in your current pricing.

Which implies you're opted into the Starter Plan with the regular 1+mil fees.

This is great news.

The initial communication left some room for clarity, which really had me confused in the same way as others in this thread. Really outside of the norm for Stripe, who's communication is usually very clear.

No thanks. When that "random freezing" happens your entire subscription business model is at PayPal's mercy.

Also take notice that there is a charge of $1 per invoice when you send more than 2,000 per year. That's crazy!

(PM at stripe here) This is $1 per one time invoice (an emailed invoice you send to users via the Stripe dashboard) rather than recurring invoices. If you're sending thousands of subscriptions invoices, you will not get charged this fee.

Stripe has always been one of those products so well presented and with guidelines so simple. But this presentation today is a total failure. Makes the billing complicated and everyone doesn’t understand what the service does with detail. You’ll need to update the page to explain a lot.

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