Comment by shekyboy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by shekyboy | Hacker News Reader

Billing (recurring or one time) is a transactional activity and should be monetized as such. There should be a per invoice or per customer type of rate. This whole % of revenue seems crazy to me. There is no inherent risk involved like payment processing. You can get paid no matter what in a tx model...

Based on what I see in the market with other billing/subscription providers, they all do the same thing (rev share). Since these businesses are not the payment gateway they try to do a revenue grab with the % share.

I hoped Stripe would be able to disrupt this by already being positioned as a payment gateway and offer this on top in a transactional model....

Hope they rethink this strategy. And no first $1MM isnt going to cut it. Any serious business will see this as a growth challenge. Backend billing flows are challenging to build and once you are committed to this you are locked in for quite sometime from the roadmap perspective.

Thanks for the feedback. To your risk point -- there is often risk involved, as businesses that have worked with large ACH payments know.

More broadly, we believe in revenue-based business models because it's the clearest way to align our incentives with those of our customers. We want to be forced to find ways to generate more revenue, via smart recovery, better invoice payment methods, more payment method support, etc.

Maybe you can provide clarity on ACH risk. Seems like businesses have most of the risk there.. and not the billing system (keeping the gateway out of this).

Secondly, transaction/user based models are also aligned with customer incentives. With growth, customers will execute more transactions on the system.

Frankly, Smart recovery is an area where I can see you can ask for % share. Other features like payment methods etc sound transactional again.

Finally, Stripe has a payment gateway business already. This will ensure growth on that side of the business. Optically this seems like a revenue grab. You have the opportunity to disrupt the ecosystem.

Thanks for responding to my comment. Appreciate the interaction.

Lowering revenues doesn't really align with IPO'ing, though. The issue is the VC model that will keep us trapped in this, until there are less greedy given the resources to disrupt these systems. Capitalism works well, it shouldn't necessarily have a stake in foundational systems - which is why we need governance to manage.

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