(Our actual thinking was that we'd iterate on the product for a few years until we were confident it was good and worth paying for -- with both large and small companies using and paying for it -- and then revisit.)
I should have known something was up when Stripe sent out the email survey two days ago about subscription pricing. Very strange that you only sat on those results for a day before pulling the trigger on this. Interestingly, some of the survey answers included concepts of a free tier.
To me, the percentage makes little sense. You could be running 1,000,000 $10/mo subs, or 1,000 $1,000/mo subs and the cost is the same. This pricing model hits high value subscription companies significantly harder, even though Stripe's costs are lower.
While this is true on some level, the challenge is that we'd have to set pricing at an inefficient point (i.e. we'd end up charging more than some businesses can afford to pay and less than others are willing to pay). If we charged $1/sub/mo (say), $5/mo subscriptions would be prohibitively expensive. At the other extreme, if we charged $0.02/sub/mo per month, it just wouldn't make sense to invest as much in improving the product, which would indirectly hurt businesses by depriving them of a counterfactual product that they'd like to be able to buy. Pricing is obviously always an exercise in trying to find a reasonable trade-off between simplicity / optimality and this is our best effort.
In the survey, there were a lot of options for dual pricing models. It must have been something you were considering. I'd be curious to hear why this was decided against?
To be honest, none of the new Billing features are relevant to us. We'd much rather have new features gated, like customer portal is, than paying 0.5% for features we never intend to use.
I'm actually not sure. I'll check with the team. (The timing of the survey was coincidental, though -- we've been working on making our Billing pricing consistent since the start of the year.)
> To be honest, none of the new Billing features are relevant to us. We'd much rather have new features gated, like customer portal is, than paying 0.5% for features we never intend to use.
We seriously considered that. It gets pretty complicated (and error prone), though, with the number of different code paths that have to be maintained. The fact that such a large fraction of customers we reached out to directly were willing to pay for a more full-featured Billing (mostly on the basis of competitors being significantly more expensive) made us eventually conclude that it wasn't worth the complexity of having two adjacent versions of the product.
This seems a little unlikely. Unless the billing side of things was too complex? :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Durbin_amendment
https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/merchants/visa-usa-in...
Bingo. This is like your cell phone company telling you that the tethering feature you have always had access to is now part of their Pro plan, for which you won't be charged extra. Then they turn around and start charging for the Pro plan on the grounds that it has a bunch of features you don't care about — and one feature that was previously available outside the Pro plan.
Unless I'm misunderstanding what's happening here, this seems really lousy. I became a Stripe customer because of the simplicity and transparency. It seems that both of those benefits are disappearing.
With a structure like that, I'd want to use Stripe Billing for every customer, rather than considering any kind of special arrangements for high-value customers.
And the original message, when I read it for the first time today, implies that it is for life because it's "beyond $1M" and there's no qualifier.
I'm not using Subscriptions so I have nothing invested. But that's what your message says.
Once you tell someone they can continue using it as is forever, you cannot later say ‘actually, we meant just a few years’.
I did this when moving from a First Data ISO to Vantiv to ensure we could avoid collecting card data from clients again.