Comment by iffycan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by iffycan | Hacker News Reader

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When I first signed up with Stripe years ago, it was a breath of fresh air. Stripe did one thing exceedingly well, at an understandable price and took minutes to integrate with.

I could sell Stripe to my developer friends (and did, a lot!) in a single sentence: "You can add credit card charging to your site in about 15 minutes for 2.9% + 30¢ per transaction." I can't do that anymore. Stripe is no longer a single-sentence sell.

Stripe still does good work. But the air is getting murkier. I'll point to some objective changes, but mostly Stripe is just starting to feel different.

- Several years ago, when I saw announcements that Stripe started supporting ACH payments (and later international payments), I thought, "Great! This is Stripe! I'll just be able to flick a switch and turn those on." Not so. I understand that it's complicated from their end. It's just not the same "Stripe is so easy" experience. "Stripe is supposed to abstract away the complexity, not expose it to me."

- The pricing page is a big sign of the added complexity. There used to just be one or two numbers on that page [1]. Compare that with the current pricing page [2]

My suggestion to you, pc: Start a little company within Stripe to disrupt Stripe (i.e. re-simplify) in the same way Stripe disrupted the industry 10 years ago. Or keep getting bigger and become just as complex as the things Stripe replaced.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20111216054911/https://stripe.co...

[2] https://stripe.com/pricing#pricing-details

I agree. I feel like good companies like Stripe want to keep growing. With this, comes the need to increase revenue to cover the extra costs. I don't know if it's investor pressure, or the fear of being stagnant, but some companies are arguably better off the way they are. There's no need to grow at all costs.

If you want more users, double down on marketing to existing users instead of pissing them off. Although it's really hard to measure, happy users do the marketing for you and bring in more customers.

First they started charging for international cards (with the "grandfathering" for years excuse), now this. I've already migrated off of Stripe and now actively recommend people think twice about going with them. Instead, I'm recommending Braintree... aka Paypal. It seems we've come full circle already.

Even more confusing, it's showing me (in NZ) prices in GBP, which I have no use for, and talking about European cards as somehow special. They seem to think currency and language are the same thing (NZ English is pretty close to British English for computer purposes, so it redirects me to en-gb?). But https://stripe.com/en-nz/pricing#pricing-details actually exists! Weird.

Charging one rate for all payments sounds nice. But not all payments cost the same for Stripe. One rate for all customers means that you are breaking even / losing money on some transactions and making money on others. In other words, you're asking some of your customers to subsidize others, because.... it makes the product simpler to sell. Why would anyone agree to the wrong side of that bargain as a customer?

Because it makes the product easier to buy? In the past I could buy stripe and know exactly what my costs were going to be. Looking at the pricing page now it’s a fucking swamp.

If I add all their percentages up I’m paying 10% per transaction.

This is an excellent Suggestion: My suggestion to you, pc: Start a little company within Stripe to disrupt Stripe (i.e. re-simplify) in the same way Stripe disrupted the industry 10 years ago. Or keep getting bigger and become just as complex as the things Stripe replaced.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20111216054911/https://stripe.co...

[2] https://stripe.com/pricing#pricing-details

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would second this VERY strongly

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