What is the state of recurring payments that most startups / companies use?
Been meaning to use Stripe for everything, but not sure why other competitors such as fusebill, chargebee, memberstack, chargify, recurly etc, exists or what their benefits are, not sure I even know the difference.
Do you use any of these in the list above or something else to handle recurring payments and how was your experience?
Thanks.
But it's the last 5% - 15% that will keep you up at night and/or eat up your time. Accepting payments from EU customers and international users. A typical B2B SaaS will eventually end up accepting checks in the mail, bank transfers from a half dozen countries, and (heaven forbid): PayPal. And you have to support tax compliance on top of all of that, and integrate it with your single source of truth for billing, and company accounting software.
Billing is a pain. Nothing is perfect. Stripe is a wonderful component of a complete solution, and a great starting point.
Most of the alternatives you listed handle a very narrow set of credit-card dunning issues, which Stripe is getting better and better at every day.
One thing on my radar is Paddle. They seem to be tackling a broader set of issues upstream/downstream of actual payment processing in an integrated way.
We are currently building our MVP and we plan to release the first part as OSS by the end of the month. Eventually the whole core will be open source and there will a version as a service (a-la GitLab). The first release will be focused on startups to help them to launch faster, in the next versions we will add more growth/enterprise features.
Feel free to drop a mail to dave <at> saasform <dot> dev if you have questions, want to contribute or if you want to be among the first users.
Interesting, I thought Stripe supports all of this for you? minus Paypal, I agree that it's a good starting point.
Would much prefer a no-code solution too all of this but will also consider looking at Paddle, if it has Paypal support.
But, eventually, every B2B SaaS hits a bunch of the same payment & compliance growth blockers as they start to grow up in volume and out in reach.
On the payment method side of things, I'm curious what methods are being requested by buyers that we are missing? We do allow users to accept checks and bank transfers, so just wondering if there is a specific method we're missing (aside from PayPal)? All in all, just want to understand exactly what you are looking for in terms of that last mile support from Stripe!
Checks: https://stripe.com/docs/billing/invoices/paper-check-payment Payment Method Overview (incl. Bank Transfers): https://stripe.com/docs/payments/payment-methods/overview
> We do allow users to accept checks and bank transfers
Some users can use the check service, but it appears very limited. I've been waiting on the invite list for 1-2 years. In that time I've set up my own workflow for handling checks, but it'll be nice when Stripe can roll that out for everyone, like US bank transfers, which work very well.
But outside the US, bank transfers get complicated, partially because billing & invoicing in multiple currencies is insanely complicated.
Example: we sell our product in dollars (US). Our customer is in Europe (Anywhere in Europe). They don't want to pay using US bank protocols, and even if they do, the fee is $20 per transaction. Stripe technically supports many European bank transfer scenarios, but only if you duplicate your product SKUs and convert them into multiple currencies. Now you have to maintain conversion rates manually across these SKUs as they diverge over time, and SEPA is really, really painful to set up for relatively low volumes in Europe.
Then, you have to learn loads about EU tax compliance, and have a bunch of extra conversations with customers about this. Submit documents back and forth. Revise invoices, and re-create subscriptions manually when invoices need to be tweaked.
For the US, Stripe has been wonderful. But for the last mile, having something like Paddle or Gumroad act as a merchant of record (which is probably outside the scope of what Stripe wants to do in 2021), is the best option for B2B SaaS founders that want to sell globally.
We are now in a better position to accommodate additional users. Feel free to send me your account ID or primary account email, and I can enable the functionality for your account: clintonb@stripe.com.
The main draw for me over Stripe is Paddle handle all country specific sales tax and VAT for me. Paddle send me a single pay out every month, I file that as income in my tax return and I'm done. Without Paddle, I'd need to charge the correct VAT for sales to each country plus keep on top of the changing rules (I'm in the UK).
How do other people do this? I'm curious how many people just don't know the rules around e.g. EU VAT and ignore it when they're small.
I had a look at Paddle (only heard about it just today) and seems to have an advantage with their VAT offering, (I thought Stripe does this already for you)
How do payouts happen with Paddle in your experience? Stripe usually happens in a week for me.
Also can't seem to see pricing on any of their pages.
Fastspring is more expensive with more features, and Gumroad is cheaper with less features where both deal with sales tax like Paddle does.
I'd be curious at an estimate of the accountancy costs for dealing with sales tax yourself. I'm happy to pay for less admin and peace of mind, but obviously there'd be some point where it would be a cheaper to do it yourself.
> How do payouts happen with Paddle in your experience? Stripe usually happens in a week for me.
Reliably once a month at the start of the month. Never had an issue.
B2B? I'd go with Stripe for credit cards and SEPA debit but also offer bank transfer for larger tickets / customers. For our services we offer the latter for all yearly plans as some companies don't want to pay by credit card and prefer getting an invoice that their accounting department can handle. Depending on your location there are various services that can provide you an API for your bank account balance and transfers, you can then match them against the invoices mostly automatically.
There are higher-level services like Chargebee that offer multiple payment gateways and do some of the legwork for you, personally I find Stripe + some homebrew code for invoice generation and bank transfer handling easier, plus it amounts to less personal / sensitive data of your clients being stored on third-party services (if you value that kind of thing).
https://www.mollie.com/en does this for example. (Disclaimer I worked in the same office as the dutch payments provider Qantani. They sold all their users to Mollie.)
I know of some dutch companies that check all the prices and based on the payments option the customer wants they sent the user to a different payments provider to save money on processing fees. I'm not very familiar with Stripe, I have only set it up on a wordpress website once. but if they do not allow you to do cheap recurring payments then just implement a second provider and switch between them.
I’m curious about the experience of others with chargebee etc as a layer that potentially lets you “swap” Stripe with something else. Is it worth it?
One thing I keep hearing is Stripe does not handle 'VAT' and all those tax stuff but not sure if I need it though.
Is this still an issue with Stripe?
Saying I don't want to sell to someone with this email address, shouldn't cost me anything it's a simple check and helps both parties, less fraud is good for them and me. Unless of course they like fraud because extra fees for them?
Do you care to elaborate what stuff Stripe doesn't have that others do?
I'm of the impression, that the only thing Stripe doesn't have really is Paypal integration, but that doesn't matter to me at my size.