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Comment by lekevicius | Hacker News Reader

US only. Well, I kind of knew it before even hitting FAQ.

A bit of a rant here, but it's crazily difficult to do so many interesting things when you don't live in top-20 country (Lithuania here)

Stripe? Nope.

BrainTree? Nope.

Recurly? Nope.

Something else... Likely, Nope.

And so, the only way to get paid is to deal with some of the most expensive and oldest gateways and merchant accounts.

Oh, and:

Hulu? Nope.

iTunes? Nope, but we do have App Store.

Netflix? Nope.

Spotify? Nope.

Pandora, Rdio, ... Nope.

...Amazon? Mostly nope.

And so, the only way to buy or stream media is to buy CDs and DVDs for crazy prices.

Sigh. Rant is over.

Stripe, I know that may take years, but please, don't forget the little guys.

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We totally get it. We're working on expanding to other countries right now, it's one of our top priorities.

Please think of India when you do. Paypal recently botched big-time in India (search paypal pan card) and there is a big hole that needs to be filled.

We have a volume of about $500k and with Paypal failing us big time, we've ourselves been searching like crazy for the past one week for a good payment processor. Alertpay was looking most promising until I came across this post. Unfortunately, since stripe is US only, so as soon as you start support more countries, we're definitely add you guys to our site too!

Just curious -- why is PAN a problem? Is it hard to get a PAN for your business?

Have you looked into incorporating in the UK? It's probably quite a bit of hassle up-front but should solve this type of problem. Unlike in many (most?) European countries, incorporating a limited company in the UK is pretty cheap and straightforward in itself.

I don't see what incorporating in the UK would buy you. Payment processing here is a total clusterfuck.

Does this mean you have a huge opportunity to be the Stripe (or Braintree/Recurly/Hulu etc) of Lithuania?

That's the problem with tiny countries:

- Global market players don't come because they don't think the effort would pay for itself.

- The country is too tiny to make cloning business models feasible.

In Europe, there are a lot of tiny countries: 3 baltic states, 3 transcaucasian states, moldavia, some former yugoslavian states. And then you have countries that are just small and not very rich, so they are always late to any party: most of western europe, greece perhaps. Even some core european countries might see this effect (for example, where does Amazon work?)

And trying to bootstrap in ten mostly unrelated countries at once would lead to failure. And if you succeed, global players might come and eat your lunch.

It's an interesting effect where a small country suffers a noticeable drop in quality of online life due to many services being unavailable.

You're overstating the issue. There's only one thing that keeps most services from being available: the insane antiquated and utterly corrupt copyright laws. Without that, there would be no issue.

Specific stuff like online payments very much depend on local context, and in many countries they barely even have the problem Stripe is trying to solve for the US market.

The copyright thing is real, and it does prevent access to those services. Ask anyone from a small country how it affects them.

It's also payments, logistics sometimes. You can't open in a part of country and leave other part behind, but you can do that with a mosaic of countries.

Even living in the UK is frustrating some times. I wish more businesses advertise their operating limits on the home page. I got quite excited when looking at stripe, but only after looking half-way down their help & support page does it mention they are US only.

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