We crunched the fees of Stripe's 21 products | Hacker News Reader

We crunched the fees of Stripe's 21 products

getlago.com

55 pointssuperzamp25 comments

I think it probably depends a lot on scale.

For a lot of small or medium businesses 4.2% + $.30 is about 1.5-2% more than they would pay for barebones card service. But the addition of tax reporting, and periodic billing more than make up for the cost of having to hire an employee or other service to handle this. PCI compliance, advanced fraud detection, etc...

As you scale, sure, you should maybe think about in-sourcing this, but how many hours per year of employee time do these services save.

This is a great article for comparison, but I think a lot of people who haven't run businesses would be shocked at the cost of handling money. Having worked at a bank I would not be surprised if cash is more expensive than credit card fees.

I think an interesting comparison now is between payment service providers (including Stripe) and all-in merchant of record services (like Paddle).

At some point all the extra fees for additional services add up and using a PSP isn't so attractive financially any more.

All the extra admin and integration work you still need to do with a payment service provider can also be a barrier.

I'm surprised the MoR market hasn't become more crowded and competitive already. It's often suggested around here that if something is core to the purpose of your business then you should do it and if not then you should outsource it as much as possible. MoR seems like the logical conclusion of that argument for a lot of financial activities.

Written by a company who has their current pricing defined as:

> Lago was born to enable any company to build a great pricing stack, starting with billing. However, we haven’t communicated about our own pricing yet

Source: https://www.getlago.com/blog/how-we-think-about-our-own-pric...

I'd give them some time to figure out pricing since they seem to be in early alpha. At least they've articulated pricing they don't like and acknowledged they're still thinking about it

Hi Dewey,

The company is open source, so the pricing is… free!

We’ve written this only for the fully cloud hosted solution. As we are in alpha, we haven’t figured out our pricing grid yet. You will be the first to know!

I kicked off at my previous co because we paid ~3% on Clearpay transactions, let alone 4% - 8% of turnover!

Interesting, what did you use instead? How was the experience transitioning?

I was head of finance for a small UK ecom business, our fees were:

1% Elavon 1.6% + 20p Paypal 1.6% + some fixed fee Shopify payments (Stripe) 3% Clearpay

We paid one of these fees per transaction. Clearpay is similar to Klarna, so we were accepting some of the credit risk of our customers.

Paypal was annoying for foreign currency, as there were exchange fees, which weren't made clear and harder to convert back to GBP.

My issue with Clearpay was that it was hard to identify if it was meeting our objective, which was getting higher value orders.

Stripe is probably the best payment platform but I'm not willing to give up 5 or 6% of our revenue.

It's the best for payment, but the additional fees come on top of the payment fees, for SaaS products: billing, data sync, etc.

Thanks for posting! We spent quite some time peeling the onion to understand how much Stripe actually cost indeed, so decided to share it!

Very useful content for companies who want to understand the implication of all Stripe's fee layers.

In France we would call it a "mille feuilles" (a thousand leaves?), like the pastry!

Thanks! I was looking for such info. It is really helpful and I had no idea about all these hidden fees.

I would not say it's hidden, everything is public, but honestly even I wasn't 200% sure about which product we used / were charged for before writing this post!

Really helpful, It's really hard to know about all the fees!

Never thought that it can take at least 4% of a company revenue

I was very surprised too!

Up to 6-7% in some cases! Not saying it's not worth it, but it's worth knowing beforehand.

Pretty common for small and medium businesses to pay ~3% of credit card revenues to the bank.

How else will would they fund an instant, worldwide transaction system?

Super interesting to manage our company cost regarding billing!

Use Payoneer instead!

Thanks for sharing, super helpful infos!

Thanks for the insights!

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