Comment by edwinwee | Hacker News Reader

Comment by edwinwee | Hacker News Reader

First off, yes, Stripe uses Stripe to bill our own customers. In fact, for our larger customers who have negotiated complex pricing plans, we're currently migrating much of our manual billing to a system that's inspired by Stripe Billing.

Second, this article seems to miss the point of Stripe. It seems to want to build a platform, which is what Stripe Connect is designed for.

For example, charging a percentage fee is just one line (https://stripe.com/docs/api/application_fees):

` $application_fee_percent = 5`

Slack, Atlassian, and Notion have all built their B2B billing on top of Stripe. But we don't target just B2B or B2C ecommerce in case a business has multiple revenue streams (which many businesses are increasingly adding). In fact, we designed Billing so it can flex across any business model—per-seat, usage-based, tiered, or even graduated.

This is the point of Stripe. A single stack that flexes with your business as it grows and pricing that's public.

> First off, yes, Stripe uses Stripe to bill our own customers.

This is confusing because you’re implying that Stripe Billing is used internally but another employee clarifies and says it’s not, it’s simply another billing service was created that predates Stripe Billing.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33193807

Sorry, to be clearer—we are moving away from the old billing service my colleague mentioned and to a new one. Our new system shares similarites with the Stripe Connect + Stripe Billing flow I mention above (specifically https://stripe.com/docs/api/usage_records).

You say it shares similarities with Stripe Billing. Above, you say inspired by Stripe Billing. "Similarities" and "inspired" are weasly ways of saying that it is not Stripe Billing.

It used to be that Stripe could be relied on not to do this sort of corporate doubletalk. The OP asked a direct question and you've given a misleading PR answer.

I'm sure you're a nice person just trying to do your job, but your inevitable PR posts to HN, within minutes of anything Stripe-related coming up, are hurting your cause. The Stripe of the past would never have spewed propaganda like "This is the point of Stripe. A single stack that flexes with your business as it grows and pricing that's public" into HN threads. It's embarrassing, and what it's telling us is that culturally you've lost your way.

Maybe that's inevitable on your way to world domination, but if you guys can no longer communicate honestly or treat readers as intelligent, you'd be better off not posting here. I like Stripe, by the way. I know this is harsh but I would like it to be helpful.

no bad intention - I am not sure when was the turning point but you appearing on a Stripe thread now seems like a negative signal recently, for me at least

It's of course your choice, jfyi

I would be shocked to learn you’re using stripe billing and checkout sessions successfully internally - those products are so convoluted in how they overlap and don’t as to be unusable. All but the most basic use cases are a nightmare to both implement and then track rev Rec on. So much so that you’ve got a whole new product dedicated to trying to figure it out. If that were the result of a dog-fooded product I’d be pretty sad to hear it.

Agreed, at my company we have a fairly complex custom reconciliation process set up just to reconcile our stripe billings.

In contrast, reconciling pretty much every other payment processor is relatively straightforward.

Somewhere along the way Stripe went from being developer friendly to becoming more convoluted than Java.

We’re always working on making Checkout and Billing gel together better, and our Revenue Recognition product automates ASC606-compliant accrual revenue reporting including automatically recognizing data from Stripe Billing. Have you talked to us yet about your use-case? Could you email me at ark@stripe.com?

I appreciate the offer. We are very much working closely with you on implementation and have from the start (over 6 years spanning many of your products). I am very familiar with all of your offerings.

The core of stripe is great, we’re fans. But as you add any complexity you end up with a mess of various internal account balances to maintain. It forces you into gross things like bin packing refunds, complex internal transfer fail handling. Toss in the inconsistent handling across connect and man, you’d be better off just going back to basic charges and ignoring all the value adds.

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