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Comment by rexreed | Hacker News Reader

Stripe stresses me out. I really cringe worrying about having too many financial eggs in the Stripe basket. But Paypal is no alternative and traditional CC processors are awful. How does one hedge their bets with Stripe? I worry one day we'll hit some transaction "trigger" and then all our money will get locked up in Stripe with no customer support recourse.

I fear being "too successful" with no recourse if I depend on Stripe too much.

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Been there with Braintree. One day they told us “your company profile is too risky, we won’t serve you unless you keep a deposit of $x million with us. We couldn’t afford that, so we migrated to another provider and then diversified - we integrated Stripe, Adyen and later a few local providers and we were able to dynamically switch between them. It was a lot of effort, but it made us more resilient and independent

Most large Stripe clients split traffic. It doesn't make sense to have Stripe be a single point of failure if you're processing enough volume.

How do you do that when Stripe holds your subscription / recurring revenue? Keep that recurring revenue base independent of the CC processor? I used to use Recurly and stuff like that but it seemed like I was paying double just for the benefit of maintaining my own recurring charge list, not to mention not integrated with many of the payment features.

> Keep that recurring revenue base independent of the CC processor?

Yes. You can transition existing customers over time by moving them over when their card expires.

Integrate Apple Pay and Google Pay and/or whatever Samsung is doing these days.

Add PayPal, too.

Have established policies about draining the processor funds into accounts, and work with your bank on how to set these up properly.

There is really no reason to have a single payment provider these days.

Apple/Google/Samsung Pay are not payment processors.

How do they work then?

Spread out transactions across multiple payment processors. We've backloaded authorize.net and braintree behind stripe to act as a failover and primary when the fees are cheaper.

How do you deal with recurring revenue subscriptions?

It depends on how you set up your billing and subscription management. If you're locked into stripes subscription management, this isn't really possible (which is one of the reasons why Stripe built this :))

Otherwise, you can pin certain accounts to specific payment processors.

Or even better if you're dealing with larger enterprise subscriptions, or even smaller subscriptions, move to ACH/Wire/Invoice model with yearly billing. Saves money on credit card fees and moves away from middlemen that can hold your money hostage.

I'm hopeful about FedNow as a strong competitor to these middlemen and enabling instant, easy, low-fee payments.[1]

1 - https://www.pymnts.com/news/payment-methods/2022/fednow-pilo...

How does one hedge their bets with Stripe?

Build your business in a way that doesn't lock you into Stripe where it's reasonable to, and accept that it'll be painful in places where you can't.

...then all our money will get locked up in Stripe with no customer support recourse.

Don't leave all your money in Stripe.

How is PayPal no alternative? Stripe is the alternative to Paypal. Or are things different in the US?

Not sure if you've been following along, but Paypal is becoming increasingly horrendous: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33462658

Not sure if increasingly, and not sure at all that stripe won't be equally bad when they reach that scale. Paypal is not bad in my experience

There is Adyen over in Europe. I don't know/doubt they do as much business as Stripe but they aren't insignificant

That’s a bit of an understatement

Airwallex is another good choice now, their API/ sdks aren't as mature as stripe but are catching up. If you are charging in multicurrrncy can actually end up with a much better deal on Airwallex.

doesn't stripe do daily payouts? i don't wat to say losing a day of revenue would be fine, but it shouldn't be a real existential risk to your business.

Daily payouts isn't the issue. Of course we get the payouts daily. But when they lock your account and you have $5M+ in recurring revenue from subscriptions on recurring revenue then you have a real problem.

Or, they'll raise their fees to increase revenue once they decide to exploit their monopoly.

This has already started happening with the introduction of their Billing product which begins charging for basic features that were previously free.

We'll see a slow migration away from the flat 2.9% + 30 cents --> much more complicated and expensive pricing models.

What's wrong with PayPal?

You might want to read the comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33462658

Square is another option.

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