Comment by ThePhysicist | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ThePhysicist | Hacker News Reader

One should keep in mind that this is an article from a startup that wants to sell you billing software, so take some of the points with a grain of salt. Definitely some truths in there but having built inhouse billing solutions I can say that some of the issues pictured here are quite exaggerated. If you integrate with a payment provider like Stripe they e.g. already provide some support for tax codes, and even if not the rules aren't rocket science, every online store that sells internationally has faced the same issue.

In the end, if you let a third-party provider run your billing you'll be dependent on their solution, and if something is missing that they don't care to provide you're just out of luck, or back to building it yourself, which is why these third-party solutions aren't terribly popular. It's very difficult to build a standardized solution that just works, so relying on outside software can make your problems worse.

I worked on a financial product in a startup. The billing and collection features were so closely tied to the product that it would be quite risky to outsource that when you're still trying to find out what your product is exactly.

In fact, we outsourced part of the software for the late payments collection process to a reputable SaaS and the results were not great.

My take is that if your needs are fairly standard, you can benefit from such service. Especially your time to market will be shorter. But you won't face any disaster should you decide to do it yourself. If you want to innovate how you bill people (most Fintechs do), you should develop in house.

Sure, until you find out Stripe is killing accounts wrongfully[0], something that has been happening since a long while. Even the first comment there hints it[1].

> It's very difficult to build a standardized solution that just works, so relying on outside software can make your problems worse.

I want to see you doing billing without software.

Also, Stripe is not available for every country under the Sun because it's U.S. based. Not that Lago isn't, but at least Lago is open source so you just use it locally.

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[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33743750

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33744053

Our payment/billing backend is built so that it can support multiple payment providers, as some larger customers e.g. pay by bank transfer. Stripe is just there to store sensitive billing data like credit card numbers and actually charge customers, everything else happens in our backend. Stripe supports that use case well, they e.g. provide web hooks and an event log which you can replay locally to integrate with them, which makes it easy to run your own billing/invoicing logic on top.

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