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Comment by pjan | Hacker News Reader

As far as I understand, you can payout in USD on a EEA domiciled account, and you won’t be incurring any fees.

It’s the crossborder settlement which they charge for, which I don’t think is crazy, as it just reflects the underlying costs Stripe must be incurring themselves.

As someone who ran a business in multiple countries, the bank always charged similar fees for these transfers between accounts. Stripe letting me settle directly in the account where I want the money to land, rather than me having to log in to my bank and initiating a transfer manually where fees are ~the same is definitely a better option, which I’m happy they offer.

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1% is enormous for this. I think the cost of a SWIFT transfer is maybe $3 to them, regardless of amount. If you're doing $100k/month of USD sales and payout once a week, it is a huge markup.

They are clearly losing money on their (really expensive) forex fees so are trying to recoup this by this payment.

There is no intrinsic reason I see why the fees are so high for this.

Edit to add: they actually use ACH for US bank USD payouts, so even less cost than SWIFT.

Again, in my understanding is Stripe not forcing you to—-as a EEA business——settle USD in a US domiciled account; you can settle the USD in an EEA domiciled account and not incur the cost. If you then want to repatriate the money to the US with your bank, you can do so yourself.

I also just looked it up how much this costs with my bank, and it's a minimum fee of $25 + agent/intermediary bank fees on top of it, for amounts less than $5,0000.

I assume that Stripe can negotiate better rates though, but for the sake of simple pricing, and cost-averaging over different amounts (which are, given that they serve the long tail, likely heavy weighted on smaller amounts), it is not inconceivable that this 1% is closer to cost than one might imagine.

Banks do not charge a percentage of the transfer for wires or ACH. It is a set fee, usually in the range of $15-35 (stripe probably pays less than a dollar). That is a huge difference between charging 1% of the transaction.

This was previously not possible but looks like they have allowed it now. That is the reason why I had a US USD account in the first place, for Stripe USD payouts. They did not allow USD payouts to any European accounts last time I checked a few years ago, only to US accounts.

The 1% is for all non local currency payouts. Example: "The primary currency for Stripe accounts in France is EUR. All other currencies fall under alternative currencies." "1% Of the payout amount, when you choose to payout in select alternative currencies." Ref https://stripe.com/docs/payouts/alternative-currencies So basically this will result in very expensive payouts for anyone doing USD charges outside US or EUR charges outside Europe. Like many SaaS companies are. Charging any other currency is problematic for many customers so it is not really an option. Like I don't want to be charged in pesos for a SaaS that I am using.

The alternative is to have Stripe convert USD to my local currency. For a small 2% fee.

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