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Comment by mvkel | Hacker News Reader

If I still have to pay the processing fees, what's the advantage here?

Having to maintain my own payments stack (and PCI compliance) sounds like a massive distraction.

This is an alternative to Stripe Billing, not the core Stripe payment rails themselves. In fact, one would use Stripe or similar with Lago: https://docs.getlago.com/guide/payments/overview .

Tracking the edge cases around recurring payments, invoicing, pro-rated tier changes, and metered billing is hard! And Stripe Billing APIs aren’t the most fluent for many cases. It’s good to see new layers in the space.

What are you talking about Stripe is great and really well made. I just built on it and was able to do whatever I wanted. Lago looks like just one more platform I'd have to keep track of for no reason.

Then it's evidently not for you, if the use case benefit isn't apparent? Same reason you personally wouldn't use Chargebee but others might.

What's your point?

That when you say "Lago looks like just one more platform I'd have to keep track of for no reason", it clearly means it's not for you, but there might be other users who get benefit from it.

Surely that's obvious?

Right Lago could be used as replacement to Stripe Billing. And one attractive feature is that it decouples your tech stack from Stripe (could use another payment processor and still handle the subscription lifecycle the same way). This is going to be more and more interesting to businesses who are getting increasingly wary of Stripe account bans.

Yep, couple it with a third party vaulting solution like Spreedly or VeryGoodSecurity and you can dynamically route any card-on-file to any payment processor with a simple configuration change, including routing higher-risk/newer accounts to less ban-happy processors. Honestly surprised that space hasn't innovated more around this offering.

Actually, PCI Compliance is largely a solved problem. Use something like https://verygoodsecurity.com and wrap the proxy around Lago and your self hosting will qualify you for the easiest PCI compliance tier.

(Disclosure: I founded Very Good Security & was the CEO for 8 years).

Yet people will still claim blockchain has no usecase

Yep. Nothing here seems to contradict that, unless you have found some magical cryptocurrency that has stable value, is easy enough for my mum to use, doesn't have the security properties of stuffing cash in a mattress (and posting a sign outside your house saying "cash here!"), is properly regulated, allows chargebacks, has fraud protections, etc. etc.

No? Didn't think so.

Yes. I have. It’s called USDT. There’s also USDC.

And we built blockchain apps that let anyone release their own at https://intercoin.org

All those other properties you mentioned are not essential to being used as a medium of exchange. People can make their own conflict resolution procedures without involving the daddy government. Your idea of “security properties” is that a bank holds your money, well around the world people get their assets frozen by these banks.

> People can make their own conflict resolution procedures without involving the daddy government.

Who's going to pay for that? Or enforce it? Can you give me a single example of this?

Pure delusion.

> around the world people get their assets frozen by these banks

Good point, that's another useful feature real banks have that you can't do with cryptocurrency.

Tell me you don’t live in a repressive economic regime without telling me you don’t live in a repressive economic regime

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/lebanon-cbank-lets...

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-jan-11-mn-21962...

https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/economy/2021/10/1/venezuela-in...

https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/novo-banco-yet-deci...

I mean, yeah.

Are most HN entrepreneurs targeting Venezuelan customers?

Blockchain isn't a ledger for legal tender transactions. It's a ledger for tokens, which then have to be converted into an actual currency whose store of value isn't reliant on some Coinbase ticker.

If I wanted to convert exactly zero customers, I'd offer crypto payments

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