Ask HN: How Do SaaS Startups Choose Payment Gateways?

3 points·stealthr··4 comments

Interested to know how saas startups that do subscriptions choose payment gateway when starting out. I know there is like one major payment gateway in stripe but interested in knowing peoples experiences and regrets and which they ultimately recommend.

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Currently I am considering Zoho Billing which is included in the broader suite of Zoho One. It is also available standalone.

It keeps things nice and tax compliant in my country, so that reduces overhead for me.

Apart from the major players like stripe and paypal, also consider checking out Lago.

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/lago

I think most of them just choose stripe unless they get a very good deal at another provider or if they need to support a particular payment method that stripe does not support.

Then they might look into something else than stripe if they have a terrible problem with stripe like having their funds locked for weeks or if they think they charge too much fees.

For me it was the developer experience and credibility. I run a small project (~4k arr) and I don't mind paying fees since it was so easy to set up. Also, the investment required to learn these things. I don't want to spend a lot of time configuring everything, I just want a simple page and that's it.

Run the numbers. Depending on your average order size and expected frequency of re-ordering, fees for different services will be different. Sometimes dramatically different.

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