Comment by jwr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jwr | Hacker News Reader

SaaS owner here (solo founder). I have been calculating this manually on a regular basis, as I've been wondering if it makes sense to migrate from Braintree to Stripe and what the cost difference would be. I finally moved, in spite of Stripe being slightly more expensive (but it's nearly a wash in my mix of currencies/accounts), mostly because of Braintree's catastrophically bad handling of 3D Secure (mandatory in the EU) and abysmally bad support.

However, people often say that Stripe's integrated solution outweighs the price (see other comments here). I disagree here. Sure, if you're just building an MVP, you want things to be up and running as quickly as possible, and you don't much care about processing fees. However, in the long term, if you run a sustainable SaaS over many years, these small amounts add up quickly. So, as an example, I do not use Stripe billing; I have my own subscription system. Because I looked at the amount I would be spending with them yearly, and realized that I prefer to have my own, building my own also gives me more control and flexibility. And independence, which matters quite a bit.

> However, in the long term, if you run a sustainable SaaS over many years, these small amounts add up quickly. So, as an example, I do not use Stripe billing; I have my own subscription system. Because I looked at the amount I would be spending with them yearly, and realized that I prefer to have my own, building my own also gives me more control and flexibility. And independence, which matters quite a bit.

Not only does the amount build up, but I guess there's some kind of vendor lock-in? 1% extra is far too much for this, but that's the strategy for Stripe Billing since that's not much different from using PayPal end-to-end.

Yes, there definitely is vendor lock-in. I've been watching Stripe billing fees being raised slowly over the years, and thinking about exactly this. It is very difficult to migrate to a different subscription system.

well, you can just pass the fee to customer

Let's set aside how this statement does or does not make sense in a competitive environment. Look at this from a different angle: at the end of the day, would you rather have those hundreds/thousands of dollars, or not?

Because if I could "pass the fee to customer", I might as well (raise prices), and then still pocket the hundreds/thousands of dollars.

You can't really directly pass the fee anyway because you don't know upfront if they're gonna use a domestic or international card.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com