Stripe adds multiple subscriptions | Hacker News Reader

Stripe adds multiple subscriptions

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69 pointssinghit19 comments

It's awesome this feature is supported (I've seen some cases where it's needed) and that Stripe is so responsive to their customers. FYI Recurly supports this as well.

Just remember, if you have customers on 2 subscriptions, you're losing 30¢ by charging them 2x instead of one. If you find yourself with lots of customers on 2 subscriptions, it might be worth it to rethink how your plans are structured.

In most cases, 30¢ is worth the reduced headache.

Does Stripe not combine the charges for multiple subscriptions into one charge? I think that would be pretty smart.

For the v1 of multiple subscription support, we don't combine subscriptions into one charge. Hopefully we didn't get a biased sample, but we asked some of our beta users about their preference here and the consensus was for keeping each subscription separate -- per-subscription invoices, and thus per-subscription charges. At the very least, this is likely the simplest thing to reason about, in terms dunning and various unpaid / past due states.

I could definitely see us allowing lumping subscriptions into one charge, at least as a configuration option.

One thought is that the right solution might be to support specifying at creation time that a subscription's billing cycle should 'snap to' another's, leading them to be invoiced and billed jointly going forward. Would definitely be happy to discuss these use cases more -- jim@stripe

I am a new Stripe user who is just about to finish implementing a workaround for the limitation of one active subscription per customer. I was excited to see this news, but my excitement was tempered when I read that billing for multiple subscriptions is not consolidated. I would love to see consolidated billing support with multiple subscriptions (configuration option is fine). Until then I will keep my workaround since it does what I want for my customers.

John's tweet is a pretty accurate summary: https://twitter.com/collision/status/430772656523063296.

Is there anywhere (other than the HN front page ;-)) that offers a comprehensive list of changes as Stripe develops?

For example, this page[1] on the Stripe site suggests that UK businesses can charge in three different currencies and convert where necessary to pay them out to a UK bank account. If that can also now be done using the same Stripe account just by putting in the desired currency value for each charges/plan, that could be huge for us, and I had no idea any progress had been made in this area.

(It's also not entirely clear from the page in question whether this is in fact the case, or whether UK businesses can use any of those currencies but still have to chose which single one we're going to work with for a given Stripe account. Quick note to the Stripe folks reading this thread: clarification on that page would be welcome.)

[1] https://support.stripe.com/questions/is-stripe-available-in-...

Not from stripe, but from looking at my own account and the documentation - You can charge in any of those three currencies (where a additional 2% conversion charge is added between different currencies) but need to choose which single currency you're going to be sending those payments to. You can do so just by making the charge and specifying the currency you want to charge in.

There is an additional feature for US customers that allows paying out to arbitrary bank accounts, but this isn't available in the UK yet.

https://stripe.com/docs/tutorials/sending-transfers

Very very useful update to support scenarios where customers can purchase multiple subscriptions in parallel. In the past I basically rolled my own instead of many of the workarounds, like creating a subscription for the combined prices (ugly IMO).

This looks great for placing the same customer on different subscription plans. If the same customers needs multiple subscriptions, use the quantity property of the subscription object to keep everything on one bill.

Kudos to Stripe for being responsive to customer feature requests: https://groups.google.com/a/lists.stripe.com/d/msg/api-discu...

I'm sure this feature was in the backlog since day 1. Was it pushed off due to keeping Stripe as a minimum viable product, or were there some deeper complexities in implementing this?

Interesting, I am drawing a blank when a subscriber will want to purchase two subscriptions on the same website... ? Is he or she purchasing the additional subscription for someone else?

Say you are a cloud hosting company like Heroku.

Your customers could have different levels of subscriptions for all kinds of things: CPU ('dynos'), databases, backups, monitoring services, etc

Yes, but ultimately you'd probably want to bill them all in one go every month, because otherwise you're paying far more in card processing fees than you need to.

We needed this for our site. You can add as many 'domains' as you like, each with their own plan. Instead of creating a new customer + subscription we hacked together a way that each customer gets a unique 'plan', which can be multiple subscriptions. Multiple subscriptions per customer would have saved us a lot of time.

The other option was asking the user for CC details each time and creating a new customer at Stripe - but that felt like friction.

"Is he or she purchasing the additional subscription for someone else?"

Exactly.

From the standpoint of a company A that uses Stripe billing, which would be preferable if you were selling per-seat services to Company B?

1) Make the person from Company B subscribe ten (or a hundred, or a thousand) separate times using different logins and passwords.

2) Let the person from Company B specify that they want to buy ten (or a hundred, or a thousand) seats, and manage them all from the same account.

As a non dev, i love the simple Stripe approach for providing first class payment solutions

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