Plasso: Payments Made Simple | Hacker News Reader

Plasso: Payments Made Simple

plasso.co

56 pointsianwootten40 comments

Note that all plans are in addition to Stripe's 2.9% and 30 cents per transaction.

The big 0% under the platinum plan header implies that you will not pay credit card fees.

In fact, you will be paying $139/month plus 2.9% and 30 cents per transaction.

I noticed this too. Seems like the potential for a lot of angry customers, though if I remember correctly when it was spacebox it included stipe's fees in its pricing. Must have been too costly to attract customers.

Incredibly misleading. 0% equals 0% when 0% is actually 0%, not 2.9%.

I don't get why companies like this can charge a percentage equal to the credit card fee. If you pay 6% + $0.30 (on low ticket items, $0.30 could add additional few percent), but your margin is, let's say, 20%, you literally need to pay a third of your margin for processing. If you sell your old shoes or something that doesn't cost you anything but your time, then it's okay, but all these marketplaces literally are saying: "Low-volume low-margin merchants are not welcome!"

They need some fine print since this is incredibly misleading. Don't want to do that to your first customers.

Thanks for the discussion everyone one :) Glad you feel its worth talking about!

A little history just for fun:

- I launched: http://quixly.com back in 2010 after a year in development. It was the first app i had seen that got rid of the idea of a shopping cart and let you pay URLs.

- Then I launched Space Box in 2012. The goal was to make Stripe user friendly for the non-developer.

- Plasso is now the first step in something bigger I want to tackle. It's my host desire to replace paypal... but i've got a ways to go. Still need to polish the selling tools on Plasso.. then attack the buyer's side of things.

I've been at the digital delivery game since 2009 really, its fun, but a lot of work. I really love Plasso (obviously ;) and my favorite thing about it, which sheds light on it's future is the 'Pay Me' feature: http://plasso.co/drew@drewwilson.com have people pay you easy peasy. Soon to have bank & bit coin transfers!

Anywho.. i hope this is the start of something big. We'll see.

This is neat. What about selling something (like a premium WordPress plugin) that might have updates? Is there anyway to automatically notify or even deliver to previous customers?

That won't make too many people happy, especially considering they're targeting a market that may have never heard of Stripe or aren't technical enough to pick the Stripe fee inclusion. This doesn't strike much confidence either for a more serious investment, from their terms:

Plasso reserves the right at any time, with or without notice, to modify or discontinue the Service, temporarily or permanently.

But great all around, using this on a project soon

On signing up, a request is made to connect to a Stripe account.

Very nice design, pretty easy to understand, and interesting. But without knowing the Plasso name (or Spacebox, for that matter), I need to especially trust an entity working in the payments space. Finding the "about" page was tedious and looking at "goods being sold on Plasso" led to several empty pages. Trust is paramount and I think you'd do well to convey that you're trustworthy. Good luck!

Seems to be well designed and simple. Similar to Gumroad.

I've been following Spacebox; what happened to plastic.io? Trademark conflict? (i.e. why change the name?)

Someone owned the trademark to "plastic". Drew still owns plastic.io.

He ran into trademark issues with http://www.plastiq.com. Same payment space, and they beat him to filing a trademark by a year (by his account he was waiting to secure the domain name first, which cost him that year). Ended up getting a demand to transfer the domain to them for free [1]

[1] https://twitter.com/drewwilson/status/446708094911799296

I was wondering why the hell is my email address already on here. Turns out it's spacebox.io renamed.

From Drew Wilson: drewwilson.com. Described as the successor to spacebox.io

We support Stripe and charge some on top of it for convenience.

It's like a delivery service that dusts the furniture after it's being delivered but doubles your delivery charges.

I'm a little confused as to whether their pay me transactions are subject to Stripe's fees or whether those are completely free.

Stripe checkout is as easy to integrate & also well designed. Why bother to have yet another middleman in the game.

> Stripe checkout is as easy to integrate

Stripe Checkout requires that you know how to write and integrate code. Plasso does not. Of the 2.4 billion people with internet-connected computers, only 1-2 million can write code.

Seriously? It's as easy as integrating a tweet or like button into a blog post. Just copy & paste.

It's not copy and paste. Stripe Checkout does not even take a payment. All it does is present the UI to collect information, then returns a token to your page via a hidden form field. You must then write code to accept the form submission, use Stripe's API to make a charge against the token you received, send receipts and deliver the product.

Here's the Stripe Checkout integration guide for Rails for example: https://stripe.com/docs/checkout/guides/rails

Stripe in general is not a great user experience for non-developers.

Clicking "Learn More" links, in many places, literally takes you to api documentation.

Stripe inexplicably does not offer payment pages.

Not so inexplicable. They don't want to deal with end-user support. Same reason WePay canned all their end-user features.

Helium charges 2%: https://gethelium.com/

Is this more like gumroad or shopify?

Wish this had support for Amazon Payments and Paypal in addition to Stripe.

Looks awesome! Is there an example of a "space" we can see?

https://plasso.co/s/ntaOPsnnlu

https://plasso.co/market/drew-s-store/

There are a few demos in the "Sell everything" section

It's interesting that there's a spinner on the CVV of the credit card.

Is it normal to use .co domains for non Colombian websites?

So why pay extra for a Stripe wrapper?

So you don't have to do anything yourself? I personally don't want to set up a https certificate every time I want to take a payment.

How many years are you willing to pay a revolving monthly fee to avoid spending an hour on an ssl cert once? Just asking for market research purposes.

Until a better solution arrives. It obviously depends on the context, but that will be an hour for every project/domain I take payments on. In some cases something like this might be a better fit.

If you set up your domain on Cloudflare and use their SSL, you literally do not need to worry about SSL certs.

Stripe is only the payment processor. Plasso also handles distributing digital downloads for you.

Does it work in Mexico?

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