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Comment by tijs | Hacker News Reader

Is it normal in the US to pay supplier invoices through credit card payments? Nobody would pay 3,9% on amounts of more than a few hundred dollars right? A normal project invoice for say a web studio would usually be well over 10k which means you're regularly paying more than $400 to get a single invoice processed? Am i missing something or do people actually do this? Not trying to be snarky, truly curious.

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Not only that, but the payment might end up being charged back up to 180 days (or even longer) later.

Great points. We've actually talked to folks whose total fees were about 6% after all was said and done. It's crazy, but it does happen.

In your example, what I'd ask is if the web studio would be willing to pay $400 to get that $10k weeks earlier than they otherwise would have. That might be a good cash flow outcome for them.

All that being said, you're exactly right, the fee structure makes transactions of a certain size not make sense if you're doing more regular invoicing. That's why we want to add more payment methods over time that are lower cost.

Sure, earlier payment might very well make it wortwhile. Maybe, if you have validated numbers, that should be part of the pitch on the invoices page? (x% of our customers get paid in x weeks)

If they're willing to pay $400 to get that $10k in they really ought to be bothered to spend 5 man minutes creating an invoice the old fashioned way, and maybe another 5 man minutes chasing the payment if it's not made on schedule.

I tried your service until I discovered you want 4% per invoice. That's 4% of my income. For comparison, California taxes (effective) were 5.8% of my income.

Please mention this up front!

When you add a calendar overview and a more sane pay structure, I'm happy to look again. Thanks.

They are only taking 1% - the other 2.9% is by virtue of using Stripe which has their fee. But I agree it should be disclosed more openly that you're agreeing to give them 1% right off the top by using the service.

Except I have no desire to use Stripe. Since they force it, it seems to me they're responsible for the entire 3.9%.

In my limited experience, it's not usual. My US clients have paid with Paypal, bank transfer and check.

Let's just say that compared to 0$ for a bank transfer (at least where i'm from) it seems like a bad deal.

Those are all payment methods we plan to support in the future. Bank Transfer and Check don't have the same kind of processing costs, so that will allow us to do the payments for something more like 1% instead of 3.9%. We also hope to make the process of setting up and verifying those accounts less of a pain.

1% is still way to much for something like this.

Maybe a yearly fee of $100.

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