Firstly you can very easily circumvent our checkout flow as we don’t lock you into using the entire system, we could therefore be supporting a large store and never receive a payment.
Secondly we see transaction fees as penalising you for selling well. It’s tough to push a product when gateways already charge for payments. A combined total of 5%+ for every order would be difficult for store owners to swallow.
We decided that offering a free tier and flat monthly fees for our paid users would be more acceptable. As a user you know exactly what you will be charged for each month.
Thanks for the feedback though, we’ll see what we can do to explain API requests and storage better.
Another point to consider is that users have a monetary incentive not to use any new features you may come up with in the future. (Unless of course, they have strong reason to believe that implementing these features will provide a significant boost in sales.)
And thanks for the kind comments, we've always loved your animations and the attention to detail you put into your site. I mean who doesn't want a buy bacon button in their header?
That being said, I agree that it's a little confusing to understand (or rather to guess how much one will be paying)... might be helpful to clarify if I need to guess ahead of time, or if per-month pricing automatically just happens based on the resulting number of API calls. (And if a rate limit could be set that would help too).
One more thought about this... what happens if my site gets DDOS'ed... what's the policy on avoiding (or not paying for) massive amounts of API calls that are accidental or bot-induced?
We very quickly know when a store is under attack and we either (where possible) drop the malicious traffic, or we absorb it. We had a customer on our free tier (30k requests) that ended up processing over 3 million during a 2 day attack, his site stayed up and we still didn't charge him.
Why is it easy to circumvent your checkout flow? I would own the money transfer. If a developer doesn't want to build their own store, they probably don't want to bother implementing Stripe themselves either (and I probably have no clue how to estimate how many API calls I need).
Do your target customers really need payment gateway flexibility? The biggest drivers (I can think of) would be acceptance (by country & payment type) and transaction fee.
You don't have to call it 5%+, you could frame it as 1% + whatever the payment gateway you choose charges. That doesn't feel too egregious.
We do need gateway options, each country is different and we're always being asked by users for support of X. I can promise you if we'd been able to stick only Stripe in and use it for everyone, we'd of done it. Our lives would have been so much easier!
And no we wouldn't call it 5% but the store owner would quickly do the math and that's where we'd end up. It's a hard sell, we ran the model past a number of people and it was almost universally rejected.