[ngoel36]

I've never seen a company release incredible products with as high velocity as Stripe has over the last few years. Truly incredible. $1.50/user may sound outrageously expensive at first, but having seen all the engineering power it takes to build something like this at Uber...it's a totally fair price.

[recursive4]

This is on the less expensive side of alternatives and doesn't require a minimum annual spend quota. They nailed this for startups, which I imagine is a combination response to / anticipation of regulatory requirements in Web3 apps.

[grouseway]

I'd put Twilio and Cloudflare in the same category for vision (expanding product offering) and execution.

[benburleson]

Yep, these are all examples of top engineering organizations.

[jonplackett]

I thought that too - until I tried to use Twillo for the first time in a couple of years. Holy crap they overcomplicated the interface! There's 3 or 4 levels of menu all shown at the same time in different directions. The docs are also way worse. The product is still great, but the interface is a complete mess!

[jonplackett]

Just what I was thinking.

Can Stripe hurry up and go public so I can buy some shares?

[marvin]

I have been thinking the same thing for some time now. Unfortunately, I wouldn't hold my breath. If they are able to stay private, they probably will. It's easier to build a business when you don't have to deal with the hassle and interference of public markets.

[boringg]

While that sounds like a great ... in all likelihood by the time it hits the public market most if not all the value will be extracted by the investors. With a branded company like this and equity markets as frothy as they are. I doubt there will be much value left for retail. Hopefully Im wrong though.

[andy_ppp]

If only Stripe would start a pre-ipo stock market. I guess only incumbent regulation prevents this, it’s not a technology problem.

[arcturus17]

You can buy it by proxy through funds or similar.

I've been eyeing Scottish Mortgage which despite the name is actually a high-tech fund packaged as a stock publicly traded in the London Stock Exchange. They hold Stripe among many other interesting investments.

[boringg]

If you want exposure to them - go get Shopify stock - they just disclosed being in on the round of Stripe.

https://betakit.com/shopify-reportedly-invests-in-stripe-bri...

[vishnugupta]

> $1.50/user may sound outrageously expensive at first, but having seen all the engineering power it takes to build something like this at Uber...it's a totally fair price.

I observed other teams struggle to build and have tackled challenges posed by identity, 1.5$/user is terrific price. Handling PII data in itself is a rabbit hole of engineering, product, and regulatory challenges. Let alone creating unique identities, matching, and what not.

[andy_ppp]

I know that KYC checks for Onfido we had no volume but we’re being charged around $10. Is the $1.50 for KYC or some lesser verification?

[tyingq]

That it's flat, and not a percentage, is a welcome surprise.

[privatdozent]

Any news on IPO plans?

[varispeed]

Sadly out of reach for small projects. For example if you had a site with 100k users, you'd barely cover server costs with Ad Sense. $150k to check all of them? Would never happen :/ Maybe if they could pay for verification themselves?

[jhugo]

In many cases you don’t need to verify the identity of every user. You can use some signal to determine when you need ID, or require it for accessing certain products/features.

[whimsicalism]

If you're not offering a service for $, why do you need to verify identity?

What is the usecase?

This strikes me as classic HN bikeshedding.

[spoonjim]

You don’t need to verify a user’s real identity to serve them AdSense.

[ankurpatel]

The tech stack has something to do with it. Stripe has such high velocity because of Ruby on Rails.

[0xFACEFEED]

lol!

When are we as a community going to move past treating frameworks/languages/tools as a silver bullet? Frameworks don't make teams better; good management, technical leadership, and great infrastructure does.

[arcturus17]

I can't even find any evidence that they use Rails, and I'm pretty sure their outstanding velocity is minimally explained by their choice of tech stack.