Changes to Stripe Billing

[binarymax]

This is the text I received in an email just now, which is for people on the 'Starter Plan' and easier to understand than the linked article.

1. Today we’re deprecating the Billing Starter plan (your current plan) and moving all customers to a single, comprehensive plan that includes all of Stripe Billing's features. Your pricing will change from 0.5% to 0.7% of Billing volume. However, we'll maintain your current pricing for one year, until June 30, 2025. Pricing of one-time invoices through Stripe Invoicing is unchanged.

2. We’re also introducing subscription-based pricing for Billing. This can make your monthly costs lower and more predictable compared to pay-as-you-go pricing. Learn more and switch plans in the Stripe Dashboard.

[dotancohen]

> Your pricing will change from 0.5% to 0.7% of Billing volume

That's a 40% price increase. I've never seen such a drastic increase, not even from Paypal.

[czzarr]

as a years-long customer for whom prices keep increasing while product keeps getting worse (fraud detection and dispute handling in particular), I'm really hopeful that a decent competitor shows up soon.

[imarkphillips]

We swapped to AirWallex but note card acceptance is limited to companies that are controlled by directors with the same residence.

Eg US LLCs not owned by US residents can't get card acceptance.

[bigyikes]

Starter pricing was 0.5%.

Scale pricing was 0.8%.

Both plans were consolidated into a single plan which is 0.7%.

This is good news if you were a Scale customer and bad news if you were a Starter customer.

[dinobones]

I love Stripe, blah blah blah, Stripe has "good" le docs and good dev experience and w/e.

But now that they have market share they are seemingly becoming more greedy.

I think they are overplaying their hand. There's no reason that these charges should be %-based. And I'm almost certain for large enterprise customers they're not; there's probably custom negotiated contracts for those cases.

I hope we get more players in this space that can force them to be more competitive on pricing.

[toomuchtodo]

They are in a valuation trap based on forward looking fundamentals.

[Animats]

> But now that they have market share they are seemingly becoming more greedy.

Of course. Go read Theil's "Zero to One" again.

[chirau]

This sounds like a pretty significant increase. This is like 40% (or 60%?) increase, no? The new pricing seems to bundle 'volume billing' and 'invoicing', was the latter previously free?

[glzone1]

The real question is what payment providers handle ACH well for a reasonable price. Say lots of $500 invoices. Underlying costs on the ACH platform is pretty low. Would love to find a $3 capped provider. Intuit is uncapped, so a $10,000 payment costs $100 per payment on their platform. Ouch!

[danwakefield]

https://gocardless.com/pricing/ is 1% below 500, then fixed for payments between ~500-2000, then its cap+0.3% over 2000

[xtracto]

For ACH I previously used Vantiv (now part of worldpay iirc) I remembered they had good service and price.

[csdreamer7]

Curious what people use besides Stripe (or Paypal) or if they are planning on moving away from it.

[a13n]

Adyen if you're big enough.

[imarkphillips]

AirWallex

[b2bsaas00]

There is no reason why this feature is % based. What alternative we have? 0.7% just to trigger a charge every month it makes not sense.

For international card is 0.7%+3.9%=4.6% fee for payment!

[duskwuff]

> What alternative we have?

A monthly plan: https://stripe.com/billing/pricing

Ranges from ~0.62% (up to $100k/mo) to ~0.57% ($1M/mo).

[brianwawok]

Yup. Keep testing out those alternatives, I pay way too much money to Stripe every month.

[cmcaleer]

It’s things like this that make me disappointed crypto didn’t find favour as a payment option. I can transfer a million dollars instantly for ~free on (good) blockchains. Vendors aren’t at the mercy of Stripe closing their account. They’re not at the mercy of payment processors deciding they’re not allowed to sell porn. The UX has improved considerably. It’s not quite ‘there’, but much better than before.

Yes as a user I don’t get chargeback disputes. That’s why I pay with crypto if I trust the vendor or if it’s for a small amount. Sometimes the savings even get passed to me. If I want protection, I use my credit card.

Stripe seem interested in this too given their push for crypto payments that’s supposed to arrive soonish. I’m curious how much of the savings will get passed on to users. But maybe it’ll just fizzle out again.

[andrewstuart]

Anyone have any experience of alternatives and competitors?

[Kailhus]

Adyen is probably the closest one. Had no issue integrating and theirs docs were good

[xtracto]

I used worldpay in the past. they were ok.

[marcelchelo]

perhaps time to pass costs to customer.

[mik3y]

0.5% -> 0.7% = 40% increase in fees, for affected customers.

(edit: 0.7% not 0.8%)

[lcnPylGDnU4H9OF]

> sig. figs. be getting y’all

This isn't an issue with significant figures but with syntax. Rewritten sans symbols, your comment means:

"3 percent increase from 5 percent"

That math actually comes out to a new rate of 5.15%.

[mvdtnz]

The numbers "5%", "3%" and "8%" don't appear anywhere at all in the article. What are you talking about?