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chucky123 | 1 year ago

100%. Stripe is a blackhole.

For my current project, I pay nearly 5-7% on each transaction to Stripe. For my next project, I'm implementing custom billing and using Stripe just as a payment processor.

discuss

order

moralestapia|1 year ago

Can you (and GP, and others in the thread) suggest alternatives?

I'm about to work on payments for a new product, would like to try something new!

chucky123|1 year ago

i don't use a 3rd party billing solution. I straight up created my own.

If you have a single type of pricing(eg, variable, or tiered) its very easy rolling your own.

The issues happen when you change from variable to tiered(or vice versa), change from anniversary to calendary dates, add coupons, per user custom pricing, credits, etc etc.

I don't recommend building your own if you aren't familiar with Stripe or any other billing system. Once you understand how billing works, feel free to make a custom billing solution.

internetter|1 year ago

I'm seriously considering https://www.paddle.com/. For 5% + $0.5, they promise that you'll never need to worry about

- Chargebacks

- Global tax compliance

- Billing support

- Fraud

- Subscription management

Their API is... worse... and it is expensive... but mathing it out it is like 1% for all that peace of mind. Feels worth it.

ankit77|1 year ago

I'm the founder of OpenPay (getopenpay.com) and a lot of Stripe customers migrated to us as an alternative. We give you all the functionality that Stripe provides without the "Stripe tax"

Feel free to reach out to us and we'll hook you up

bastawhiz|1 year ago

That implies you're only charging a few dollars per transaction (where the $0.30 fixed cost per transaction with sticker pricing is 2-4% of the transaction). That's about $7.

It's great to want to charge only a small amount, but this is easily fixed by billing annually and allowing payments through lower-fee payment methods like ACH.

I was in your shoes when I started my business, charging $5/mo. I increased my prices to $10/mo and enabled annual billing (with a $10 discount) and saw MRR grow, both through added sales and increased retention (fewer payments means fewer opportunities for failed payments). And increased revenue on volume, since I pay less in fees.

chucky123|1 year ago

Nope, b2b saas. We charge a decent amount.

Scroll down Stripe's pricing page, they will charge you for literally everything.

We have annual pricing and that definitely results in lower fees and other stuff. But only a small percentage of our users are on the annual plan.

ankit77|1 year ago

Check out getopenpay.com

I ran into the same issues / frustrations as you when I bootstrapped my previous business to 30M ARR. I hated paying the "Stripe tax" and having vendor lock in with Stripe

Feel free to reach out to us on the website and we'll take care of you with free subscription management for a year

dboreham|1 year ago

The whole idea that billing should be "a service" was a Jedi Mind Trick.

hibikir|1 year ago

There are industries where billing is a service for very good reasons: Telcos have been buying entire billing packages, paying a mint for them, for decades.

The issue is whether one needs a battleship sized, super flexible, yet expensive billing solution for much smaller problems.

thedangler|1 year ago

That is quite the markup. You should look into using a processor and a gateway with a solid API. email me if you have questions.