Show HN: I built the tool I wished existed for moving Stripe between countries

[felphos]

In late 2024, I had to set up a new Stripe account because I incorporated my company in a different country. Turns out it's not as simple as just changing the country in a dropdown, you have to start from scratch.

I had hundreds of users and using Stripe's dashboard to add all of the products, prices, coupons and subscriptions manually would take ages. I contacted a couple of services that help with this kind of migration, but their quotes were way over my budget. My next option was to use Stripe's API, which is very powerful but also very complicated. I'm a designer who can code, but I didn't feel confident doing it alone, so I asked a friend, an experienced developer, to help.

It proved to be quite challenging, with many details and caveats we had to learn as we went. What we thought would take a couple of days took us a week.

After this experience, we teamed up and built https://stripemove.com, a tool that guides you through this whole process, explaining and automating that hard week we went through. It handles the technical complexity while keeping your business running. Customers keep paying on your old account while everything transfers in parallel, then you flip the switch when ready.

It's a very niche tool, built for founders who need to change their company location for personal or business reasons. For entrepreneurs buying companies established in other countries. For people in the same situation I was in a few months ago. Basically the tool I wished existed, and for a fair price. Designed to get you through this inconvenient process and back as soon as possible on growing your business.

Would love to hear from anyone who's dealt with similar Stripe migrations. What was your biggest pain point?

[egorfine]

May I suggest price increase?

Your business model means no retention and no return customers. This is mostly a one-time transaction thus it won't generate sustainable revenue.

And this one transaction is absolutely crucial for the business in need of it.

I might be your customer soon. I have less than 2,500 customers and I would consider any amount under $1,500 a no-brainer "shut up and take my money" for the move - and probably even a larger amount.

[felphos]

I appreciate the suggestion and I hope we can help you soon. The lower price is intended to attract customers now and help us understand different set ups which might need a custom solution and a custom price. Once established and the tool is more robust we do expect prices to increase. Please don't hesitate in contacting us in the future.

[x13]

How are you handling this?

https://stripe.com/legal/marks

Use or incorporate any of our Marks in your own trademark, service mark, trade dress, trade name, website name, domain name, corporate name, or social-media handle (or any other source-identifying use), or use any trademark, service mark, trade dress, trade name, website name, domain name, corporate name, or social-media handle (or any other source-identifying use) that is likely to be confused with any of our Marks.

[felphos]

It's a concern we raised while starting the project but the other services I mentioned also had Stripe in their names and have been operating for a few years. Because our product is so connected to Stripe we felt that it was necessary to make its purpose clear so we took the gamble and added to our content that we are not affiliated to them. If we have to change the name in the future that is something we will have to deal with when the time comes.

[janmo]

I was in the same situation as the OP 2 years ago and because of the migration nightmare I kept both accounts, new subscriptions would occur in the new account while old ones would stay in the legacy account.

Stripe has many issues, the missing migration is one. In my case there is alos the fact that there is no "company name" field and there is no way to issue an invoice correction for subscriptions... This makes it problematic for B2B use cases. I have alrady contacted them multiple times to ask them to add these very basic features but to no avail.

Had I known this before I would probably not have used them.

[soared]

Where/what object would you like to use the company name field in?

Can you describe a situation where you need to do an invoice correction on subscriptions (ie how do you handle this now)?

[mtmail]

We've been in that situation 5 years ago. Stripe's customer service moved the data (customers, subscriptions) over for us.

Edit: I've been corrected by my collage. Stripe only copied customer records. We had to manually stop and recreate the subscriptions.

[felphos]

Exactly, that is the only part automated by Stripe.

[pan69]

I have never done this personally, so no real experience, but I would try to handle everything but customers by using Terraform.

[pimlottc]

*colleague

[matthewtse]

I did a cross-country account migration for ImprovMX in January 2025.

It was a total nightmare, and definitely the vast majority of the acquisition migration work.

We ended up with a scheme where each customer was migrated over, as a "trial" account until it converted over to a regular paid subscription on the next subscription renewal time.

I wonder how you guys handle that.

We did see some similar services out there, but we didn't deem them high quality and trustworthy. It's kind of hard to build a reputation around a service you only use once. If our acquisition broker had said "use stripemove.com, we've done it many times, they're great", we probably would have forked over the cash immediately.

Consider reaching out to saas acquisition brokers!

[felphos]

Thanks for the advice. Yes, building a reputation is the hardest challenge when you have a once-off kind of product. Hopefully the low price can attract leads and we can start from there, although I understand that it can also backfire and make it look low quality and untrustworthy but we need to start somewhere. Our tool tries to explain each step in detail and also links to the specific Stripe documentation to help the user understand the process to build trust. The subscription transfer is done as a trial, following Stripe's recommendation.

[xyst]

Stripe should just have this native as part of platform. Hope it gets acquired.

[citizenpaul]

>I contacted a couple of services that help with this kind of migration, but their quotes were way over my budget

I guess I'm "that guy." Have you considered that the reason is this as you say is niche thing and there simply is not the market to make it profitable? That is the reason they have to charge out of your budget for it to be worth their time?

Maybe the maintenance and upkeep of the site is low enough that it doesn't matter. (I do hope so i'm not here to watch people fail.)

I would actually target it at those exact businesses rather than individuals. B2B tool. Let them handle the mess of sales negotiations and change your pricing model to the number of accounts or something like that. Accounting firms always have a million high priced tiny tools they use for odd cases. Ask me how I know.....

[felphos]

You might be and I hope there are no hard feelings about me launching such a tool but as I mentioned this is something I wished existed when I had to go through this process and while I understand charging more because it's a niche market, my set up was quite "simple" and I think it can help solo indie entrepreneurs in the same situation. This is not my main business and the lower price should attract customers now and help us understand different set ups which might need a custom solution and a custom price. On your last paragraph are you suggesting a partnership? If so you can contact us through the website.

[e28eta]

I haven’t run a biz on Stripe, but as an ex-employee the two potential problems I worry about for you immediately are:

1. Account takeovers, helped by your service. Maybe a non-issue in practice, but it’d be a PITA if you get tangled up in that.

2. Handling the long tail of Stripe API version changes. Hopefully it’s straightforward enough, and maybe you can simply require your users to upgrade if they’re on something older that you don’t support. I don’t have any specific thing in mind, but it feels inevitable to me.

But awesome job and good luck! I hope it succeeds, it sounds like a good service to me!

[felphos]

Those are fair points and something to investigate further but for point 1 our tool only uses the restricted API keys with minimal access, so both parties would have to agree on using the tool but I believe we should protect ourselves legally against such cases. For point 2, Stripe seems to be quite good for backwards compatibility on core objects but it's good to agree on a minimal supported version. Thanks!

[egorfine]

Also: perhaps consider per-customer pricing? $499 for a very small business with 50 customers might be expensive, but say $1/customer is never ever expensive to anybody.

[felphos]

That seems a fair model. Thanks!

[absoluteunit1]

Oh interesting - I didn’t realize how much of a headache switching countries can be! Bookmarked as I might have to do something similar in the future.

[diggan]

> I didn’t realize how much of a headache switching countries can be

Indeed, and in some areas, it's easier to make the move with the government, than getting all the for-profit services to accept your country change.

For example, Sony/Playstation straight up refuses to change the country on your account, so even though I lived in Spain for more than 10 years, Playstation Store is still in Swedish and using SEK, and when I reached out to support they told me to create a new account if I wanted to change the country.

Google is another company where moving countries is really disorganized. I still get emails in Swedish, and a "payment/billing account" (different from "payment method") is still somehow locked to Sweden and cannot be changed or removed.

To actually get the residency with the government, I basically had to queue at the police station for some hour, then go to the bank and then I'm 100% done with my move. I'm surprised how much easier it was to deal with the government about this move, than companies that I actually pay money to...

[felphos]

I had no idea either until I was in the middle of it! It was quite a stressful process, especially with a tight deadline.

[kundi]

How are you dealing with privacy and data concerns? Accessing a Stripe account is a big privacy concern and should be handled with highest order of care and data protection

[felphos]

We don’t save any data from the customers in our platform. The migration happens via restricted Stripe API keys from one account to the other with minimal permissions and we can't make changes to the account beyond what's necessary for the transfer. Once the process is done you can just revoke the API keys access.

[elemeno]

nit: on the front page it says "transfers everything seamless", I think you want to say "seamlessly" instead.

[adriand]

“Transfer everything with few clicks” should be “Transfer everything with a few clicks”; although the former version is not grammatically incorrect it’s not how this phrase is typically used.

[felphos]

Thanks. Fixed.

[Horffupolde]

Does Stripe even allow this?

[felphos]

Yes, we use Stripe's official APIs and follow their recommended migration practices. There are other services also helping with this process and they have been operating for a few years.

[pxue]

why do this instead of using a merchant of record?

[joshstrange]

I think you might want to rename, having “Stripe” in the name is asking for trouble.

[diggan]

I don't know the ecosystem, but seemingly Stripe themselves lists some projects/products/organizations that themselves have "Stripe" in their name, as part of the "Stripe Partner Ecosystem": https://stripe.partners/?search=stripe&sort=relevance

Still, risky to use someone else's trademark regardless, if they suddenly don't like you anymore they'll start to enforce it at the worst moment.

[felphos]

We went with it because the other services I mentioned also had Stripe in their names and have been operating for a few years. At the moment our product is so connected to Stripe that we felt having Stripe in the name was necessary to make its purpose clear. We added to our content that we are not affiliated to them, if we have to change the name in the future that is something we will have to deal with.

[absoluteunit1]

Was wondering about this as well. Might fly under the radar for a while but if your project grows you might draw attention from Stripe and having to rebrand later on will become difficult.

Also, what if you want to support this type of migration for other payment processors in the future? This name ties to just Stripe.

Also, tiny grammatical nitpick: the subheading should use the word seamlessly, not seamless there I think.