"As a user of Stripe Subscriptions, you will get all the functionality of Stripe Billing's starter plan with no change in price. You can continue using it free of charge on your existing Stripe pricing, even beyond the $1M free threshold. This will be automatically applied to your account. Contact [email protected] with any pricing questions"
As far as I can see, the Billing Starter plan has not changed and still applies. Not only that, it claims we get "all the functionality of Stripe Billing.." when this hasn't been the case for a few months. New features have been gated recently, ie. the new customer portal.
You have every right to change your pricing how you see fit. However, if this message was worded as it being a grace period, we would have taken steps two years ago to consider other tools or building something in-house.
(Our actual thinking was that we'd iterate on the product for a few years until we were confident it was good and worth paying for -- with both large and small companies using and paying for it -- and then revisit.)
I should have known something was up when Stripe sent out the email survey two days ago about subscription pricing. Very strange that you only sat on those results for a day before pulling the trigger on this. Interestingly, some of the survey answers included concepts of a free tier.
To me, the percentage makes little sense. You could be running 1,000,000 $10/mo subs, or 1,000 $1,000/mo subs and the cost is the same. This pricing model hits high value subscription companies significantly harder, even though Stripe's costs are lower.
While this is true on some level, the challenge is that we'd have to set pricing at an inefficient point (i.e. we'd end up charging more than some businesses can afford to pay and less than others are willing to pay). If we charged $1/sub/mo (say), $5/mo subscriptions would be prohibitively expensive. At the other extreme, if we charged $0.02/sub/mo per month, it just wouldn't make sense to invest as much in improving the product, which would indirectly hurt businesses by depriving them of a counterfactual product that they'd like to be able to buy. Pricing is obviously always an exercise in trying to find a reasonable trade-off between simplicity / optimality and this is our best effort.
With a structure like that, I'd want to use Stripe Billing for every customer, rather than considering any kind of special arrangements for high-value customers.
In the survey, there were a lot of options for dual pricing models. It must have been something you were considering. I'd be curious to hear why this was decided against?
To be honest, none of the new Billing features are relevant to us. We'd much rather have new features gated, like customer portal is, than paying 0.5% for features we never intend to use.
Bingo. This is like your cell phone company telling you that the tethering feature you have always had access to is now part of their Pro plan, for which you won't be charged extra. Then they turn around and start charging for the Pro plan on the grounds that it has a bunch of features you don't care about — and one feature that was previously available outside the Pro plan.
Unless I'm misunderstanding what's happening here, this seems really lousy. I became a Stripe customer because of the simplicity and transparency. It seems that both of those benefits are disappearing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Durbin_amendment
https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/merchants/visa-usa-in...
I'm actually not sure. I'll check with the team. (The timing of the survey was coincidental, though -- we've been working on making our Billing pricing consistent since the start of the year.)
> To be honest, none of the new Billing features are relevant to us. We'd much rather have new features gated, like customer portal is, than paying 0.5% for features we never intend to use.
We seriously considered that. It gets pretty complicated (and error prone), though, with the number of different code paths that have to be maintained. The fact that such a large fraction of customers we reached out to directly were willing to pay for a more full-featured Billing (mostly on the basis of competitors being significantly more expensive) made us eventually conclude that it wasn't worth the complexity of having two adjacent versions of the product.
This seems a little unlikely. Unless the billing side of things was too complex? :)
And the original message, when I read it for the first time today, implies that it is for life because it's "beyond $1M" and there's no qualifier.
I'm not using Subscriptions so I have nothing invested. But that's what your message says.
Once you tell someone they can continue using it as is forever, you cannot later say ‘actually, we meant just a few years’.
I did this when moving from a First Data ISO to Vantiv to ensure we could avoid collecting card data from clients again.
I could sell Stripe to my developer friends (and did, a lot!) in a single sentence: "You can add credit card charging to your site in about 15 minutes for 2.9% + 30¢ per transaction." I can't do that anymore. Stripe is no longer a single-sentence sell.
Stripe still does good work. But the air is getting murkier. I'll point to some objective changes, but mostly Stripe is just starting to feel different.
- Several years ago, when I saw announcements that Stripe started supporting ACH payments (and later international payments), I thought, "Great! This is Stripe! I'll just be able to flick a switch and turn those on." Not so. I understand that it's complicated from their end. It's just not the same "Stripe is so easy" experience. "Stripe is supposed to abstract away the complexity, not expose it to me."
- The pricing page is a big sign of the added complexity. There used to just be one or two numbers on that page [1]. Compare that with the current pricing page [2]
My suggestion to you, pc: Start a little company within Stripe to disrupt Stripe (i.e. re-simplify) in the same way Stripe disrupted the industry 10 years ago. Or keep getting bigger and become just as complex as the things Stripe replaced.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20111216054911/https://stripe.co...
If you want more users, double down on marketing to existing users instead of pissing them off. Although it's really hard to measure, happy users do the marketing for you and bring in more customers.
First they started charging for international cards (with the "grandfathering" for years excuse), now this. I've already migrated off of Stripe and now actively recommend people think twice about going with them. Instead, I'm recommending Braintree... aka Paypal. It seems we've come full circle already.
If I add all their percentages up I’m paying 10% per transaction.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20111216054911/https://stripe.co...
[2] https://stripe.com/pricing#pricing-details
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would second this VERY strongly
We'd be totally happy keeping the old functionality of Stripe subscriptions and not getting any of the new hotness. I think Stripe has done a great job supporting old versions of the API, seems like we should just be able to stay on our old pricing / subscriptions functionality as well.
Saying that we can build the infra ourselves to do reoccurring kind of goes against what we purchased Stripe for initially. I know technically you can change your pricing/billing however you want but this is more of "let's capture more revenue from old customers" than it is "we launched a bunch of stuff thats new so pay for the new stuff".
There's obviously heterogeneity, though, and we'll be as reasonable as possible. If this would be really disruptive for your business, or if you need more time to plan a migration (if you don't think Billing makes sense for you), or something like that, I'd be happy to connect you with the team -- we could extend your current pricing through the end of 2021.
Then presumably you'll follow alooPotato's suggestion and allow folks to not pay extra for stuff we never wanted and never signed up for?
Presumably you can see how many of your customers (myself included) have never even looked at some of these new features you've added to Billing. I'm literally finding out about these features in this thread. If people were not aware of these features, you can figure they are not interested in paying extra for them.
This feels like New Coke.
There have been comments elsewhere in the discussion that for folks with higher volume, we should be negotiating our fees. At what volume would you recommend companies reach out to your team to do so?
So maybe but not as good of one?
I think Stripe does a lot of things right, but your comments back in 2018 certainly indicated that Billing could be used in perpetuity:
"- For existing customers, there's no pricing change. You just get more functionality than before for free. This is what we generally try to do: we want Stripe to continually become better value for you over time, as you get more functionality for the same price."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16766846
I specifically reached out to Stripe support back then to verify this would be the case and they confirmed. If you've since changed your mind, I think you should come out and say that's the case as opposed to saying this is a communications issue.
I'm ok with paying for services like this that provide loads of value. I expect there's increasing diversity in terms of Stripe's customer base and how they use the product, and trying to pick a single percentage price point that works across all of them is no longer feasible.
That said, I'm quite unhappy with Stripe's pricing as an AU customer. We're paying exorbitant rates to convert USD to AUD (think retail bank rates despite transacting multiple millions a year, ~3x what we'd pay Transferwise). There's no option to settle in USD, and a lot of our expenses are in USD, so we then pay another currency conversion fee when we spend.
It's problematic to the extent that we're considering whether the ongoing costs and hassle of setting up a US entity, dealing with international tax, compliance, parent companies etc. would be worthwhile.
Braintree have offered it for years so this might be the final motivation to switch over.
It's been around 7 or 8 years with Stripe now and it just seems like they are prioritising heavily increasing their average revenue per user at all costs.
If not, I would set up a US checking account and settle some portion stripe transactions there. Take that revenue and pay your US vendors. No currency conversions.
But lots of us have been using Stripe for a lot longer than that, and don't necessarily want or need all the extra things you're now putting under the "Billing" brand.
We haven't received any notification of a change from Stripe, but from the HN discussion, it looks like the option to just have a simple, automated recurring charge -- the key feature that attracted businesses like mine to Stripe in the first place -- is being removed. If that is the case then we'll naturally view the change as a 0.5% increase in Stripe's fees, pure and simple.
Your account has been upgraded to Stripe Billing for free. No matter how much revenue you process on Stripe, you’ll get unlimited use of Billing’s Starter plan included in the price you currently pay for payments. All new features are available in your account now, no API version upgrade necessary.
If Stripe pushed ahead forcing an additional 0.5% with no new features adopted, that's pretty predatory and the kind of rent seeking that will leave a bad taste in a lot of people's mouth which then when starting new projects won't be looking to adopt Stripe with the same passion they did years ago.
Those are reference customers and should be treated with much greater privilege. They are early adopters and could very easily become early the next group of vocal detractors. I can't help but wonder about the poor client advocate Stripe fired before they made this move.
> I'm sorry that it feels that way.
It's not just that it feels this way. It is this way. I'm still on the Subscriptions API and haven't seen anything in Billing compelling enough to rewrite my code to implement.
I'm not saying any other payment processor is better. They may not be. It's just that while I deeply respect some of your broader ethical stands, this kind of behavior is dismaying.
I think it is that way, and this is an attempt to make it feel a different way.
For some reason your designers have decided that your website should pick a language based on the ip address.
Stop guessing a language :)
[1] In Stripe's API, the subscriptions section is nested under "Billing"
[2] https://www.stripe.com/billing is all about handling subscriptions through Stripe
... What I'm not so happy about is: * we have asked Stripe to sign a contract for years (something requested by our institutional investors but have always been just pointed to an online MSA URL * we are now being asked to sign a contract suddenly w/new line-item charges and no ramp-up or notice period
Most companies (especially those that are PE backed) have already done year end planning + budgetting.
Happy to provide the details of our timeline but so far at a high-level: * contacted by a new account rep 11-days ago about signing a contract * still have not received the proposed rates for billing, processing, rev rec, sigma etc ... * ... but have been told that Billing charging needs to kick off 1/1/2021 (which is essentially 45-days away)
Thanks, JE
I'm curious how Patrick does it though as his attention isn't exactly cheap
btw there's a small bug on the storage part of the pricing plan calculation. It shows 5,525 GB units but then the calculation is for 10,100 units.
While you are here:
Any update on when Stripe will be available in South Africa ? We really need some alternatives to PayPal.
Hi folks -- as Edwin points out elsewhere in the thread, the article title isn't accurate. (I'll update or delete my comment if it's fixed.)
[Update: it was changed. It used to read "Stripe is now charging 0.5% more for recurring charges."]
You can happily make recurring charges yourself and no additional fees are incurred. Lots of Stripe customers do this and we don't charge anything extra for it.
If you decide to use Stripe Billing, which is a separate product, we charge for that. Stripe Billing's pricing hasn't changed in a few years. What's changing is that we're ending the several-year grace period where we didn't charge anything for Stripe Billing for businesses who started to use this functionality before 2018.
Charging for Billing helps us fund a lot more investment in it -- we've gone from very basic cron-like functionality to a pretty full-featured subscriptions management tool. (You can read more at https://stripe.com/billing.) Billing is now sophisticated enough that companies like Slack and Atlassian are using and paying for it. We've built things like "Smart Dunning" (which improves revenue recovery for failed charges by about 14%), better analytics, international payment method and invoicing support, and a whole host of other features. There are now more than 30 people working on improving Billing.
Importantly, Stripe Billing is (and will remain) significantly cheaper than most of the other competitors in the space.