Although I agree with all the issues you raise, I think the confusing nature of the pricing is by design.

Stripe's fee model probably makes serious bank, because it's quite non-transparent and basically nothing is provided for free. Want even the slightest extra feature? +1% of your revenue (and repeat)

It's worth noting that most customers with any volume will be on custom contracts that will either be cheaper, include more features, or both. At my previous workplace we had this with relatively modest revenue and would renegotiate every year or two.

Is there a process for getting an account manager with Stripe? I think it would be useful for other reasons but cheaper fees is certainly good too.

I'd do like that:

- Have a large enough transaction volume, say, above $100k / mo.

- Use the contact form.

Note that i your transaction volume is $100k/mo, and Stripe takes 3% of it, it's $3k/mo for them. Maybe a customer that's worth paying extra attention to, but of course by spending a minimal amount of time.

I suspect that if your transaction volume were, say, $1M/mo, they would have contacted you already.

There's a "Contact Sales" link right next to the sign-in button on stripe.com.

“Everyone gets cheaper pricing except anyone you know.”

Stripe is also one of the most expensive payment services - enough so that I worked at a company where we had an in-house payments frontend for Asia which was basically a common integration over about 6 different major regional banks. The reason was pretty obvious: Stripe was something like a 2.5% surcharge, our system 0.2-0.5%. That was a huge difference in revenue.

How did you get the visa and mastercard interchange fees down so low? Just the interchange fees for non debit cards can be as high as 2.5% (premium travel cards for example), not even mentioning Stripe's fee then.

AFAIK it was basically just minimising Stripes cut so overall the cost may have been higher then that.

Ah, the "we're out of ideas and have nothing, time to squeeze until the company dies, to chase stock price" phase of a business.

Like your cable company!

It's worked for 45+ years for cable companies.

Negotiating for medium and high volume sales isn’t exactly unheard of…

It’s kind of the rule rather than the exception in B2B. Hell, a lot of businesses will give you better terms just for opening a business account.

Yeah well, this article is called “I hate Stripe.” People hate Comcast too.

> Stripe's fee model probably makes serious bank, because it's quite non-transparent and basically nothing is provided for free.

Whatever it is making, it is apparently not enough to IPO. I would temper my expectations.

Stripe ['s leadership] doesn't want to IPO, and its balance sheet doesn't need to. There's ridiculous demand for a Stripe IPO, whether it could is not at all in question.

An IPO is, if anything, a bad thing for a company. I wouldn't consider it a black mark that they aren't selling stock publicly and subjecting themselves to the "must grow every quarter at all costs" insanity.

You can make plenty of money and still be private. Look at Steam.

I’d say it’s not enough to satisfy early investors, who probably want a 10~50x return before IPO. They could definitely go public if they wanted to, and do ‘well’.

Does Stripe need to IPO? Are they just privately held, or do they have VCs or others that need to be paid back?

They have raised at least $6.5 Billion.

I'm one of the founders of OpenPay (getopenpay.com) and we support all this functionality and have a simple to use API. We are charging way less than Stripe so you don't have to pay the "Stripe tax" just to run your business

You can also bring in whichever payment processor you want which will help you save on your payment processing fees

FYI there’s a typo in one of your image assets below the fold on your landing page - under the subscription optimization tab, the failed payment, recovered payment mockup says “paymet” rather than “payment”.

Product looks cool in any case.

Thank you- will fix. Feel free to reach out to us if you'd like to give it a try

That sounds great, but with the "pricing" link on your site going to a "contact us" form, it's hard to be convinced of that :-(

agreed, would love some transparency on the pricing page

Isn't it just the reality of payment today ?

If you're not letting them do the checkout from start to end with only theme changes to the hosted payment page, you're signing up yourself to learn the different flavours of payment auth, callbacks and state management.

No! Stripe docs totally suck today. They're a labyrinth of things that do not impact my business that Stripe decided need to occupy my limited time.

I just want to take payments for dead-simple SaaS. I don't care about the 20,000 use cases for different billing product lifecycles, itemizations, etc.

"Launching a startup? Do this: [x]" would be incredible.

It's wild that Stripe doesn't have the 99% case covered.

The real reason for this is probably because Stripe's main customer isn't the scrappy upstart anymore, but rather the giants up-market. We're table scraps now.

> I just want to take payments for dead-simple SaaS

You'd be paying for the prepackaged all hosted and standardized offering (at the higher price point) if all you wanted was to "just" take payments.

I assume you actually want recurring payments, potentially lower fees and a personalized checkout experience ?

Welcome anyway, I've been playing with payments systems for a long time and there's no shortage of fun and new regulatory spice coming in every now and then. "Just" taking payments can be a whole way of life.

Is this not exactly what you are looking for?

https://docs.stripe.com/checkout/quickstart

But that's deceptive and not all you need. You wind up having to learn about all of the lifecycle and state machine pieces anyway.

The API surface area is large and cluttered with stuff that's entirely irrelevant to most business types, yet you have to understand which parts of the API, checkout session, and webhook callback payloads are relevant and mutate your subscription state.

I wholeheartedly disagree. I think the Stripe docs and developer experience is one of the greatest, if not the greatest, I've ever seen.

It has great user docs, API docs, developer centric UI elements like copy pastable IDs, webhook event browser, time travel features, test mode (!!), and you can even look at the exact API calls that the stripe UI itself is making. I've brought it up to many colleagues are awesome the docs and experience is...

IMHO, for most things, the data model is straight forward and well explained. Of course there are complicated topics and quirks, but that's just because payments is not easy in general..

I'm clearly a Stripe fanboy, but I am not affiliated in any way.

Stripe undoubtly has great docs. The problem is:

- Them adding a ton of products that are automatically integrated/opted-in their default payments stack

- This has massively increases the api surface, and the complexity of integrating stripe has gone up.

- And to top it off, they charge for every single "feature" that they automatically added in their payments stack.

I agree. I think stripe is complicated because accepting payments is complicated. It’s easy to start a new services that only support the 80% of use cases. Especially if you don’t have to consider fraud or regulatory requirements. But that remaining 20% is what kills your simplicity.

Stripe has both hosted checkout and subscription management pages.