I'm about to work on payments for a new product, would like to try something new!
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.
We support all the edge cases you mentioned around variable/tiered pricing, coupons, etc all part of our solution
- 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.
MoR solutions are a good idea; the tax (F*K VATMOSS Europe) / accounting overhead is likely not worth it. Having a single B2B transaction whenever you want is much easier to deal with.
When your income is large enough that the % you'd be saving let you afford developer time to implement and maintain taxes / billing and extra for accounting of thousands of transactions, then go for it and switch to a cheaper solution.
Let's say you make 100k per year: the 2-3k you save on pure stripe won't pay for the extra developer / accounting time to maintain all that.
Currently we use a processor agnostic billing engine - sticky.io - but they were purchased by private equity and are doing private equity things. Raising prices, charging per transaction fees, etc. Plus, their software and api is downright terrible but it's what we decided on 12 years ago so here we are.
Vendor lock-in sucks. Open to payment stack suggestions.
I previously bootstrapped a business to 30M ARR and was sick of paying the "subscription tax"
We give you all the tools you need to build and run your subscription business without having to integrate a dozen different tools together and tear your hair out (and also break the bank). Feel free to reach out to us via the contact form–we're giving people on HN one year free
Obviously you need to use some third party services, but as soon as your business is viable, always be preparing the ability to switch to competitors.
https://alternativeto.net/software/stripe/
I don’t run any commerce sites, myself, but is there a big difference in using stripe vs a more traditional processor, like working with CardPointe or something?
Feel free to reach out to us and we'll hook you up
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.
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.
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
The issue is whether one needs a battleship sized, super flexible, yet expensive billing solution for much smaller problems.
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.