For anyone wondering about pricing, here's our approach.
- For new Stripe customers, this is free up to the first (lifetime) $1M of payments.
- 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.
- What we've seen over Stripe's history is that customers handling large amounts of revenue have been forced to pay substantial amounts for expensive third-party systems. So, we've decided to build something that we think will be better and cheaper -- and that will, over time, increase the net revenue of businesses built on Stripe.
I'm sorry about any confusion in our communication around this!
Its not just a communication problem, it's a pattern. You guys did the same thing last year when you stopped returning fees on refunds.
I couldn't believe my eyes when I read that you weren't returning fees anymore. I get not returning the flat 0.30 transaction fee, but not returning the % fees smacks of being more worried about the corporate bottom line than customers. Many processors refund the % fees, and there's no way you couldn't negotiate special dispensation with "the various payment partners we work with" to at least be able to return the % fee.
I used to unabashedly recommend Stripe as the best payment processor -- a little expensive on the rate, but easy to set up and no monthly or hidden fees to worry about.
That changed as soon as I had my first new customer screaming about getting whacked with fees on a refund. Didn't affect my account, and your messaging was horrible on that change as well, so I blissfully recommended unaware of the change until a new customer to whom I'd sung the praises of Stripe got hit and had to yank all of the Stripe code and go to a direct processor.
Just because you grandfather existing customers doesn't mean you get off scot-free on unfavorable policies.
My recommendation immediately changed to only use Stripe if access to special niche features like Stripe Connect or non card payments were required, and otherwise use a direct card processor with defined fees (and much lower rates, like 0.5% lower at least).
Clearly your focus has changed from doing right by the little guy to "customers handling large amounts of revenue" and policies tilted toward the bottom line vs "rightness". That's fine, and a natural part of many corporations during growth... Just telling you how it's affected my perceptions of Stripe and my recommendations to customers.
Stripe has become masters at patronizing customers. We all know it is about the bottom line and the act is getting old at this point. The company was built on developer referrals and now that they are at critical mass - all of the "little guys" get drown out.
Depends on volume and risk profile. There are many very sharp Authorize.Net resellers out there that will work with you to get a great rate for your situation. I've seen 2.2% rates on 50k/mo of processing for low risk customers. Of course, with that you get some additional fees to factor in -- monthly statement fee, international, Amex, etc... but it pencils out to way lower than 3% at a decent volume.
And many of these processors will give you gross deposit which is the only way to make things easy for an accountant. The net fees model Stripe uses is a nightmare for reconciliation at any sort of scale.
This isn't to say I've abandoned Stripe entirely -- there are some cases where it makes sense, when you're actually using some of the advanced features and API, not just a straightforward card charge.
I just completed a Stripe Connect integration that handles millions a month for several clients... but even there you run into half baked/stapled on feelings when you try to produce a full featured process that works at scale. For example, there's no straightforward way to provide a batch report for a Stripe Connect client -- the charge ID's don't match up with the platform account, and the only way to fully map which charges/refunds/chargebacks are in a given deposit for the client account is to link them up by amount and date/time....
Research around. Many of the same processors will work with you even at low volume, although the rate wouldn't be as good. Of course, with little or no volume, the rate doesn't matter as much.
Any information on support for Europe? And if support for Europe were to be in the pipeline, would it be for the whole of Europe or only specific countries? We'd love to use Stripe for billing as well, but because Stripe is an American company, we feel like as Europeans we're constantly an afterthought and would therefore prefer a European provider. What's your opinion on this?
Btw, I was at the Stripe offices 2 years ago and it was an amazing experience. I really like what Stripe has done over the years. Keep it going and thanks!
> we feel like as Europeans we're constantly an afterthought
Agreed.
Ahem, Stripe team. May I have your attention?
Could you please, please, please do something about helping your customers with calculating, charging, and tracking VAT to EU countries? It is currently a glaring omission from your services.
Or, adding support for SEPA/EU Bank payments to Stripe Checkout?
I know it's in the main Stripe API, but if I'm going to have to roll my own integration, I'm just going to go use PayPal.
PayPal has much cleaner API for non-card payments.
With Stripe I need two different codepaths for bank payments and cards....
while you are talking about SEPA, i know that there is a support for SEPA Direct Debit, but are you thinking about implementing Swiss Direct Debit, right now there are two sub implementation one from Postfinance and one from the Banks, there are talks about combining it in one system in 2 years or so but right now its kinda shitty + i would rather work with stipe api then with camt and pain files.
I am very happily using Paddle. They treat me very well, but what makes their product really sticky is the (global, not just EU) VAT handling. I basically do nothing, and it just happens for me.
EU support is coming! The market is quite different, as you obviously know, and we want to take the time to test Billing properly with European users. But enabling support for Europe is a high priority for us.
Hi, we're working on adding support for Poland, but don't have a fixed ETA at this point. Mind sending me a note so we can talk more once we're ready? I'm pglootz@stripe.com.
Against all my instincts, even though this post is unconstructive and snarky and flame bait, and even though I am European (or perhaps because of it), I have to upvote this. European people, those voting for representatives voting for representatives (!) making the laws, need to start feeling the negative feedback of the regulations. I’m not saying there are no benefits to consumer protection; there are, I am a massive GDPR fan, but we are too unaware of the opportunity price we pay for this.
Be aware, fellow Europeans: there is a cost to all regulation. If you feel like a constant afterthought, maybe it’s because you are.
(I know these are not necessarily specifically related to this Stripe product. It’s more of a cultural undertone. What I’m trying to say is: the parent comment has a point.)
As a fellow European living in the US I feel divided about this: while the opportunity cost is high and the business environment is definitely stifled by regulation, the quality of life and health consequences of the lack of regulation in the USA are massive and there's very little recourse for the little people against the criminal misbehavior of corporations.
There must be a happy medium between the two positions, I don't know that a country has gotten it right yet but the US is no paradise.
There is no lack of regulation in the USA, it's just the USA has some wrong regulations that creates horrible results you see sometimes. Most of it is from a lack of single payer healthcare and a public culture of infrastructure neglect with high amounts of waste compared to pretty much everywhere else in the world.
I really think it comes down to legislation philosophy. In the english speaking countries, cost of compliance is something that is thought about for small businesses, so many regulations are small business exempt until you get to certain employee counts or revenue numbers.
In the EU, that concept doesn't seem to exist and businesses of 1 are assumed to be $100M revenue businesses that can afford to do things like GDPR properly.
If you are a 1 man show, how about not collecting data you most likely don't need anyway? And the 4% global revenue fine the GDPR is famous for does exactly what you want -- scales with the means of the business.
Last I saw there was a minimum fine of x million Euros.
Edit: had to verify. It seems a bit more reasonable: """Article 83 of the General Data Protection Regulation provides details of the administrative fines. There are two tiers of fines. The first is up to €10 million or 2% of annual global turnover of the previous year, whichever is higher. The second is up to €20 million or 4% of annual turnover of the previous year, whichever is higher.""" - https://www.gdpr.associates/what-is-gdpr/understanding-gdpr-...
Yes, because a minimum fine of $10 million for a 1 person business is totally reasonable, unless by the grace of the bureaucracy, they decide to give you a warning instead. /s
Also the GP post, there is more than 'avoiding collecting data'. If you have text field comments form and a 3rd party puts 'personal data' in that, then that is GDPR liable! You also need audit logs and and list of other requirements that needs multi engineer teams to implement properly.
As a result, most small businesses with email are probably not going to be properly compliant on some level and you can prosecute anyone. Just like the new-ish VAT laws, large stores are going to be compliant because they can afford it, while some petty bureaucrat will prosecute the small online shops instead.
I don’t see your logic. Of course new features of a US company are going to be focussed on their home market first.
And claiming that regulation in EU is stifling business is a bit naive. Regulation is everywhere. Have you ever tried to sell an app that uses encryption (like TLS or SSH) on the app store? The stuff you need to do in the US for „export compliance“ is ridiculous (even if it‘s an app that wasn‘t written in the US in the first place)
I doubt that EU regulations are more onerous than their US counterparts. And, obviously, the EU is mostly just replacing country-specific regulations, making it about 16x easier to enter the European market.
I'd also like people to name specific regulations they disagree with, yet any time I challenge s/o they slink away.
In this case, a stripe rep in this thread posted a list of their todos for the EU. Note that literally "putting VAT ID numbers on invoices" makes their top 5! Can't be that bad after all:
"localize the invoices, add EU specific payment methods to invoices, improve tax support, make default invoice templates EU compliant with VAT ID"
US requirements around what we put on invoices: 0
EU requirements around what we put on invoices: Still figuring it out
The technical implementation is not difficult. It's dealing with all the lawyers and accountants who have to understand regulations of 27 different countries.
There is a significant difference between "not regulated" and "regulated at all". The burden of understanding the regulation itself is a cost, even if the actual compliance turns out to be simple.
His opinion "I wonder why the EU is an afterthought when you need to spend millions on compliance for every new feature" is not backed up by any facts.
If he had said that meeting the legal requirements in 28 different independent and sovereign countries adds too much cost then he would be correct.
Remember the EU Single Market and Custom Union does not cover every aspect of commerce and industry across all 28 member states.
Having said that, the Payment Services Directive 2 (PSD2) which applies to Stripe, will remove any remaining barriers and costs that still exist between member states when applied to the provision of electronic payments. If one was to add in the eIDAS directive then meeting compliance for identity, fraud, etc will soon be irrelevant.
The EU has been moving towards more standardization for quite a while now. The most prominent example is the euro coin. And although the GDPR may seem to many like another regulation to comply to, it's actually a unifying regulation because now you don't have to deal with separate privacy laws for each member state.
From a tax point of view, EU is a lot easier to deal with than the US if you have to collect sales tax in the US.
There are two big differences.
Let's say I'm selling some digital good online. Consider three purchasers, one in the US in the state of Washington, one in Germany, and one in France.
First, how much tax do I have to collect from each?
For the German customer, that is easy. It is 19% VAT. I don't have to care where in Germany they live.
For the French customer, that is easy. It is 20$ VAT. I don't have to care where in France they live.
For the US customer in Washington...it is not easy. There is a state wide 6.5% sales tax, but there are also county, city, and other sales taxes that I have to collect. For example, if the customer is in the city of Seattle, I'm supposed to collect the 6.5% state tax, plus a 2.7% city tax, plus a 0.4% for something called the "Regional Transit Authority"...that's 9.6%. If that person is over in Bellevue instead of in Seattle, it would have been 10% (6.5% state, 3.5% Bellevue).
For the US customer, I have to care where in their state they live. Also, tax boundaries are not guaranteed to line up with postal code boundaries, so to do that tax accurately I really would need to collect their full postal address (which since I'm selling a digital good I have no use for except for calculating taxes).
Second, what do I do with the tax I collect?
For the EU, I sign up for the VAT MOSS system in a single EU country. Then each quarter I have to file a simple form with the tax authorities in that single EU country that simply lists each EU country, what my total taxable sales were in that country, the VAT rate I used, and the amount of VAT collected. I turn the collected VAT over to that single country's tax authorities. Then they deal with distributing it to all the other countries.
For the US...I have to deal with each state I collect tax for separately. Each has its own forms. Each has its own place to file them. Each has its own place to pay.
If you have to deal with more than just your own state and maybe a handful of others in the US, you pretty much have to use a third party service that specialized in handling all of this. For companies in lines of business that are only barely profitable, this could be prohibitively expensive.
If Congress ever decides to require online companies to collect tax for all states, instead of just those that they have a presence in, and they do not require that the states use something like the VAT MOSS system, and they do not require that each state has a single rate for out-of-state non-present sellers, it's going to be nightmare for small companies, and possibly drive many out of business.
The situation wouldn’t be nearly as bad if the federal government offered some sort of API or search service to which all states would have to report, but this is currently only being addressed by the private sector. And at kind of a prohibitive price for very small businesses, in some cases.
Fortunately, there’s almost no enforcement at all with respect to small- to medium-sized businesses collecting and reporting interstate sales tax. Do the best you can with it.
The core Stripe Billing features actually work in the EU: flexible billing, our recovery tools, and invoicing. You can use subscriptions with all of the payment methods on Stripe, including SEPA DD, ideal, and more. But as Patrick mentioned, there's a lot we can do to make the experience great for European companies and that's what we're focusing on right now. We're thinking about ways to localize the invoices, add EU specific payment methods to invoices, improve tax support, make default invoice templates EU compliant with VAT ID, and more. If you'd like to try early betas, let me know!
We're about to re-evaluate our billing system for StyleCI and as we're based in the EU, we'd love to give this a go. My email is james [at] alt-three.com
We are in France and we already use Stripe subscriptions. We'd like to try early betas of Stripe Billing for EU. My email is nicolas at vocationcity dot com.
FWIW, since Stripe has been completely ignoring Central Europe (I'm in Poland), I've been using Braintree (https://www.braintreepayments.com), which does want my money.
It's not as hip and fashionable as Stripe, but does work fairly well. They do subscriptions, but I had to take care of invoicing myself.
> 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.
The email that existing customers received was ambiguous on this point. It said this: "Since you used Stripe Subscriptions in the past year, the Stripe Billing Starter plan is included in your current pricing."
Many existing customers that rely on basic subscriptions probably think their rates are about to go up. Maybe you guys need a follow-up email to explain that they're not?
Very sorry about the lack of clarity in the email! You will get all of the functionality that you have now, plus anything additional that we add to Stripe Starter, at the price you currently pay to Stripe. No additional fees here, even beyond $1M lifetime cap.
We signed up for Stripe account on February 9, but are yet to start processing paymens, will our account be grandfathered in as well? I sent you email yesterday asking about it too. We did not receive Stripe email about changes. Could you please clarify it? Thank you!
Would love to hear what "more featureful" means for you and your business! What are the big features they have but we don't? (I honestly don't pay attention to them so not sure what features they offer...genuinely curious how we could be serving businesses like yours better.)
Josh to be honest we used you guys for almost a year and repeatedly gave large amounts of feedback, none of it which was really acted upon. To the point it felt that Baremetrics had essentially stalled. In fact, the only change I remember from the time we used Baremetrics is that the colors of the dashboard changed to be more pastel.
Baremetrics is a great "early release" product, but we don't see development on it, nor even a hint at a roadmap. Profitwell has a lot more features (Paypal support, customer tracing, a powerful UI, etc) and we constantly see new features being added.
I could tell you the same stuff I said when we unsubscribed: Paypal support, a better API, "cancel at period end" support (which Profitwell does have), etc... Wish you well with it, and I hope for your success as I really like how transparently you run Baremetrics, but the product just doesn't cut it for us. And I think you should definitely pay attention to what Profitwell is doing (or any competitors really).
Fair enough! 2017 was a tough year for us (especially May to December). You're correct that we launched very few improvements in that time. On the backend we were doing a complete rewrite, which ultimately set the stage for us to roll out really powerful new features like Segmentation (https://baremetrics.com/features/segmentation) which launched a couple of months ago.
Since January we've been on a roll, releasing a slew of new features and updates and have a ton more on the way.
Certainly wish we'd handled that big rewrite differently since it did leave a bad taste for some folks, but it is what it is. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The features that are crucial to one business are inconsequential to others, so I appreciate your perspective on what you guys really need.
Would love for you to give us a try again down the road and thanks again for taking the time to give feedback!
I know you wrote this to Josh, but just jumping in here to address the ProfitWell side. :)
1. You're 100% right. We don't have a live demo. We're working on a solution for you here, but it's been delayed for some other cool features. Happy to share when we launch something for you. I know a call can be annoying, but it wouldn't be a sales person. Most metrics demos are from our product/engineering team. :)
2. As for pricing - we don't typically hear it's confusing, but it's 100% free forever. We make money through our add-ons. There's definitely something here to get better at though, so I'll take this back to the team to make it rock.
The short answer to your question is, “Yes.” The long answer is:
> INFORMATION SHARING
1. With Third Parties:
We may share your information with third-party business partners...
...
2. With Service Providers:
We may share your information with third parties who provide services on our behalf...to which these services may include:
Payment processing
Providing customer service
Sending marketing communications
Conducting research and analysis
Providing cloud computing infrastructure
...which also means, “Yes.” In particular, “research and analysis” is not clarified (nor would a clarification outside the formal ToS be legally binding). As long as there is a defensible interpretation of these clauses, they can freely sell all of your information. This also might be of interest to you:
> We will respond to your request within a reasonable timeframe. In certain circumstances we may be required by law to retain your personal information, or may need to retain your personal information in order to continue providing a service.
There is a legitimate reading of this clause which allows ProfitWell to retain your data indefinitely because they’re providing a service to someone.
Let's back up a second. The silence isn't because I/we don't want to talk about this, it's because it was 2am here in Boston and I was sleeping at that point (coincidentally after leaving the office around 1130pm pouring over our new GDPR paperwork).
The short answer is 100%, absolutely no - we do not, have not, and will not ever sell your data. We say this pretty clearly at the top in our terms and services, which you didn't link to (found here: https://www.profitwell.com/terms-security). For context, there's a difference between a privacy policy and a terms of service. I'm not a lawyer, but from my understanding the reason here we structured things this way (as a lot of BI/analytics providers do) is because one handles the actual handling of data, especially pursuant to EU/International/US law, and the other handles the actual service of that data. For instance, we will share your email address with our email service or with our payment processor. The terms are inclusive of the privacy policy.
From a terms perspective, we don't access someone's account unless given permission for QA, analysis, and the like. We do aggregate data for research purposes, but there needs to be a minimum of 30 companies in that data set and if you'd like to opt out of that we're more than happy to sign/put together custom Ts&Cs, which we do with almost every company that requests one.
Additionally, with GDPR the nature of our privacy policy is going one step further beyond EU/Swiss Privacy Shield compliance to offering up DPAs and a whole host of new functionality to make sure we go beyond the requirements.
Apologies if I'm coming off any bit passive aggressive/defensive. Just trying to explain and sometimes the legalease can be tough to sift through. I started my career working in network security/intelligence, so I personally take this really seriously and we put a lot of work into all of this fun stuff (pen tests, training, our policies, etc.), so I take it too personally when hearing someone misinterpret how we work. We can always make this clearer, as we tried to do with the pre-amble to our terms, but happy to do what some other companies have done and really refine the plain speak of our terms and privacy policy (especially since they're shifting a bit with GDPR). Assume you meant the best here with your comments though, so hope this clears this up at least a bit.
From a monetization perspective, we do offer a service to _someone_ - our customers. We sell Price Intelligently, ProfitWell Retain, ProfitWell Recognized, and ProfitWell Premium. All of these products are feature and performance based - and more than paying the bills for us to continue to invest in building the company without a drop of funding (which is intentional to keep us independent).
The reason we set up our monetization this way is that frankly we don't think there's a whole lot of value in taking your data and putting it into a bunch of graphs. I know that's trivializing BI/analytics, but that's the crux of the industry right now. Plus, doing willingness to pay and pricing analysis supports this - hence why most BI companies have to go upmarket to survive/grow. Instead, metrics are the gateway.
The world we're building is one where ProfitWell can show you the one graph (or few) that you need to look at - not the 60 you need to sift through to truly understand if there's a problem or not. Then we're going to help you see exactly the metric you should worry about (and the ones you shouldn't worry about) before offering up resources to help you fix it or a product that takes care of that metric for you with 0 work on your part through what we call an anti-active usage product (like ProfitWell Retain). This just feels like the right move to best serve our customers and the greater community.
You should resolve the discrepancy between this comment and your Privacy Policy. A message board comment is not legally binding, and what I linked to has substantial wiggle room in interpretation.
Yup - a HN comment is definitely not legally binding. Given some of the flame wars on some of the threads over the years, that would definitely be a scary world.
Based on a number of lawyers (we've gone deep on this over the past several years), I'm confident this is resolved through the combination of our terms and privacy policy - the EU/Swiss privacy shield stipulations, which drove the privacy policy encompasses the specific data there that's shared (check out the section entitled "Collection", which is then what's referenced in the shared section). These are common information to engage in internet commerce like email, billing info, etc. This is actually specifically why we had language in our Terms to encompass the actual financial data. The ironic part of all this is we repeatedly told our legal folks we needed to simplify, simplify, simplify.
All that being said - you clearly came to the page and thought the worst based on the language, so I guess it doesn't really matter if we're legally doing the right thing, we need to make sure you (and other folks who reach us) are interpreting and seeing what we're doing as intended.
Give me/us a little bit of time to figure out how to make this instantly obvious. As I mentioned, we're in the midst of clearing up our house based on GDPR requirements, so it's a good time to revisit. Really appreciate the feedback - only way we get better. :)
For greater context, the reason why I’m saying your Privacy Policy needs to be revised for precision is because:
1. I have experience acquiring data for the financial industry, and your privacy policy looks like the kind used to discreetly allow data brokering for free apps that have a lot of user data, and
2. I’ve seen executives who do sell data deny that they sell data by being overly literal and obtuse about what users mean when they ask if their data is sold. When users ask if their data is sold they’re usually including “data sharing with affiliates”, even if they aren’t savvy enough to use that terminology. The concern there is that user data collected by third parties is allowed to be reshared by their affiliates and under opaque terms that do not preclude monetization.
In EU, you need to write something like "...share data with third-party service providers..." already if you use AWS, because customer data will not only be held at your premises, but also held by another company (Amazon).
It seems to be difficult to phrase the Privacy Policy in a way that will satisfy this condition, and at the same time remove the 'wiggle room' you see.
That has the big disadvantage that if you switch from AWS to Google Cloud, you need to notify all of your customers about the changed policy and ask them for consent again. I have not seen any Privacy Policy yet which lists the service providers.
You don't need to ask for consent, because it's typical that a clause will simply state, "Continued use of this service indicates acceptance of these terms", etc. That seems like a non-problem as far as these things go.
The reason you don't see privacy policies which list that information is not because it has an exorbitant inconvenience cost, it's because they benefit directly from that information asymmetry.
You actually do, because now you want to send data to Google Inc., for which you don't have the consent of your customers yet. They only agreed to sending it to Amazon. You can't make them agree to any future changes of your Privacy Policy.
edit: yes, you can send out a notification on every change and tell your customers that it is an implicit consent if they don't object. But I still wouldn't want to do that for every change of service provider, and there can be quite a few such providers in an SaaS.
If I understand correctly, finishing the last citation with:
"[in order to continue proving a service] to you."
would at least resolve the problem of retaining user data indefinitely, but I also totally agree with the free interpretation of "Conducting research and analysis".
Also, because Profitwell is available to customers in Europe, it will soon have to align with GDPR requirements (which also includes the right to being forgotten), even if it's not a European company or otherwise face fine risks.
Re: privacy/terms - hope the other comment I just made clears some things up. Happy to answer any questions if not, of course.
Re: GDRP - you're absolutely right. We'll be required to align with GDPR in just over a month. We're all set from an engineering perspective and rolling through all the fun documentation, agreements, compliance records, and trainings from a legal perspective now.
Hey Joewee - wanted to answer this directly here in case the other longer, more in-depth comment gets a bit buried - short and long answer is no. We have never and will never sell user data. We monetize through a bunch of products that help optimize different pieces of your business - pricing through Price Intelligently, churn through ProfitWell Retain, revenue recognition through ProfitWell Recognized, etc.
I explained this in depth in response to one of the comments here, but the crux of this is that metrics are the gateway, which allow you to see the problems in your business. We then offer resources or products to help with those problems.
FWIW I love that Baremetrics has a live demo as well and it's what turned me towards them in the first place. But I don't understand what you mean by "simpler pricing". Profitwell is literally free, I don't get how that's not simpler pricing.
They do have an opt-in "Recover" product, just like Baremetrics, which is priced exactly the same way as Baremetrics.
We don't want to be perceived as cheap, but super expensive isn't our plan either. We're free for companies below $10K MRR, then charge on subscriber volumes. We can offer custom pricing to high-volume/low-margin businesses, feel free to reach out if you'd like to discuss nick [at] chartmogul.com
Hey Dictum - we're free for non-basic usage, basic usage, and everything in-between. I explained a lot of why this is the case in the blog post link below (when we went all in for free), but it really comes down to the following:
PHILOSOPHICAL
1. In software (and the subscription economy) we're moving away from function based pricing to outcome based pricing. Putting this simply in the context of analytics/reporting means that if I just take your data and put it into a bunch of graphs, it's helpful, but not valuable, even if they are the right graphs (and most of the time they aren't the right graphs, at least in most BI/analytics products).
2. Based on this, we believe in outcome based pricing. We make money by selling products like Retain, Price Intelligently, etc. that all have a specific number we can point to (in your free ProfitWell account :)) that we helped move in the right direction. For some of these products we then only perfectly charge based on our performance. Others where we can't measure this precisely, we still price on a value metric axis.
ANALYTICAL
1. Metrics/analytics are a terrible business from a willingness to pay and unit economics perspective. People don't really appreciate how much work goes into 100% accuracy (that's our thing compared to our competitors fwiw). It took years to be perfect and even now we're still finding edge cases of edge cases. Multiply this by the number of billing systems and it takes a lot of work to support this free product.
Here's the thing though - back to that lack of appreciation - when measuring the willingness to pay for analytics/metrics, people just aren't willing to pay that much. We measured this well ahead of going all in on free and found that our unit economics, especially in a market that's weak in number of logos (subscription market is much smaller than people think). As a result, most BI/analytics companies go up market. We're upmarket and do have an enterprise plan for all the fun enterprise fixings people need, but we don't want to waste massive amounts of CAC fighting for $50/month or even $150/month. Creating a phenomenal user experience (we're not there yet) is so much valuable. Plus, we're able to show our customers they have a problem that we can then sell an add-on for.
Long story short, this business and space requires a scalpel, not a sledgehammer for growth. Hope that's helpful. Always up for answering questions.
We don't plan on stopping. Admittedly this gets us in some trouble being a growing company, because we need to make sure our free product is the best for our customers AND we offer up stellar paid products. A whole lot of surface area, especially for a bootstrapped company (although we're past the Ramen stage - $10M+ ARR and 45 folks :)).
There's a lot of work we did to make sure we're learning as quickly as possible that really helps advance the mission on all fronts.
This comment needs to be stuck to the top of this thread—the thread has already got out of hand wrt/ the confusion on how this affects current customers.
Thanks for clearing up the communication on this! I've been a happy Stripe user for years, now!
we use stripe subscriptions now quite a lot, and I'm a bit worried about the whole invoice pricing - could you please clarify that a bit?
the web site says invoices are free for up to first 2K, then $1 per invoice. our recurring charges to customers now are around $2.99 per month, I hope you're not planning to take $1 more away from that. does the invoice price apply for each recurring payment cycle, or am I reading something wrong here?
For existing customers, there's no pricing change. You just get more functionality than before for free.
Will anything change for those of us who might not need that new functionality? The wording in the email is that Stripe Billing "replaces" Stripe Subscriptions, but historically Stripe has been good at not breaking its API. We're concerned about another situation like GoCardless last year, where existing integrations would get broken.
The one thing we'd love to see improved is fixing failed charges. We've never been able to find much documentation on the previous settings for Dunning management, and support emails on the subject went unanswered. However, our stats for churn caused by mysterious Stripe payment failures are consistently quite a bit worse than the ones you mention in your publicity today, and relatively few of our customers resubscribe after their subscription is cancelled like that even if they were previously happy and active users so this does significantly hurt growth. This has been our #1 problem with Stripe for a long time. If this new system leads to better Dunning management and better documentation about how it works, that would be positive.
On your integration -- you won't have to change anything if you're currently using Stripe Subscriptions. You can continue as you are.
On high decline rates -- Of course, we're hoping Smart Retries and automatic card updater help you here without any additional work on your side. That said, drop us a line! There's actually quite a few things you can do on your end to minimize declines (pass us the right information at the time of charge, segment your decline reason codes in Sigma, experiment with trials, etc.) that can help reduce passive churn. (Docs on declines here: https://stripe.com/docs/declines)
Thanks for the reassurance on the current subscriptions integration. A first look at the API suggested that updating to the latest Stripe API was now going to involve some breaking changes, e.g., introducing products and requiring one to set up a plan.
On the decline rates, we actually have dropped you (Stripe) a line -- many times, in fact, and via multiple channels. In some cases, we never received a reply at all. In the others, the reply was essentially that you didn't know why the failure rates were so high and there was nothing actionable you could suggest to improve them.
I appreciate the link to the declines page, but I think that information has been available for quite a while now. What we have really needed is the detail about exactly what would happen if we configured the existing Dunning management to retry things, for example which objects get created in your system and/or get reused on retried payments, and which webhooks get sent at which points in the try/retry/give-up process and which objects they refer to. As far as I'm aware, none of this has ever been included in your usual documentation areas.
With today's announcement, it would now also be helpful to know the differences between the previous Dunning controls and the new Billing system, and how to migrate between them if necessary. The controls for the new smart retries feature seem to be in the same area on the dashboard, but as with the older controls, if there's any documentation anywhere about what any of these settings actually do under the hood, or how to simulate the relevant scenarios for integration and testing purposes, I can't find it.
It would also help to fix some limitations of the current tools, and again maybe the new Billing system helps with this but we haven't spotted it yet. For example, one problem we've run into a few times now is that address verifications are all-or-nothing. Either we don't use them (presumably worse for fraud detection) or we do (but then if a customer moves house and doesn't tell us, their next charge on a subscription will fail). In terms of risk, it would seem to make sense to check the details that don't appear on the card itself for the first payment(s), but after a while to trust that the card really does belong to the customer claiming it and downgrade/ignore those signals in later fraud checks, but this doesn't currently seem to be possible.
I appreciate that you're probably all very busy today with the roll-out of the new system, but I'm sure we're not the only ones who would be grateful if these kinds of documentation gaps and any actual limitations in the functionality could be addressed when time allows.
Thank you for the invitation, but as this happened several times over a period of years, there's not really any specific communication worth following up at this stage.
If you'd like to help, I'd suggest that the online documentation pages would be the most effective area you could look into. As Stripe has grown, gaps have appeared from time to time, where dashboard features or API calls weren't fully described. In this case, the entire feature set seem to be missing at the moment, so if there's anything you can do to fill in that gap and provide the kinds of specific details I mentioned in my previous comment, that could help others in a similar position to us as well.
In the rare cases where an existing customer is forced to migrate accounts (due to incorporation/moving elsewhere) is that considered an existing customer?
Can you share some details on when Stripe will be available for Israeli start-ups? There's quite a big ecosystem here dying to use Stripe but we just can't.
Also wondering how the new invoice and receipt emails are sent out?
> Under invoices there are two new documents "Invoice PDF" and "Receipt PDF" which are different from the standard e-mail receipts. Are these documents emailed to the customer automatically? Is there a way to control this?
(Pm on Stripe billing) There's a param in the API that indicates whether you want an invoice to be sent out or charged automatically -- you want `billing` to be `send_invoice`: https://stripe.com/docs/api#invoice_object-billing
For receipts, you can turn them on in your account settings: dashboard.stripe.com/account
Does "existing customers" mean someone (like me) who has a Stripe account set up, but who hasn't (yet) started accepting payments? Am I grandfathered in?
The email sent by Stripe says "Since you used Stripe Subscriptions in the past year, the Stripe Billing Starter plan is included in your current pricing."
So... based on that, it seems that "existing customers" means "customers that have actually used the product we're replacing".
I think we'd all appreciate a confirmation or clarification, though. :)
We'll make sure you're taken care of here. (If you're just running test subscription charges right now, you're still grandfathered. You can ping me any time if you have questions.)
I wish Stripe interface was more friendly. Looking at Freshbooks and Stripe, Freshbooks makes it look so simple and nice. Any plans to make your user interface more friendly to casual users who are not devs? Thanks.
This looks great, but I also see a lot of functionality being restricted to USA. That would be quite limiting for us as we are based in Europe and have the vast majority of our customers there. :(
Can you clarify what "Advanced reporting with Sigma" refers to in the Scale tier? Which fraud features are included in the base tier and which are a paid upgrade? Thanks in advance?
I assume Sigma refers to their SQL-based analytics product [1]. I think (and might be wrong) that most fraud-prevention features are included by default in all Stripe products, including Radar?
Sorry to hijack this thread but I wanted to ask if there's any news about supporting payments in Brazil. I've requested an invite 2 years ago and never heard a word.
we are a current enterprise subscription customer with more then 200k subscription transactions per year - we also have more then 40k a la carte transactions (non subscription w/no invoice) per year. If we move the a la carte transactions to the new invoice model will we be charged per invoice?
So as a customer of yours who still has to use PayPal because so many Europeans have "bank cards..." What do you recommend? Using both PayPal & Stripe? PayPal is a work around because, for example, a US Stripe account can't take EU "bank cards" (which account for about 1/3 of payments coming from the EU, as I see in Stripe's error logs) or non-US ACH.
Yes, like StavrosK said, for anyone who has significant customers outside of the US - there are lots of countries that use various types of "bank cards." Netherlands iDEAL is fairly well-known, but I get lots of customers with Visa & Mastercard "bank cards" in Italy, Germany, etc - all whose payments fail on Stripe (but they try anyway, not realizing theirs is not a typical "credit/debit" card).
For anyone wondering about pricing, here's our approach.
- For new Stripe customers, this is free up to the first (lifetime) $1M of payments.
- 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.
- What we've seen over Stripe's history is that customers handling large amounts of revenue have been forced to pay substantial amounts for expensive third-party systems. So, we've decided to build something that we think will be better and cheaper -- and that will, over time, increase the net revenue of businesses built on Stripe.
I'm sorry about any confusion in our communication around this!