Ask HN: How should I accept payments from pilot customers?

[penguinium]

Is it best for me to set up an entire Stripe integration with my website, or before a public launch should I just ask my first customers to venmo me? Would that make my project look unprofessional and worth less to them? It's a B2B SaaS and I plan to have monthly recurring payments.

[throw03172019]

I’d go for Stripe because you’ll seem more professional, especially as a B2B SaaS. It’s really not that bad, they’ve made it easy to integrate payment collection and a few webhooks to get you started.

[yen223]

A pretty decent in-between approach, if you aren't willing to go all-in with payment integration, is to use Stripe's hosted invoice page: https://stripe.com/docs/billing/invoices/hosted

[penguinium]

does that cost extra?

[lironmo]

It all depends on the resources you have and whether you are a B2B or B2C business. In the pilot phase I would not put in a payments component - because it could create a lot of holes that you might not want. Try to do things manually at this point - talk to each customer and charge them manually

[penguinium]

My worry is that this will look less professional, directly asking them to Venmo me. It may also look less trustworthy, if I'm negotiating a price directly with them and don't have a standard one on the website.

[anthony_franco]

I had the first one Venmo me just to verify people are willing to pay. Then I setup a quick solution using a no-code platform.

Maybe down the line I’ll build a fully custom one but for now it’s been working great.

[penguinium]

Can you elaborate on the no-code platform? I am working on a SaaS, so the most obvious thing is to just integrate Stripe... but that sounds like it'll be very tedious.