| When I first signed up with Stripe years ago, it was a breath of fresh air. Stripe did one thing exceedingly well, at an understandable price and took minutes to integrate with. 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... [2] https://stripe.com/pricing#pricing-details |
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.