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by kmoriarty 1841 days ago
Thanks for the feedback! Completely understand your reaction to pricing. For a bit of context, we’ve spent the past year listening to users and trying to understand the best way to price. In finalizing our launch pricing, we made sure there are no fixed upfront costs or contracts, nor are there any per transaction fixed fees either. We tried to find a price point that ultimately was not prohibitive for small businesses but also portrayed the value of the product itself. Please do keep the feedback coming, we’re always open to hearing more from users: kmoriarty@stripe.com
2 comments

My honest feedback on pricing was "expensive but we would only want to apply it on non-US users." Also, we wouldn't want to have to pay for invoicing, which is honestly much much worse of a value prop. For someone with a 20% margin business, the combination of these and payments products is about 4%, or 20% of all profit.

While this is the first product since payments I have liked (so good work there) it would be nice to see Stripe work on reducing the transaction costs, particularly on the payments side. Right now for me I consider Stripe a part of the "credit card processing tax cabal". Payment processing fees are a huge tax on the world, and if stripe could help solve that and genuinely reduce it to the level it should be (nearly free marginally), I would have the utmost respect for them. I honestly think this should be the main company focus if they actually want to help customers.

It's worth noting that there's the interchange fees that come along with using a credit card in the US aren't just a pure profit rake for the credit card companies.

It obviously pays for computing resources and staffing and such, but beyond that it also, roughly, pays for all the fraud that happens with any credit card. In many cases, when someone does a fraud, it's someone "in the middle" (i.e. not the fraudster, the card holder, or the merchant) who ends up holding the bag.

It's also paying for some aggregate amount of credit risk that card users pose to their banks.

Credit card fees are high because fraud is such a colossal problem, and at various levels it's better for institutions to just eat costs (and thus slightly raise the minimum viable price they can charge for processing) than make it harder for people to buy things.

> "nor are there any per transaction fixed fees either"

Why not? Wouldn't fixed fees be preferable to a relative basis for something like this?

It punishes smaller transactions unfairly, which doesn't make a lot of sense since the size of the dollar amount probably doesn't have anything to do with the incremental cost to stripe to compute the tax bill.