[gelatocar]

I also had issues with stripe's automatic tax. We use stripe's subscriptions with free trials but don't collect credit card details up front, preferring to make sign up simple and low friction. Automatic tax is charged at 0.5% of each transaction, and apparently a trial ending is considered a transaction even if the user has no payment method, so we were hit with automatic tax fees for every trial end even if we received no money for them.

Overall my experience with stripe has been pretty negative and the large gap between my perception of the quality of their products, and the reality I discovered in actually using them has made me realize how much effort they put in to marketing to developers.

[Aeolun]

> I discovered in actually using them has made me realize how much effort they put in to marketing to developers

I think the problem is. When I used them like 5-6 years ago, their offering was absolutely legendary. So much so that I happily moved over from 1.5% fees on Authorize to 3% on Stripe.

Right now? It’s basically become everything it seemed to be fighting against in the past.

[maxwelldone]

What's a good alternative these days? Especially in NA.

[sam0x17]

If you want something barebones with the smallest possible transaction fees and a good API, Helcim was quite good at least a few years ago when I used it. This was for a project that did a lot of micro-charges and they were the only payment processor I could find where that would still be profitable because of their (then) low fees. Not sure what their fee structure is now, though.

[andy_ppp]

Adyen seems to be a fair bit cheaper, no idea about if they are good or not

[jbverschoor]

All the big boys run on Adyen.

[mperham]

Adyen seems to be missing a huge chunk of Stripe's functionality: subscriptions, billing portal, etc.

[hardwaresofton]

Do you have any examples or could you mention some industries?

[nostrebored]

I worked briefly in sales at stripe, and most large enterprises are on or have considered Adyen. Keep in mind that many of these businesses will use more than one payment solution.

The business I’m working at now splits traffic between adyen, stripe, and others. Anecdotally, stripe has the best payment success rate of any of our providers.

[telesilla]

Vueling, Booking.com, Dropbox for example.

[AlwaysRock]

Adyen and bolt seem to be popular.

[edwinwee]

Could you email me at [e-mail] and we can dig a bit more into this?

[gelatocar]

Hi Edwin, I appreciate you offering. I did message support about this but it pretty quickly hit the limit of the time I was willing to put in to try and retrieve the money we lost (which wasn't all that much). It is one of those things where the way Stripe charges is technically correct as you need to calculate tax for all transactions even if they aren't fulfilled. But the odd behavior of trying to charge at end of trial even if a user doesn't have a payment method combined with charging 0.5% of all transactions whether fulfilled or not results in a pretty unexpected outcome. Changing any one of these behaviors, or even making the documentation clearer would stop this happening to anyone else probably.

[edwinwee]

It'd be useful to take a closer look at your invoices, so let me know. The Stripe Tax fee is charged for the volume of the invoice—a trial invoice should have a volume of $0, so the Stripe Tax fee would not be charged.

However, after the trial and when your customer starts paying, you'll have an invoice that's >$0—that's when the Stripe Tax fee would be charged.

We talk about a bit about this in https://stripe.com/docs/tax/faq#when-do-you-charge-a-fee-for..., but we'll try to update this with a clearer explanation.

[simfree]

Hey Edwin,

I appreciate your help in the past getting our business unblacklisted from Stripe in the past.

Stripe seems to be trying to move up the value chain, but problems like this tax calculation issue and the fear of Stripe deciding to brick the accounts of businesses keeps other businesses and worker owned co-ops in the industry I work in from considering Stripe.

Does Stripe plan to review and unban accounts of businesses that were solely banned for being in formerly undesirable or blacklisted categories?

Additionally, emails like the one below do spook me: Our data shows that 72% of your transactions in the past six months were recurring and you are not currently automating recurring payments. Stripe Billing can make it easier and faster for your customers to pay you on a recurring basis.

We use an off the shelf open source invoicing system to connect to Stripe, First Data, our local tax authority and the rest of our infrastructure, which is already automating the recurring billings for our clients without Stripe Billing.

I'm unclear what value Stripe has to add here besides putting all our eggs in one basket (risking potential lockout again), and these types of emails make it clear that Stripe is mining the subset of data you get from us and our clients, though the fact that we're reusing payment tokens via API was missed entirely in this marketing email...