[echelon]

I feel this comment.

I'm working though Stripe integration for the first time. It's one of the worst APIs I've ever dealt with.

I couldn't find a single place advising which webhooks to listen to - or what their payloads should be - for simple subscription behavior. It's actually inconsistent in places.

They built and accrued all of this complex billing behavior for all of these incredible upmarket needs, and in the meantime they forgot about the simple cases.

I almost used PayPal or Square. Perhaps I should have.

Stripe seems to have moved on to upmarket.

[jwr]

> I'm working though Stripe integration for the first time. It's one of the worst APIs I've ever dealt with.

Braintree user here, have I got news for you. I regularly have to waste weeks of developer time on payment processing. The documentation is terrible and fragmented, some things are not explained anywhere, support response times hover around two weeks (I'm not kidding), and the canned support responses rarely fit my use case, so there's always a back-and-forth.

This would all be fine if I could just get it done once, but the thing rears its head regularly, what with the newer PSD2 regulations or something else.

As an example, after having done all the 3DS2 integration work (well, it was closer to re-work, as extensive changes were required), Braintree now tells me that 3DS1 is being deprecated (fine) and some of my transactions are 3DS1. Well, which ones, and WHY? I have no idea. I asked support on Sep 27, that was 12 days ago, no answer.

I looked at Stripe and had a really hard time understanding how I can fit my subscription SaaS into it. I think if you fit the simplest common use case and you're willing to outsource everything, Stripe could be simple to use. If you want to be independent in any way, or want to maintain the relation to the customer yourself, things quickly get difficult. But the real reason why I can't even consider Stripe is multiple currencies: I want to settle in three currencies (including USD), and Stripe will only settle in USD to a bank account based in the US. Good luck getting a US bank account if you are an EU small business. Also, pricing looks reasonable at a first glance, until you notice the currency conversion fees and the extra "billing" fee. In my specific case I would end up at about 5.4%.

[fiznool]

On the specific point about getting a US bank account in the EU. I’m in the UK and have used Wise [1] (née Transferwise) to set up a ‘virtual’ US bank account. You get a US account number to send to your client / plug into Stripe, and the funds are paid into the Wise account, which you can then transfer into your home currency account at your leisure. It’s worked really well for me and the fees are very reasonable.

[1] https://wise.com/

[martinald]

Echo this, works really well. Saves many many thousands a month sending Stripe -> Wise US "virtual" account -> UK bank account vs Stripe -> UK bank account.

Stripe's forex fees are horrendous. Wise charges <0.5%, Stripe >3%. The spread here is similar to the credit card charge in the first place!

[kweks]

You might find https://www.airwallex.com useful for your multi currency needs. Not related to them, simply a happy user.

[koromak]

I was lead to believe a stripe API integration would take maybe a month of my time, for a subscription based service.

Genuinely 3 months of development, with more roadblocks than I could have ever imagined.