Isn't this pretty much what every processor everywhere charges? I have been out of the industry for 10+ years but I remember this being pretty standard.
It ain't by much, but we're a tiny bit cheaper than Stripe when you consider how much they charge for Billing (.7% for them vs .65% for us). And pretty much every Stripe integration uses Stripe Billing (unless they pair with a 3rd part billing SaaS)
Stripe Billing handles subscriptions and usage based billing now. Most software products fall in one of those two categories, or sometimes both. As a result, most software companies are paying more than 2.9% + $0.30 for Stripe, closer to 3.6% + $.30.
To only pay Stripe 2.9% + $.30 they'd need to only use Stripe just for charges, and either build their own billing engine (usually poor use of time) or use a 3rd party SaaS.
Ahhh so this is mainly for subscription software companies? That also did not come across.
As we approach Black Friday in the US, I'm thinking of the giant volume of e-commerce transactions that are not subscriptions (or usage-based), and of which Stripe gets a cut. It sounds like you are not angling for that part of the market?
When Stripe entered, people stopped caring about the cost of payment processing. I don't work in the industry anymore, but Stripe became rather popular at the time where I worked on online payments. We looked at it, because the Stripe API and services are really nice, but the cost is just insane.
We where never even close to 2.9% on credit cards, and we'd certainly never consider paying 30¢. Part of that is working out of the EU, that caps your credit card fee, so around 1% and 0.10EUR per transaction is closer to the standard. Then you can start negotiating lower raters from there, depending on the number of transaction you make.