[hmokiguess]

I remember when Stripe started and it was super fun to set it up as a developer and build stuff.

Today I find it does way too much for small projects and the fees are too high. Does anyone knows of good alternatives for that? (Someone recently shared https://astrafi.com/ with me and it seemed promising, with much better fees, but I haven't tested or used anything other than Stripe)

[Stromgren]

I find Stripes fees excessive too, but I don’t think I’ll ever switch. I’ve been running a small SaaS product on the side of other work for >15 years and if it taught me one thing, it’s that I need to reduce the things I have to maintain, reduce manual work, reduce the things that can go wrong. There’s nothing worse than having to fix a bug in a codebase you haven’t touched for a year and possibly in a feature you haven’t touched in many years. I simply love that Stripe handles not just the payment, but the payment application, the subscription billing, the price settings, the exports for bookkeeping. I’ve had a few instances where my site was used fraudulently to check stolen credit cards and it was quickly flagged and I could resolve it with Stripe. I’m sure someone can mention alternatives and I’m sure that I could build something that would work myself, but they keep a big part of what it takes to run the business out of my mind and I’m willing to pay for that.

[hmokiguess]

Fair point, though a lot has changed from 15 years ago. A lot of what you mentioned is sort of the new baseline most payment gateways ship with, and working on code you haven't touched in a while is certainly a lot easier nowadays with agents too. All that said, if you're satisfied with the price and the product I am not here to convince you to swap.

[Stromgren]

Yea it wasn’t meant as a counter argument either.

To be honest I haven’t even looked at competitors for some years. I guess one drawback of using third-parties for such a big part of the responsibilities is the lock in. The benefits of switching would have to be rather big for me to put in the effort.

[jamesdelaneyie]

In the EU and had to switch from Stripe to Mollie due to Stripe thinking the client was a cruise company because they rent 'cruiser' boats for river leisure. Mollie was super easy to implement for them, and fees much better

[steve_adams_86]

I'm using Helcim here in Canada. It's not great. Stripe used to be far nicer to use, has become fairly bloated and messy, yet it's still far nicer to use in general. The developer-first roots are still apparent.

Helcim takes ages to respond to tickets. They still haven't fully set up my account after weeks. You can't just do sandboxes or dev mode by default; you have to speak to a human via email who sets it up for you and provide the test card numbers. It takes ages.

The rates are much better and once it's fully set up and integrated, I guess it'll be fine? I'm not looking forward to needing support and adding further integrations.

I guess the moral here is that Stripe has gotten worse for small projects, but it's still really good.

[hmokiguess]

Oh interesting, I haven’t heard of Helcim before, would love to learn more about them and your experience

[steve_adams_86]

I can't speak to what it's like to work with their platform in the longer term, but I'm not feeling enthusiastic so far. I'm mostly doing it because they're a Canadian company and I've been making an effort to move my business and personal purchases domestically. The technology isn't compelling yet. The rates are, which is legitimately worth looking at if you do high volume.

[tallest_grugg]

Using Helcim has been nothing but friction for myself. Best to stay away from these guys.

[krainboltgreene]

You can't really do better than stripe. The onboarding overhead is because of fraud and the costs are basically barely above interchange.

[MichaelZuo]

Stripe needs all that byzantine fraud prevention, on top of what they had a decade ago, because they are a huge concentrated target.

A smaller firm could be way simpler. Because they simply wouldnt have enough money to provide a decent payday for dozens of malicious geniuses going at them 24/7/365.

[woodruffw]

Is this true? I would expect most of Stripe's fraud overhead to be statutory in nature, not something they hire for because they're a concentrated target.

(They certainly have more staff because more volume, but the actual regulatory requirements I'd expect to be roughly the same for the service they provide.)

[the_bear]

When we used Stripe, we opted out of all their fraud prevention stuff to save money (not sure if that's still an option). As a b2b SaaS where payment happens after a free trial (not at signup), we're just not a target for fraud, so it was totally fine.

I can't speak to why Stripe's fraud protection is so expensive. Is it because they're a target? Or maybe because they realized people will pay for it (it seems valuable for something like ecommerce)? I dunno, but I can confidently say that as of ~5 years ago, it wasn't required by any regulation, and my business was perfectly fine without it.

Now we use Paddle, and they also try to sell us a bunch of stuff we don't need at ridiculous prices. We're just using them because we wanted a merchant of record (where they handle taxes and stuff), but no, I'm not going to pay a % of my revenue for basic dunning emails, fraud prevention, vague "optimizations" that "increase conversions" (lol no they don't), etc.

[hibikir]

Look at what happened to, say, Cards Against Humanity: You don't have to be a really bit store for some random card tester to ruin you.

[hmokiguess]

what happened with them? I'm not aware of it

[woodruffw]

Oh, that makes sense. I was thinking fraud as in AML requirements, not fraud as in scammers and card theft.

[hibikir]

Stripe was already a big target for basically anyone and anything 10 years ago. Fake merchants, card testers, the works. People were selling guides to defraud Stripe. And we are not even counting just losees due to nonsense like the Fyre festival.

You really don't have to be that big a payment processor for dozens of malicious geniuses to decide that they want to fleece you. If anything, the ROI is better in less sophisticated companies. Most ways to trick a payment company are, if anything, standardized. The smaller company can often be attacked by just changing the API calls, but otherwise taking basically the same actions you would to try to defraud a bigger fish.

[MichaelZuo]

I meant geniuses in the real sense, not colloquial sense.

If someone could reasonably expect a cushy 40 hour/week seven figure job, even a malicious personality wouldn’t risk criminal fraud without a much much bigger payout.

And to have dozens focusing on one company…

So anyone handling under a few hundred million per day are safe from that kind of coordinated attack.

[krainboltgreene]

> Stripe needs all that byzantine fraud prevention, on top of what they had a decade ago, because they are a huge concentrated target.

This is not true. Every payment processor needs this effort because as soon as you broadcast that you're a payment processor you're going to get about 3-5 scammers a day.

As an aside I really think Mercury bank should audit their onboarding process.

[hmokiguess]

Sure, though not every small project needs to worry about that. Perhaps the payment workflow is a tight loop that has KYC through physical memberships (ID + Photo), say a gym membership for example, and the entire system is private just needs a gateway to do transactions.

[krainboltgreene]

Even if that was true literally no payment processor cares about what a small project worries about and they never will.

[fragmede]

Stealing someone's identity and pretending to be them and buying a gym membership with a fake id and a stolen credit card might seem far fetched to you, but Stripe doesn't want to be on the hook for that, especially if the scammer signs up for, say, Equinox and it isn't discovered for year+. (ex-Stripe; didn't work directly on fraud, however)

[hmokiguess]

Again, scale matters here. I'm talking about small projects, think a local small city gym, run by maybe one person, family business, probably knows all the customers closely, used to run on cash, but wants to get their bookkeeping in order, needs credit card recurring transactions to avoid late payments from some of their members, and doesn't want to increase their pricing because of high fees on a brand new system.

Equinox Fitness is a major conglomerate and likely wants and cares about fraud detection software.