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by danpalmer 64 days ago
Having done a major migration with Stripe, at a startup, I disagree.

They have lots of products, but you don't need most of them and can ignore them. What's left is, in my experience, the correct amount of complexity. We looked at Braintree, and it was just missing things that we were legally required to support, we looked at Judopay and it was... lacking (a nearby founder describe Judopay as treating payments like a hobby).

If your business is just ecommerce and you can use Shopify instead, sure, do that. If you just need to take dumb payments, just use Stripe Checkout. But if you need any control over your payments, Stripe is the only good option for startups. As you grow it becomes easier to justify more complex integrations such as Adyen, Klarna, etc, but Stripe is definitely the best starting place I've seen.

3 comments

He is right, reading the docs you have no idea which events leads to what. Nowadays with llm's it's easy before that I still dont know which events mean what.
> Having done a major migration with Stripe, at a startup, I disagree

Initial integration is very simple and developer-friendly. The complexity comes later.

The migration I did was from the basic Stripe product to the complex one. I did it because we were legally required to do the transition. Stripe was the only major vendor with the technology ready for that migration.
> If you just need to take dumb payments, just use Stripe Checkout.

Could not agree more. Offload as much complexity (receipts, invoices, tax, customer info, etc.) to Stripe as humanly possible in the beginning. Don't build for edge cases or UX polish. If people want your product, they will buy it.

and then without knowing it you are paying 1000's a month to stripe
This is kind of the tradeoff you need to make when launching a product though. You cleave off some of the product's margin & send it to a third party so that you can get the thing launched. If it's unsuccessful, that's fine, you'll pay no money to the vendor. If it's successful..? Great! Now you can afford to pay someone to build a checkout that doesn't cost me thousands a month in fees.

Stripe takes 1.5-2.5%, so if you're sending them 1,000s a month, your revenues from that checkout are approaching the $millions p/a. Certainly enough to hire an expert in the domain.

It costs much more then that, that's their feeds on top of CC, conversion etc. at 20K mrr you are easily paying 1k p/m in Stripe & Processing fees.
How is that different than any other payment processor? Interchange isn't free anywhere
Stripe's fees are well above interchange fees (especially in Europe). On top of that Stripe's pricing for other features (e.g. invoicing and subscriptions) is also a percentage, so you end up paying a ton for those features.
because stripe on purpose hide fees, constantly asks you to try out new features and then secretly charges you more then market price when you say yes. See radar, managed payment, stripe billing management etc.
This means you’ve done everything absolutely fucking right
thats a bit my point, you get there at around 18-20K mrr already
Fair point, just saw your other comment.