[embedding-shape]

> is there a real alternative that covers what they do?

Have you tried searching the internet for things like "European Stripe alternatives" and things like that? Or you tend to rely on word of mouth and similar?

I won't claim there are 100% replacements available for everything, but for all the basic functionality of Stripe, Cloudflare, AWS and so on there are tons of options out there, seemingly growing every month, but it does require you to proactively go out and look for them, rather than relying on that you've heard about it since before.

[LucaSiviero]

I get your point, and even in Italy we have Banca Sella (first one that comes to mind) which is a great way to collect payments with a local processor. But it's not Stripe...

Stripe is not just an integration for Link or Card payments, and payment fees are actually not that bad. Developer experience matters most to me. Plus, I agree there are alternatives to a basic Stripe implementation, but what about Stripe Connect?

[embedding-shape]

Right, because you're looking for a Stripe alternative, none of them will be.

Did you actually try searching what I told you you could use as a search term? Have you looked into Mollie, Adyen, Klarna, Mangopay, Quickpay, etc? The list is quite large, there are options available but again, it requires you to proactively review and compare them, not just throw your hands in the air proclaiming "It's not Stripe".

[khurs]

Seems you need to use multiple providers and route payments depending on card type if you want lowest rates. For example, mollie is 2.5% for Amex but Stripe is 1.5% for Amex but or others it swings other way.

> Mollie for UK

- 1.2% + 20p for standard cards

- 2.90% + £0.20 for corporate and European

- 2.50% + £0.20 for Amex

- 3.25% + £0.20 for international

> Stripe for UK

- 1.5% + £0.20 for standards cards inc Amex

- 1.9% + £0.20 for corporate uk cards

- 2.5% + £0.20 for international within Europe

- 3.25% + £0.20 for International + 2% if fx conversion

[0]https://www.mollie.com/gb/pricing#psp-block

[1]https://stripe.com/gb/pricing. (scroll down for list)

[embedding-shape]

Almost only Americans use Amex though, unless you exclusively target the US market, you can skip it and basically not miss out on a single customer.

[khurs]

In UK Amex are relatively big.

They do cards with airlines where the customer can earn free flights and other such reward schemes to attract customers.

[embedding-shape]

Interesting, has that changed lately? I remember sitting in a pub talking with a bunch of software engineers living and working in London, maybe 15 years ago, and we were joking about how weird it was that the American tourist tried to pay with American Express, and neither of us had seen an actual American Express card in person before that. Maybe is different nowadays, or maybe we were just in a tiny pub?

[Imustaskforhelp]

Interesting things. What is your opinion on Helcim (though it seems to be US/Canadian?) but your comment made me do a bit of digging because I think that I know fairly well about the server side of things but I still somewhat believed that stripe was the cheapest options in general. Thanks for making me get into this rabbit hole I suppose, I do like these rabbit holes though :-D

So do you have more information about normal payment processors in general which are more competitive than Stripe. The comment below by @khurs for example shows that Stripe is actually a bit cheaper than Mollie for Amex cards (which you respond with the point that most European demographic doesn't use Amex cards etc.)

but I am non-european, non-US so I have no skin in the game and I wish to support those which are mutually beneficial to me in terms of providing me a very decent deal and hopefully good support as well. So what do you suggest me some more resources about and would there be anything better than Stripe.

I absolutely know that AWS and others are so overpriced that I sometimes even used to wonder why people might buy it if OVH and Hetzner exists (before price increase, perhaps it can still be price competitive sometimes though)

But interestingly, I didn't believe the same for Stripe, so I am re-thinking my belief about Stripe and payment processing in general too (which to be fair, tangentially might also perhaps be the same way some people might feel about AWS). So I'd be curious to learn more! :-D

Edit: just did some more digging and as an Indian, we have UPI payments which there are some providers of but there is an option iirc for us to directly have a bank account and do a lot of payment processing so much more easier with UPI ourselves and basically pay 0% for Indian specific traffic as India heavily uses UPI (its really good to be honest!) and there are some providers like carefree/razorpay as well which can accept UPI on their side at 1.6-2% if you want API and are just starting out

But I am curious about accepting European/American/Canadian cards though. It seems that carefree/razorpay are recommended if targetting Indian markets and Helcim for American/canadian and Adyen/Mollie are recommended for European centric markets. So I'd be curious to hear your opinions about it.

[cuu508]

Do you know of any EU payment processor that supports recurring payments like a SaaS would need (subscriptions, subscription state tracking, automatic retries of failed payments)?

I looked but couldn't find any. Adyen does not do this on its own AFAICT, only with 3rd party addons that implement recurring payments on top of it. Mollie claims it does this but is woefully incomplete (no failed payment retries for example), and appears to be all in on slop.

[econ]

Fake news?

> Mollie will retry the failed payment up to 5 times.

https://docs.mollie.com/docs/recurring-payments

[cuu508]

Oh, interesting, I stand corrected!

I was investigating this 5 months ago and the answer their slop machine gave was:

> Does Mollie retry failed payments (dunning) and track subscription states? Mollie does not currently provide automatic dunning or retry logic for failed subscription payments. Subscription states like active or past due are tracked, but you need to implement retry and notification logic in your system. This is a common feature request and may be on the roadmap, but no official release date is available.

From your link, note though:

> If your subscription payment does not succeed, Mollie may attempt it again up to 5 times (once a day), depending on the failure reason. After all retries have been exhausted, the subscription will be cancelled.

If there's a payment issue, I would not consider cancelling the subscription 5 days after the first failure as reasonable. I would expect the subscription to go into "past due" state, and to keep retrying.

[econ]

Can't help you as I've not used it. If it's a new feature feedback might accomplish something.

[nottorp]

I keep being told Stripe supports 3D Secure (or whatever the marketing name for it is this week) too :)

They may but it's not out there in the wild.

[Scroll_Swe]

It's not that they cannot be found.

But are they as good and is one willing to take the risk of putting your business one a smaller company vs one of the big ones?

[embedding-shape]

You're not choosing between "Hans with a server in his closest in Germany" and Stripe here, you're choosing between two almost equally established companies that just happen to have different geographic locations and different names. Companies like Adyen are even older than Stripe by some years, and there are tons of examples like this.

[anonzzzies]

That's why I meet with them. I have the mobile number of the ceo of Mollie and can call him in the weekend; compared to the US, we are DEFINITELY not big. But haven't had issues since using them since 2006.