[kevinholesh]

You are correct. We are more expensive than Stripe if you're just looking at money.

But we look at it from a time and capital perspective. With Stripe, you have to code and maintain your own payment solution on the backend and your own checkout form. You also have to worry about a million other things like emailing your customers when they place an order, and handling refunds. If you don't have the coding skills to build that yourself, you have to hire an expensive developer to build and maintain that for you.

If that extra 2% cost savings is worth it to endure the hassle above, then Forge isn't for you. We're aiming at people who don't want to deal with all that and would rather concentrate on growing their business doing things like launching a new product and marketing their current ones.

[nicksergeant]

If you want to stay competitive, you'll probably need to drop your fee down to 1% to match https://spacebox.io/ (which is powered by Stripe)

[kevinholesh]

We're purposely not trying to compete on price. There are always going to be cheaper solutions out there.

We're aiming to be the best. We're aiming to be the absolute easiest checkout process and the simplest experience for the merchant.

[nicksergeant]

Understood. Good luck :)

[tvladeck]

Point taken. You're right, it's a different market. Good luck!

[kevinholesh]

Thank you for the feedback :-)

[flexie]

The extra 2 percent - that is 'only' 2 percent of revenue but for a webshop it is easily 20 percent of profits.

[kevinholesh]

Absolutely. If you're doing enough business, that 2% really adds up. At that point, it is financially worth it for you to build your own backend payment solution using Stripe or Balanced to save money.

But when you're first starting out selling something, it's a huge capital investment to build that payment processing code on top of Stripe/Balanced, likely $5,000+ if you do it right. We're trying to make it as easy as possible to get started.

[flexie]

True. So do you offer lower prices for clients with higher volumes? I mean, you don't want to loose clients just as their business takes off...

In any case, I like to see competition in the this market so good luck :-)

[kevinholesh]

We cap our Forge fee at $500 a month. You'll always pay the 2.9%+30 cents per transaction, but you'll never pay Forge more than $500 a month.