zlacker

Indeed -- although our business model is, I think, more closely aligned with our users. We serve only one kind of customer: businesses receiving payments with Stripe. Our revenue is a roughly linear function of that of our customers.

>>pc+(OP)
I appreciate the security and the clarity on this issue. I only wish you didn't sneak in a pricing increase for long-standing users a few months ago, and I wish Stripe was more honest about its enterprise pricing.

>>michae+k2
Stripe is cheaper than most other processors and charges a flat rate for the transaction, regardless of the upstream cost. Amex is more expensive than Visa for example. A fact of doing business is that things will go up in price, as I'm sure your company also raises prices from time to time.

>>michae+k2
I apologize that anything about the pricing change felt sneaky. (We tried to do the opposite: we emailed every single impacted customer!) I posted a few thoughts about the refund change here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22893388.

We're not transparent about enterprise pricing since our costs on any given user are so country/business model/implementation-dependent. It's less that our sales team isn't willing to share the details and more that the models themselves are very complicated and change frequently. (Visa and Mastercard are both making big changes to their pricing this year, for example, and that will change almost all of them.)

>>pc+a4
I appreciate that. My particular beef with the enterprise negotiation experience was that Stripe lists a specific number after which they're open to negotiating and when we'd far exceeded that number (with minimal fraud risk due to the nature of our business), their answer was "You have too many Amex customers, but aren't you happy you're grandfathered into x, y, and z feature we now charge extra for [which we don't even use]".

Then shortly after, Stripe raised pricing on a model I'd just been told was grandfathered in.

>>michae+I4
There has to be some room for negotiation at scale, given that Shopify Payments offers lower base rates, and Stripe powers their payments.

>>chadwi+T3
I think what is being mentioned is that Stripe started keeping the original transaction fees on refunds. In my opinion this is borderline fraudulent since visa/mc/amex do not keep these charges and refund them back to Stripe.

>>poxrud+jj
You do realize that this is a free market? If visa/mc/amex are so much better, people can use them. Charging a flat fee for a service doesn't seem that fraudulent to me.

>>google+xK
Based on your comment you're clearly not a Stripe user, so I'm not sure why you felt the need to post this.

If visa/mc/amex are so much better, people can use them.

Stripe uses visa/mc/amex, it is not a competitor. You completely missed my point. Stripe uses visa/mc/amex to process credit card transactions, then when a refund is issued the CC companies return the charged amount to Stripe, but Stripe does not return the full amount back to the customer. They keep a percentage. This is what I consider "borderline fraudulent".

Charging a flat fee for a service doesn't seem that fraudulent to me.

But it is not a flat fee. They keep a percentage of the refunded amount. So if a customer bought a $1000 item, then changed their mind and cancelled the order 5 min later, Stripe would still keep $40 just for the fun of it. A small flat fee to cover network expenses would be more appropriate, not a percentage of the amount.

>>poxrud+iY
> Stripe would still keep $40

So you have to charge $1000 + ($40 * % of users who return + cushion) for the product. That means non-Stripe businesses can start to out-compete you on cost.

What makes it so that Stripe has such a unique position and can impact your costs and competitiveness to such a large degree?

> A small flat fee to cover network expenses would be more appropriate

That sure seems like the solution a free market in processing would settle on. Something is up.

>>bill_m+122
So you have to charge $1000 + ($40 % of users who return + cushion) for the product. That means non-Stripe businesses can start to out-compete you on cost.*

If you charge your customers more you will still end up paying more. The $40 was based on a 4% fee. (I'd like to make a correction, as in my case it is actually 3.5%)

What makes it so that Stripe has such a unique position and can impact your costs and competitiveness to such a large degree?

Stripe and PayPal are the biggest players in this space. There are others but they are either built on top of these two or do not have the easy API's and/or integration with other 3rd party services. PayPal was the first to start keeping the fees for refunds, and then Stripe followed.

Stripe is a great company otherwise, and I will continue being a customer but that doesn't mean that I can't get upset over such an blatant money grab.