Stripe’s real pricing: a primer
[I work at Stripe]
As a practical matter, this guide is somewhat misleading in the sense that it very substantially overestimates what a typical B2B SaaS business pays for Stripe.<p>For example:<p>• Cards pricing. The guide assumes a B2B SaaS business accepts 100% of payments via cards. B2B SaaS businesses on Stripe tend to encourage payments via bank transfers and other lower-cost payment method, especially for their biggest customers, and we try to make it as easy as possible for businesses to do this. Bank transfers are priced at 0.8% in the US. The guide states that “additional fees apply for bank transfers, additional payment methods”, which is not true. We encourage users to use alternative payment methods for this reason.<p>• Stripe Tax. The 0.5% per transaction cost is incurred only in jurisdictions where the business is obligated to collect taxes. For US-based businesses, this generally represents a very small fraction of total payment volume. (And, of course, the tax collection itself is mandatory, and so some tax provider or calculation engine presumably has to be paid for.)<p>• Stripe Data Pipeline. Including this as a default cost is misleading. It isn’t. While we think it’s a great product (especially if you have a sophisticated ETL pipeline), most Stripe users don’t find themselves needing it.<p>More broadly, I think it’s important for onlookers to know that OP is the founder of a business that runs on Stripe and positions itself as an alternative to Stripe Billing. They seem to be trying to write deliberately-provocative posts to go viral, as described in this tweet: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;byAnhtho&#x2F;status&#x2F;1601197512227885056" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;byAnhtho&#x2F;status&#x2F;1601197512227885056</a>. Competition is good, and anyone is of course very welcome to analyze Stripe’s pricing. But, in the spirit of transparency, we’d welcome a slightly more realistic analysis.