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Ask HN: USA-based SaaS and Candian payments?

6 points by mottomotto ↗ HN
I am bootstrapping a SaaS company and we have our first customer. We're based in the USA, they are in Canada. We have a year of checks to deposit for the monthly fee. This is fine but I have to go into the bank and deposit via a teller due to CAD funds. Our monthly fee per customer is $650-1300 USD.

Is there an easier way to accept payments from Canadian customers? We do have a business banking account with Chase in the USA. I see options like TransferWise.com and it actually comes out cheaper than Chase due to the exchange rate being more favorable (even with the 1% fee). But it doesn't look like it is setup for recurring payments. I'll go ask them. We could use something like Stripe but the fees are higher and I don't know if our customers want to pay by credit card (I don't know B2B payment conventions in Cananda).

I am asking here to possibly get advice/suggestions based on experience as there appear to be a lot of options.

4 comments

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tixocloud
Your Canadian customer should be fine with credit cards and that's probably the more seamless way to do it. We do use credit cards for B2B transactions. The downside is that you'll be hit with not-so-great exchange rate.

You can also check out Plooto (https://www.plooto.com/ca/), which specializes in B2B recurring payments internationally.

saluki
I would go with Stripe, more fees but also more convenient for you and the client.

Or if they want to pay by check require them to pay annually. It's pretty standard in SaaS to give a discount for annual usually 10xMonthly for annual. But at your price point it might not be necessary.

Fees/exchange rate is just part of the cost of doing business,. Most SaaS could raise their pricing with out losing sales so if you want just increase your pricing slightly to cover the fees when you setup your online pricing/payment page.

mottomotto
Good points. At a certain point, the convenience is well worth it. But you raise an interesting point about an annual check. We do sign year long (well, sometimes multiple year) contracts so we could increase our monthly price enough to make the 10 month discount the current annual price. That would let us offer flexibility in payment.

I do hope Stripe Canada gets EFT and that includes a gateway to ACH. I can guess there might be lots of red tape. But that would be excellent.

But I'm going to do what you suggest -- over an annual check-based payment schedule or a monthly credit-card based schedule (with basically the costs to do so rolled in).

hackermailman
I've used VBCE.ca where in Canada I transfer EFT (online billing or Interac payment, or direct payment if Royal Bank/TD) to one of their local bank accounts, they convert to USD and pay out the US company in a local USD cheque or ACH but depends on amount/fees https://www.vbce.ca/business/importers but they also accept mailed cheques/couriers so you could set up an account there and just collect payments likely, customer only knows where to mail the cheque or where to send Interac B2B payment.