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fastest963
We use Stripe to process credit card payments and we're adding support for ACH soon. Recently they made some changes to pricing (charging for Radar and non-US cards) that was surprising but otherwise they've been amazing. Great tooling support, great customer service and overall great platform.
judge2020
>ACH soon

What is your approach to bank account verification? Plaid/Yodlee, a more traditional "deposit x money, ask for verification", or both?

chrisgoman
We use Cliq.com for ACH for about 3 years now moving lots of transactions. Amounts are from hundred to low single-digit thousands (<$10k) about 200/wk. API is not as mature as Stripe but you can't beat the cost at $0.20 per transaction.

We mostly do outbound so no verifications are done

fastest963
Interesting. Haven't heard of them but I'll check them out. Thanks!
fastest963
We plan to do the traditional 2 small deposit verification. After discussing we decided not to force our customers to give up their bank logins to Plaid just for a quicker verification.
chrisgoman
the guys at teller.io seems to be doing it the OAuth way so technically not storing it like the scraping guys. However, it may be limited to the banks that they can connect to due to the requirement for a "real API"
espinchi
At our price range (most invoices are $10k-$50k and in the US), we generate and send invoices from Xero, our accounting software. Customers can pay via check, wire, ACH or Credit Card, and they typically do checks or ACH. For additional context: we automate customer service for ecommerce companies in the 50-500 employee range. Payment methods vary depending on the company size, localization, sector, payment size, etc.
goatherders
Every client pays via CC except one by check and one by ACH. We use WePay which is connected to Freshbooks. We eat the 3% charge or whatever it is. Avg order size of $2,000.
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maxmalysh
Bitcoin.
sillysaurusx
How many payments have you processed? I thought Bitcoin died as a payment medium.

People have figured out that the overhead is only about $0.50 if you're willing to wait, but most consumer apps don't make it easy to default to the lower fee.

(I haven't looked into this for some time, so that last paragraph is a bit dated.)

qwerty456127
It is worth mentioning that today "you're willing to wait" actually means just some minutes.

I've actually started using BitCoin to pay for things recently and I was surprised to find out how easy and quick this actually is. This really is a no-bullshit electronic cash. No registration, no verification, no borders, quick and easy. I hope more goods and services are going to be offered for cryptocurrencies in future.

echelon
How do you deal with the price volatility?
qwerty456127
I don't use crypto for business and don't store much money this way (which would mean I have to plan) so far so I ignore it and I'm Ok. In fact I have only been affected by it in the positive way: I had insufficient BitConins to buy what I needed (not illegal) and planned to buy more but the rate grew quickly and I found myself in possession of sufficient value before I had time to bother.
rglullis
On the Ethereum blockchain, things are a little easier. You can always use a stabletoken like DAI.

On the BTC blockchain, this can be a real problem. The best one can do is to hope that the BTC price doesn't swing more than the equivalent fee amount of a credit card transaction to make it worthwhile.

If you are willing to keep some of your crypto on an exchange (but remember, it is only really your crypto if you have the keys), you can try to automate the swap between BTC<-> stablecoin to reduce the exposure to price swings.

companyhen
I use CryptoWoo plugin for BTC payments and I use KyberSwap WooCommerce plugin for erc20 payments, you can select if you want to convert to DAI at checkout. BTC I just take the risk and believe it will keep appreciating in value over time.

We've processed over $200k in orders with over $100k being in BTC and ETH payments since 2017. Crypto merchandise website.

thinkmassive
For smaller payments, say under $100 worth, the lightning network works great. It takes only a few seconds to complete, costs fractions of a cent, and is divisible to the millisatoshi (there are 100M satoshis per 1 BTC).
shtack
At Olodolo.com we process a few payments a day through CoinPayments. Haven't had any issues.
rglullis
Lightning is changing that, and hopefully Ethereum's Raiden will soon be released and bring the possibility to use stablecoins for off-chain transfers as well.

Disclaimer and shameless plug: I was working on Raiden last year and now I am working on a self-hosted payment gateway that can leverage Raiden (https://github.com/mushroomlabs/hub20)

sigio
I create invoices using invoiceninja, which are payed via banktransfers mostly and via mollie payments for the smaller amounts.

This is usually an ideal payment in .nl, and various other payment methods in other european countries.

cknight
I use https://pinpayments.com/ to accept credit/debit cards. My target market is 100% Australian so it was an easy option for me, but it won't be suitable for most people here.
mooibos
I use them too, and have been extremely happy with the service I've received so far. I'm based in Australia but sell mostly to overseas customers and bill in USD. They take a 4% cut this way, but don't hit you with a currency conversion fee like PayPal do.

I used to use Stripe, but had an issue where my account was flagged as fraudulent by their ML model for God knows what reason. They sent me a link to click on to provide more information and escalate the issue, but the link went to a 404 page. I forwarded the email to their support but never heard back from them. Tried to call them, no dice. That's when I realised my business was relying on a service which could go down at any moment and didn't provide adequate phone support. Cancelled the account and signed up with PIN Payments on the spot. The few times I've spoken to them, I've received a response from a real person that actually knew what they were talking about. Couldn't recommend them more.

hex1848
Authorize.Net is what we've used for online payments and our internal subscription processing for over a decade. API is easy to use. Never really had any downtime. Rates are competitive. No one has come along and given us much of a reason to change.
wheelerwj
Authorize.net is OLLLLLLLLD school. Its the primary merchant service that is recommended/resold by banks.

I ended up choosing stripe but only because Stripe has better branding and was 'cooler' to use.

dlhavema
I worked with authorize.net in 2006/7 for a php driven lead gen site... that brings me back...
conductr
When stripe first came out my initial thought on the API was “these guys got tired of Authorize.Net”
scottmotte
That brings me back. I remember Authorize.net before there was the ActiveMerchant gem (ruby).

Have you used Stripe as well? Authorize.net always got the job done. Then Stripe came along. I was honestly surprised of its success at the time. It was mainly just more of a joy to use - not cheaper or much easier. Just 'fun' as I remember it.

wtracy
Everyone else is dumping on authorize.net, but they're willing to work with industries that PayPal and friends won't touch.
sleighboy
They could really use someone who gives a damn to focus on their official libraries. They seem to have tried to make them function similar no matter which language you use. Not the smartest move, they end up being sort of convoluted in languages like Python. Which lead to many people starting a client library, but probably moving on from using them and the libs go unmaintained.
tzs
Have they added support for the Visa stored credential framework [1]?

Last I saw on their forums, a few months ago, a few people has asked about it but Authorize.Net didn't have anything yet. (Support has been kind of spotty in general among payment processors [2]).

I was going to check their forums again to see if anything has changed, but the forum link on their developer site is giving me a 404 right not.

[1] https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/global/support-legal/documents...

[2] https://3dmerchant.com/blog/cenpos/which-payment-gateways-su...

runako
Services work invoiced through Bonsai, typically paid via ACH with some credit cards mixed in. Stripe handles the ultimate money movement.

SaaS - mostly Stripe credit cards, with a tiny percent in PayPal.

[dead] asdfq1234
Authorize.net

Their fee structure is far cheaper for us than Stripe, who are scam artists and need to be disrupted. Stripe needs to reduce fees dramatically.

dreamer7
We use MangoPay.

The customer service or tech support isn't as great as Stripe but they have a really intuitive model for marketplaces

oneplane
Multiple businesses but most common is direct wire transfer/bank transfer. The smaller business: generate invoices, send them to the customer, customer has a few choices, the only international ones are IBAN or PayPal (adds fees). Most common used is direct bank transfer. AVG transaction: €2500. Larger business: mostly commerce payments, over 90% is iDEAL (Dutch native payment system - does instant wire transfers between Dutch banks), the rest is either Apple Pay or by invoice/manual bank transfer. Some sub-0.1% uses Credit Cards but it almost costs more to keep it available than the revenue it generates. In all cases we use native banking APIs, no middlemen/broker/processors, except Credit Card. AVG transaction: €50.
inopinatus
Pin Payments, for cards.

They have an Australian focus but global capability. If you use a scheme card for Fastmail, you probably paid via Pin Payments.

Pin have a Stripe-like API but a small-team feel during contact i.e. we know one another by name, and when escalating a technical query I've had dialogue directly with a dev lead. I've even received hand-written Christmas cards from them.

I live in mortal terror of Pin being bought by Stripe, or (worse) an Australian financial institution, with all the consequences for competence and customer service level that follow.

We also handle bulk/large payments via CS2 (the Aus equivalent of ACH, for Usonian readers), with handling fee.

jimohalloranau
I've been using Pin since very early days. Dev experience is great, the API is well thought out and documented.

Your fear about Pin being bought by an Australian financial institution may be unfounded (or it's already happened depending on your perspective). Back in the early days, it was fairly well known that National Australia Bank was a part owner in Pin, but I can't find anything to support that now. NAB is listed first on their partners page (https://pinpayments.com/company/partners) and their Terms of Service (https://pinpayments.com/terms/national-australia-bank) are a 3 way agreement between NAB, Pin and yourself.

I'm sure it would be worse if Pin was fully absorbed into NAB though.

esdott
I am also interested in this question but would also love to know the average percentage people are paying. It’s always been interesting to me how stripe (and the like) are basically a premium over less polished tools like Authorize.net but are able to charge as much as a percentage point more for basically the same thing.

I’ve built payment integrations my entire 20 year career and have always appreciated how ease of use relates to cost, e.g. it’s hard to build tools as easy to use as stripe or Braintree, but I’ve wondered how these features play out when it’s so close to the actual money itself.

perennate
Is Authorize.net not also 2.9% + 30 cents? (https://www.authorize.net/sign-up/pricing/)
scottmotte
I believe that is for the all-in-one option. And I do not believe Authorize.net offered that a decade back. Anyways, if you already have your merchant account, it is only 10cents a transaction.
nickphx
The percentage depends on the business "risk" category , transaction volume, return and charge back rate. You can get rates as low as 1.9% and .15 per transaction. That doesn't cover payment processing gateway fees (ie Authorize.net) though.
emersonrsantos
Ebanx, for the Latin America market.
ianhawes
+1 for EBANX! Though after talking with them and talking with Stripe I’m not sure we lose out on as many credit cards as Ebanx made it seem like we would when processing with Stripe in LATAM.
bestnameever
Do you do any processing in Mexico? If so - how do you deal with facturas?
lemming
I use Paddle, because they handle the intricacies of international VAT which is getting more and more complicated. I'd love to use Stripe, but I'd have to use something like Taxamo in combination with it. Since I was one of their first B2B customers I managed to negotiate a good rate with them, otherwise they'd be reasonably expensive. I've been generally happy with them.
Old_Thrashbarg
We use Chargebee backed by Stripe.

We've been quite happy with Chargebee overall and would recommend them. The only downside is their customer support is very bizarre sometimes and a bit frustrating.

For example, they limit API access to my own (events) data to the last N months. I contacted and asked them to remove the restriction, and they said that wasn't possible because the data was "archived". I pointed out that their UI allowed me to see all the data and their page loaded quickly so clearly the data is close at hand. They then said they'd give me access to all my data over the API for one week. I told them I'm not going to build a script that will be broken in a week and instead will just have to scrape their website - they seemed happy with that resolution.

koolba
What value do you get from a middle man between you and the raw Stripe API? Why recommend them?

From what you describe it just seems like a hassle with them acting as gatekeeper to your own historical transaction records.

robhunter
Customers need invoices, A/R tracking, recurring payments, line items on an invoice, billing for multiple entities, adhoc products/add-ons - a billing system and a way to process payments are separate things.

I believe Stripe does more and more of this stuff, but it isn't cheap and in our experience Chargebee has perfected a lot of that functionality.

Old_Thrashbarg
Exactly. I find myself wondering why Stripe is still in the picture, seems like they're doing the easy part.

We use the above-mentioned things, and they also take care of providing a UI where customers can change their plan, cancel it, download PDF invoices. Upon plan changes, they deal with proration. They send dunning emails for failed charges and cancel the plan after N retries. You can set up coupons, discounts, trials, credit, refunds, welcome emails, etc. through them.

ksahin
+ VAT management, self-serve portal etc. Chargebee is really great
celticmusic
Stripe only allows access to the last 30 days of events, it sounds like this 3rd party is offering a service of collecting that for longer (probably among other things).
powerslacker
What do you mean last 30 days of events? I use Stripe's API's daily and you can go back much further than that.
celticmusic
https://stripe.com/docs/api/events/list

> List events, going back up to 30 days.

If you're able to go further than that you may be paying extra for it.

Now, if you have the event id then you'll be able to pull it, but you can't simply list them out unless that documentation is lying.

ss3000
Chargebee looks really promising but the pricing of minimum $250 per month feels way too steep for bootstrapped businesses that are just getting started, and a billing system feels like something I'd want to decide on at the beginning and have it scale with my business rather than starting with something basic and then have to refactor to something else later once the business starts gaining steam.

Anyone have recommendations for similar services that have a lower price of entry?

1stcity3rdcoast
They have a free tier up to $50k in revenue that I’ve used successfully. Hosted checkout, strong API, etc.
skrish
Founder of Chargebee here. Thanks for the feedback and this broken experience doesn't make sense. Will check with the team. We will take it up to fix it. Sorry!
Old_Thrashbarg
Sounds good! Chargebee and Heroku are the 2 paid services that have saved us the most time. I'm a champion of your service.

While I have your attention, some unsolicited feedback: Chargebee's core is great (and that's what we care most about), but a lot of the UX is kind of whacky and the new redesign of the Customer Portal and Signout flow was also a bit whacky and we won't be upgrading.

Last thing, small pet-peeve of mine: password rotation is annoying and is an outdated practice. Both Microsoft[1] and the FTC[2] are encouraging people to stop using it. It ends up wasting my time because I can never remember what I've incremented the last digit to (I now track it in a file). I've given your support that feedback, but doubt anything will happen unless you give the order.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/06/micro...

[2] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/blogs/techftc/2016/03/time-r...

skrish
Thank you. Noted. Shared feedback with the team to review the password policy. Could you please give some specific feedback on the UX for customer portal and signout flow? We can setup a 15 min zoom call with you to understand your challenges. I will reach out to you via email if that's OK with you.
ablekh
Please clarify whether Chargebee supports custom hybrid plans (e.g., Per Seat + Usage models in Stripe terminology, which, correspondingly, would approximately be equal to a combination of Per Unit + Volume + Tiered models [1]). If Yes, please create or point to relevant documentation; if No, do you have plans for implementing such capability?

[1] https://www.chargebee.com/docs/plans.html#pricing-attributes

Axsuul
A mix of Stripe and Shopify's own billing system.
LannisterDebt
Stripe for credit cards, run own nodes for cryptocurrency because customer privacy is important in certain scenarios for me.
mlacks
Exclusively Paypal. I've had nothing but extremely positive experiences, but form what I hear, when it goes bad, it goes really really bad. I'm looking into other options
scrollaway
Do look into Stripe. The difference in dev UX is night and day.
droopyEyelids
It's actually easy to understand when PayPal 'Goes Bad'

1) When you collect money long before a user might file a chargeback - like if you're selling tickets for an event that will happen in 5 months, or if you're selling a product that you'll be shipping much later.

2) When your 'pattern' changes dramatically. eg, you've made 5k/month worth of sales for the past 2 years and this month you've suddenly sold 20k.

derrick_jensen
Stripe and an in-house Bitcoin backend

Funny thing is that I'm working on debugging an issue with the Stripe API right now (or the library I'm using)

ezconnect
Paypal. Never had issues with them. Only problem is there are a few customers that are dishonest but they are just a couple of them Every year. Average transaction is 15usd
lopmotr
I dare you to try doing a withdrawl while overseas. You may have to prove you're not where you are before they'll reinstate your account.
aianus
This happened to me too. They thought it was suspicious that I was in Vietnam, so they brilliantly called my Canadian landline to verify that it was really me that was connecting from Vietnam (???). Of course, I was unable to answer...

PayPal is utter trash.

PaulDavisThe1st
Done it many times. My entire income (more or less) flows through PayPal, and I manually withdraw at the end of the month, no matter when I am at that time. It has never been a problem.
lopmotr
I'm a complete dinosaur using Paypal. It emails me when there's a payment and I manually respond to the customer. They have to wait until I check my email since I don't even get notifications. Sorry customers. Paypal is a nightmare of course. Don't be like me.