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I need help with lowering fees stripe charges my subscription project.

4 points by adelHBN ↗ HN
I am starting a project that gives context to news through history. I charge an introductory fee of $1.00/month for three months, and thereafter $2.99 month. In WordPress, I signed up with Stripe through the MemberPress plugin. But then found out Stripe charges 30 cents per each transaction, plus an additional 2.9%. I am fine with the 2.9%, but the 30 cents won't work with my low fees. Does anyone have any suggestions for me please? Thank you in advance.

10 comments

[ 1783 ms ] story [ 1542 ms ] thread
davismwfl
When I was consulting I helped a lot of small companies deal with this type of situation. We loved Stripe when it fit the clients need, but it doesn't always work out. First, you should reach out to Stripe support to see if you can fit into their micropayments model which means you wouldn't be paying .30 + 2.9%. You can also look at some of the other platforms that support micropayments, like paypal (although I hate paypal).

Outside of that, many times what we wound up doing was integrating to First Data or another local bank clearing house that would provide more proper low transaction fees. It takes more work and effort, but clients saved huge percentages of their small payments many times by doing this, so if you can't fit into one of the existing solutions you may have to do it the "hard" way. Nice thing about this is we usually could accept e-checks (ACH transfers) when doing this which also lowered the fees drastically and made things more profitable. There are rules of course on industries, types of payments etc, but mainly if you aren't doing anything "illegal", porn or financial services you can generally find a good clearing house through a local bank. First Data's api used to suck, no clue what it looks like today but it used to be a royal pain.

adelHBN
Thank you so much. I will look into this. Seriously though, all these little things shrink the real time I have left to do the real work for my project. Thanks.
adelHBN
I sent am email to Stripe support... let's see where that goes. Thanks for flagging out micropayments platform. I told them about that too.
edwinwee
Hm, I'd suggest batching fees together so you can have one, larger charge (e.g. charge for many months at once).

Most of that 30 cents represents the underlying costs for the card networks to process the charge—in some countries, we have separate (lower) pricing for micropayments, like your fees. It looks like you might be in the US, where we don't have micropayments today, but it is on our list!

literallycancer
Look at Stripe competitors. There are some with 0.1 + 1% and around those numbers.
adelHBN
Thanks. Any suggestions?
arjunvpaul
May not be issue you need to solve right now.

Your's is not "a project that gives context to news through history" @$1.00 per month. If the market wants it, it should work at $1(+$0.30 +2.9%)per month also.

So just charge $1.49 per month and move on. Once you have a 1000 users, you can think about optimizing things.

adelHBN
You're right. I decided to move on... I agree. Thanks. But I don't get your comment about "yours is not". You mean is not necessarily a $1, right?
arjunvpaul
Yes. not necessarily. Once you are able to observe active users, have paying users or even sizeable traffic to test conversions.

You can experiment to find out what that "right" or "best converting" price point would be.

"Free to start" may very well end up being the answer. Here are 2 examples one from pubilshing and one about starting with a price and using data to uncover insights about the "right" price. You will see the 30 cents is not the biggest problem you are going to have in pricing. :-)

- https://www.priceintelligently.com/blog/new-york-times-prici...

- https://www.priceintelligently.com/blog/netflix-pricing-stra...