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Ask HN: What do you use to pay out multiple people (Stripe/Wise/PayPal, others?)

21 points by ajeet_dhaliwal ↗ HN
Hi all,

I'm lead dev at Tesults (https://www.tesults.com) and I'm looking at options to pay out users participating in our affiliate program.

We're happy with using Stripe to receive payments and manage subscriptions but paying out is limited to US accounts only that's quite disappointing because we like Stripe. Tesults is currently based in the UK and need to pay out to people globally. I'm investigating Wise, PayPal and looking at others and wondering what others here are doing. Keen to here about other options I may not have considered.

Having an API is useful, rather than having to manually upload a CSV file.

16 comments

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kilimchoi
Check out Tipalti
ajeet_dhaliwal
Hadn't heard of this before, thanks for the suggestion, I believe it's their 'Global Payments' option that may help with this, will read the docs.
nsp
At Teachable (course hosting and sales platform, we remit a ton of money), we use Stripe where we can w/account transfers, and paypal mass pay which kind of sucks but has low fees for everyone else
ajeet_dhaliwal
You ask your users to create Stripe accounts for the purpose of transferring funds? PayPal seems like something individuals and companies would both have, I just had the perception (perhaps wrongly) Stripe sign up would be more rare, but it's worth considering asking them to sign up to receive payments.
nowherebeen
The problem with PayPal is that you need to sign up for marketplace account and they don’t care about you unless you are generating multi millions.
domk
At Purple Dot (waitlisting platform for e-commerce), we use Stripe.

Not sure which Stripe product you are using exactly, but with Stripe Connect it is possible to pay out people in quite a few countries now, not just the US. If you only have a UK registered business, you should be able to cover EU at least.

ajeet_dhaliwal
Do these people need to have Stripe accounts? I guess that’s where I was blocked, we’d been hoping to make it easy for people to accept payments by not having them sign up for other services and transfer directly to their bank accounts but this does provide greater flexibility on our end. Paypal is something that individuals and companies are used to having accounts for, but Stripe feels like a 'company' type thing, but it's not a big ask to have users sign up to receive payments.
scrollaway
I'm the maintainer of dj-stripe, i think you might be misunderstanding something about the stripe connect set up. Did you look through the docs? https://stripe.com/docs/connect

I think no matter what it'll be the cheapest option for you since you're already using stripe. Feel free to email me if you need help.

ajeet_dhaliwal
This is my preferred option but it's only available for US accounts. See the banner under the documentation here: https://stripe.com/docs/connect/add-and-pay-out-guide?integr...

I reached out to Stripe support to confirm and this was their response:

Cross-border payouts are only available in the US for Platforms.

All connected accounts in every supported country can receive payouts, Connect is the only option there is with regards to transferring funds from one account to another.

So cross border is sending payouts to connected accounts in different countries. If you are in the UK and your connected accounts are UK based, then there would be no issue with payouts to the connected accounts

tornato7
Stellar works really well - you can just have users input a stellar address or make one for them. They'll need some sort of crypto exchange account to withdraw, though.

You can send USDC or native XLM. There's a nice JavaScript API and you can even batch payments up into one operation. Fees are negligible.

cubicmeter
unrelated but then somewhat related question, how is it that fees are negligible, but they aren't on eth, bitcoin etc?
tornato7
Compared to Ethereum, stellar is simpler in operation, not as popular, and considerably more centralized. All those contribute to having much lower fees.

Stellar plays nice with banks and other financial institutions, but still facilitates easy and cheap global payments, which is why I recommend it here even though you could achieve the same result with other blockchains like Ethereum.

Urgo
I've been using Transferwise, which is now known as Wise to pay people outside of the US for years. For inside the US I'm using Quickbooks. Other then liking their original name better I can't really say anything bad about Wise.

While not as quick as a crypto transfer, wise is remarkably fast when comparing it to the US banking system at least. The person you're paying does need a wise account and their banking details entered in it, but beyond that the funds are ACH'd out of my account and converted to their own local currency and deposited directly into their bank accounts.

It does look like they have an api [1] too though as I only have two people I'm paying with it I've always just entered it manually.

[1] https://api-docs.wise.com/#wise-platform-api

scrollaway
Yes, using Wise you can pay out to people who don't have Wise accounts as well. Codementor implements it. It might be a restricted API, you could reach out to their sales team.
elementiks
We actually use a combination of Transferwise, Paymentrails and PayPal. We are a US e-commerce company with hundreds of foreign vendors that we pay every month. It gets complicated quick, particularly when dealing with certain countries. Some countries might have receiving limits, some countries don’t allow business to personal transfers. That’s partly why I use a mix of payout providers. Usually one of them will support the country I’m trying to send to. Be careful with Tipalti. I think they were the ones who wanted to have you sign a contract and guarantee them certain volume.

I have not looked into Stripe, but TransferWise is by far the cheapest option overall. And all three have an API.

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