HN Explorer

Ask HN: How do you collect payment as Startup from Stripe none support country?

12 points by tuyenhx ↗ HN
I wanted to use Stripe to collect payment. But I'm a founder from Stripe's none support countries.

I see there is an option Stripe Atlas. I'm a little hesitate about this option. I totally understand the cost, set up fee and yearly fee. But is there any other hidden fee after this? Like taxes? ...

I did research and saw a few posts tell that, it costed them about 10k/year (When using Stripe + Stripe Atlas) with many hidden fees.

I asked a lot of people around me, they avoided answering this and I don't know why. I even contacted Stripe's support, and they redirected my to a lawyer site with no clear answer. I'm so frustrated.

I have a dumb question.

How do you collect payment if you're in my situation?

Paypal seems a better option for this.

20 comments

[ 1.6 ms ] story [ 79.7 ms ] thread
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
flothebre
There are a couple of alternative that I used before Stripe was allowed in my country:

- Flurly, they take 1% on top of Stripe fees but provide super easy payment setup + dashboard, fraud management. You can be paid by direct transfer or PayPal

- Paddle, never tried but has really good reputation

- Gumroad, kinda same as flurly with higher fees and custom payment pages.

You should consider alternatives before open a US company IMHO (except if you have others reasons to do so) Gumroad (not really appro

tuyenhx
Thank you so much for the suggestion.
ReadTheLicense
Is there not a local payment gateway company where you're headquartered? If not, then a bank should be able to help you with accepting cards, they might even have their own online payment gateway with a simple enough API, or they'll point you to their online payments partner.
tuyenhx
I am from Viet Nam. But it will take me a lot of time (1 - 2 months) just for only paper work before really integrate with their payment gateway.
carlosleyva
You can also use Wise as an alternative.

For a certain fee they'd give the option of having a "local bank account" in that country so customers can do deposits there. Then you can withdraw to your main account elsewhere.

tuyenhx
Thank you! Let me check it
toomuchtodo
Wise is so good, they’re a Stripe sleeper competitor as credit card payments make way for local instant payments in various markets.
nivertech
Could you explain how one can use Wise to accept credit card payments for a SaaS website?

Or just point to the relevant pages on the https://wise.com/ site.

Do you mean to open US bank a/c via Wise, and then use it with Stripe or similar to accept credit cards?

illegalmemory
Please check paddle, another decent option for solo founders.
tuyenhx
Thank you. Let me check it
mikhael28
… Bitcoin?

Well, only if the transactions are substantial - otherwise you are getting bones by transaction fees.

You can run your own Lightning node - check out https://stacker.news for an example of proof of concept.

tuyenhx
I am not sure accepting crypto is a good idea in my case, since my customers are low tech. They dont know much about these things.

Last time, when I made a transaction on ETH, it took me 10 mins for wait nodes to confirm and costed me about 20$ of transaction fee.

How about the speed of Bitcoin network now? Just curious.

mikhael28
Much better. But still slow. Check out the lightning network, and the link I posted above for an example of how fast lightning network transactions are.
tuyenhx
Just checked it, it’s very fast. Will the speed still the same if the network bigger?
mikhael28
Probably. If the network grows, more nodes will be added as the demand increases (because the nodes who open the channels, get paid a small amount of money. Very small, but still something).

You can run your own nodes, and get paid to open your own channels.

alexmingoia
I’ve used PayPal to accept payments in non-Stripe countries. Even for Stripe-supported countries PayPal is probably an easier checkout experience because most customers just have to login to PayPal rather than getting their card or bank info out.
tuyenhx
Yes, I have the same thought.
ev1
I think phrase you are looking for is "merchant of record"
tuyenhx
I didnt know that is its name. Thank you for the phrase.