Show HN: I built the tool I wished existed for moving Stripe between countries (stripemove.com)
I had hundreds of users and using Stripe's dashboard to add all of the products, prices, coupons and subscriptions manually would take ages. I contacted a couple of services that help with this kind of migration, but their quotes were way over my budget. My next option was to use Stripe's API, which is very powerful but also very complicated. I'm a designer who can code, but I didn't feel confident doing it alone, so I asked a friend, an experienced developer, to help.
It proved to be quite challenging, with many details and caveats we had to learn as we went. What we thought would take a couple of days took us a week.
After this experience, we teamed up and built https://stripemove.com, a tool that guides you through this whole process, explaining and automating that hard week we went through. It handles the technical complexity while keeping your business running. Customers keep paying on your old account while everything transfers in parallel, then you flip the switch when ready.
It's a very niche tool, built for founders who need to change their company location for personal or business reasons. For entrepreneurs buying companies established in other countries. For people in the same situation I was in a few months ago. Basically the tool I wished existed, and for a fair price. Designed to get you through this inconvenient process and back as soon as possible on growing your business.
Would love to hear from anyone who's dealt with similar Stripe migrations. What was your biggest pain point?
16 comments
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Edit: I've been corrected by my collage. Stripe only copied customer records. We had to manually stop and recreate the subscriptions.
Stripe has many issues, the missing migration is one. In my case there is alos the fact that there is no "company name" field and there is no way to issue an invoice correction for subscriptions... This makes it problematic for B2B use cases. I have alrady contacted them multiple times to ask them to add these very basic features but to no avail.
Had I known this before I would probably not have used them.
I guess I'm "that guy." Have you considered that the reason is this as you say is niche thing and there simply is not the market to make it profitable? That is the reason they have to charge out of your budget for it to be worth their time?
Maybe the maintenance and upkeep of the site is low enough that it doesn't matter. (I do hope so i'm not here to watch people fail.)
I would actually target it at those exact businesses rather than individuals. B2B tool. Let them handle the mess of sales negotiations and change your pricing model to the number of accounts or something like that. Accounting firms always have a million high priced tiny tools they use for odd cases. Ask me how I know.....
Your business model means no retention and no return customers. This is mostly a one-time transaction thus it won't generate sustainable revenue.
And this one transaction is absolutely crucial for the business in need of it.
I might be your customer soon. I have less than 2,500 customers and I would consider any amount under $1,500 a no-brainer "shut up and take my money" for the move - and probably even a larger amount.
It was a total nightmare, and definitely the vast majority of the acquisition migration work.
We ended up with a scheme where each customer was migrated over, as a "trial" account until it converted over to a regular paid subscription on the next subscription renewal time.
I wonder how you guys handle that.
We did see some similar services out there, but we didn't deem them high quality and trustworthy. It's kind of hard to build a reputation around a service you only use once. If our acquisition broker had said "use stripemove.com, we've done it many times, they're great", we probably would have forked over the cash immediately.
Consider reaching out to saas acquisition brokers!
1. Account takeovers, helped by your service. Maybe a non-issue in practice, but it’d be a PITA if you get tangled up in that.
2. Handling the long tail of Stripe API version changes. Hopefully it’s straightforward enough, and maybe you can simply require your users to upgrade if they’re on something older that you don’t support. I don’t have any specific thing in mind, but it feels inevitable to me.
But awesome job and good luck! I hope it succeeds, it sounds like a good service to me!