There's a vast payments ecosystem beyond Stripe that lets you avoid this.
With companies like Spreedly to provide almost-Stripe-quality APIs and PCI-compliant card vaulting at only a flat cost, and a massive amount of "merchant account providers" a quick Google away that can hook into Authorize.net and then into Spreedly, you can end up at 1.75% or less depending on your industry, and the flexibility to dynamically route transactions to merchant accounts (including Stripe itself) based on anything from geography to your own notion of fraud/return risk.
Stripe has far and away the best developer and administrator experience in the industry - it surprises and delights. But this doesn't make it the right solution for all businesses. Its genius was that it entered the zeitgeist as such.
Last I read, Authorize.net is never going to be updated to provide for PSD2/SCA authentication flows, which means it will not be suitable for charging customers in Europe in the future. Whether Spreedly will really be able to wrap those flows up in their API is an iffy question to me still.
Wow, Stripe is the best developer experience? When I integrated a few months ago their documentation was so confusing I ended up giving up and not using it at all, relying on using a library for laborious guess and check, and watching the JSON responses. I suspect my product can still be purchased for free if you use that EU security feature because nothing could help me figure out when I need to use it or how to do so, so it just looks like the payment succeeded. So much documentation recommends you use a totally different system I felt like I was caught in a loop.
Or just extend the same privacy protections to all your users globally and implement the same functionality once. Honestly, the PaymentIntent API is not difficult to wrap your mind around when you dive into the documentation, and it has you covered on 3D secure payments.
Nah there's some credit card security thing in the EU they talk about in the Stripe API. No comprehension of what it is, but I'm not talking about GDPR or anything, just weird credit cards.
I thought the Payment Intents and associated information about SCA had a learning curve, but was well documented. I think the aspect you're missing is that you don't need to decide, necessarily, when to use Payment Intents. You use only that API, and if there's an additional step required on the user's end, you'll get a different "state" in the response https://stripe.com/docs/payments/intents
Your experience isn’t invalid, but it’s by and far the best developer experience compared to everyone else.
Stripe was “bleeding edge” in their desicion to use JSON when I first integrated with them which was a hell of a lot easier than integrating with PayPal’s SOAP API
Idk, we’re at 5x that and the stripe fees are such a small part of our overall costs that it hasn’t been worth it to optimize there yet. We’ve found so many other places to optimize over time with bigger cost savings.
We just revamped our hosting on AWS and saved $6k/mo or so. Totally worth it.
It highly depends on the price of the product you’re selling.
If you’re selling 2.99 monthly subscriptions, then Stripe is eating ~13% of your revenue (30c + 2.9%). Or ~$6k per month in the grandparent commenter’s case ($30k in your case).
If you’re selling 99.99 monthly subscriptions, then it’s only ~3% of revenue.
Contrast this to PayPal who offer a “micro payments” solution for such cases - where it’s a flat 5% + 5c fee.
With companies like Spreedly to provide almost-Stripe-quality APIs and PCI-compliant card vaulting at only a flat cost, and a massive amount of "merchant account providers" a quick Google away that can hook into Authorize.net and then into Spreedly, you can end up at 1.75% or less depending on your industry, and the flexibility to dynamically route transactions to merchant accounts (including Stripe itself) based on anything from geography to your own notion of fraud/return risk.
Stripe has far and away the best developer and administrator experience in the industry - it surprises and delights. But this doesn't make it the right solution for all businesses. Its genius was that it entered the zeitgeist as such.