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hmokiguesstoday at 5:52 PM3 repliesview on HN

I remember when Stripe started and it was super fun to set it up as a developer and build stuff.

Today I find it does way too much for small projects and the fees are too high. Does anyone knows of good alternatives for that? (Someone recently shared https://astrafi.com/ with me and it seemed promising, with much better fees, but I haven't tested or used anything other than Stripe)


Replies

Stromgrentoday at 6:36 PM

I find Stripes fees excessive too, but I don’t think I’ll ever switch. I’ve been running a small SaaS product on the side of other work for >15 years and if it taught me one thing, it’s that I need to reduce the things I have to maintain, reduce manual work, reduce the things that can go wrong. There’s nothing worse than having to fix a bug in a codebase you haven’t touched for a year and possibly in a feature you haven’t touched in many years. I simply love that Stripe handles not just the payment, but the payment application, the subscription billing, the price settings, the exports for bookkeeping. I’ve had a few instances where my site was used fraudulently to check stolen credit cards and it was quickly flagged and I could resolve it with Stripe. I’m sure someone can mention alternatives and I’m sure that I could build something that would work myself, but they keep a big part of what it takes to run the business out of my mind and I’m willing to pay for that.

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jamesdelaneyietoday at 7:43 PM

In the EU and had to switch from Stripe to Mollie due to Stripe thinking the client was a cruise company because they rent 'cruiser' boats for river leisure. Mollie was super easy to implement for them, and fees much better

krainboltgreenetoday at 6:12 PM

You can't really do better than stripe. The onboarding overhead is because of fraud and the costs are basically barely above interchange.

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