Changes to Stripe Billing

This is the text I received in an email just now, which is for people on the 'Starter Plan' and easier to understand than the linked article.

1. Today we’re deprecating the Billing Starter plan (your current plan) and moving all customers to a single, comprehensive plan that includes all of Stripe Billing's features. Your pricing will change from 0.5% to 0.7% of Billing volume. However, we'll maintain your current pricing for one year, until June 30, 2025. Pricing of one-time invoices through Stripe Invoicing is unchanged.

2. We’re also introducing subscription-based pricing for Billing. This can make your monthly costs lower and more predictable compared to pay-as-you-go pricing. Learn more and switch plans in the Stripe Dashboard.

as a years-long customer for whom prices keep increasing while product keeps getting worse (fraud detection and dispute handling in particular), I'm really hopeful that a decent competitor shows up soon.

Starter pricing was 0.5%.

Scale pricing was 0.8%.

Both plans were consolidated into a single plan which is 0.7%.

This is good news if you were a Scale customer and bad news if you were a Starter customer.

I love Stripe, blah blah blah, Stripe has "good" le docs and good dev experience and w/e.

But now that they have market share they are seemingly becoming more greedy.

I think they are overplaying their hand. There's no reason that these charges should be %-based. And I'm almost certain for large enterprise customers they're not; there's probably custom negotiated contracts for those cases.

I hope we get more players in this space that can force them to be more competitive on pricing.

This sounds like a pretty significant increase. This is like 40% (or 60%?) increase, no? The new pricing seems to bundle 'volume billing' and 'invoicing', was the latter previously free?

The real question is what payment providers handle ACH well for a reasonable price. Say lots of $500 invoices. Underlying costs on the ACH platform is pretty low. Would love to find a $3 capped provider. Intuit is uncapped, so a $10,000 payment costs $100 per payment on their platform. Ouch!

Curious what people use besides Stripe (or Paypal) or if they are planning on moving away from it.

There is no reason why this feature is % based. What alternative we have? 0.7% just to trigger a charge every month it makes not sense.

For international card is 0.7%+3.9%=4.6% fee for payment!

Anyone have any experience of alternatives and competitors?

perhaps time to pass costs to customer.