How do I bill my user for $1 per month
Hello, I am software engineer student from Russia, and I have an idea for a service, that I am planning to sell for around that price. Backend is serverless, frontend is modern PWA, and I thought I could find a cheap plug and play solution, but the truth is different...
My first option is stripe, but the website says it's 2.9% + 30¢, which, in my situation, is 33%, and I really don't want to pay that much.
My other option is bank acquiring, which will cost me only 3.5% from incoming transactions (and no account maintenance fee), but there is no billing service, only few solutions for some old CMSs.
What are my other options? Am I understanding stripe fees right? Or is this normal, to pay 33% of transaction fees?
Could just charge yearly at $12 to help level out the fees.
In my experience, extremely low cost services end up being targeted by credit card scammers because it's a cheap way for them to validate stolen numbers. Personally, I would avoid offering up anything for less than 5-10$ per month.
I've started with $5 per month, but there is similar service for $1.5 and it's only for Apple
A race to the bottom isn't a race you want to win.
True. Good that I am thinking and not committing right now.
Anyone paying $1 for something could just as easily pay $10, it would never be worth your time to bust your balls for that amount.
Your keyword is "Microtransactions", search for payment processors that accept them - I was researching something a while ago and quite a few had this, but can't recall any now. Stripe also has it, but only on case by case basis https://support.stripe.com/questions/accepting-microtransactions-on-stripe
I run a payments startup that is currently a Stripe and GoCardless verified partner. We often have people asking about microtransactions and I think what others are saying here is valid, it's just not feasible to charge such small amounts. We have a few users charging $3/month for side-project SaaS. Better to do a yearly fee to account for the gateway costs, or raise your pricing.
Visa/mastercard are taking nearly 1% for using their card networks. Even with GoCardless for bank transactions you can't charge less than $2. For true microtransactions you start getting into complex territory, it's something we're looking into but I have no idea if we will find a good solution to it that doesn't make things more complex for the end consumer i.e. crypto.
Option 3 is charge more, honestly charging $1/mo as an indie maker isn't worth the hassle.
you just don't because
Charge annual / quarterly recurring or increase your price to account for Stripe charges.