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5 Comments

Questions about your payment gateway 💳

I'm curious as to what went into the decision process when you chose your payment provider/gateway (Stripe, Paypal, Gumroad, etc.). I'm interested in what the important factors were for you, e.g.:

  • availability in your country
  • feature set (billing, full merchant of record, VAT/GST capabilities, APIs,...)
  • accepted payment methods
  • ease of use
  • resources found for implementation
  • recommendations from others
  • ecosystem around the provider

What were the reasons and motivations you decided it was the best for you? And which provider did you eventually end up with?

  1. 4

    We went with Stripe for a number of reasons, the most important being:

    • Availability in our country and our target market countries.
    • Destination Charges - the ability to sit in the middle and collect an application fee while transferring the majority of a payment directly to our platform users without incurring additional processing fees.
    • Ease of use when setting up subscriptions.
    • Stripe.js

    I've worked with PayPal, Braintree, and Authorize.net in past roles, but never found the experience as nice as that of Stripe.

    1. 1

      Thanks for sharing! Yeah Stripe is probably one of the best if not the best when it comes to usability & price.

      If you don't mind me asking. Are there any other services directly related to payment processing that you are using alongside Stripe? E.g. extra Subscription management or billing or invoicing services?

      1. 2

        Stripe actually provided most everything we needed for the subscription part.

        • Stripe Elements to collect the payment method.
        • Subscription API to initiate and cancel subscriptions.
        • Invoice API to obtain a billing history for each user. The data from Stripe includes a PDF invoice and link to a receipt that is hosted by Stripe.

        We did need to build out some tables in our DB that map user IDs, subscription IDs, and payment method IDs, to their equivalent values in Stripe. We also needed to provide the UX in our dashboard where users could manage their payment methods and subscriptions. From there we are pretty much just proxying data to Stripe. We run a few scheduled tasks that check that status of subscriptions and in the event that a subscription becomes invalid (things like expired cards or insufficient funds) we notify the account owner and proceed from there.

        All in all it's pretty lightweight.

        1. 1

          That's a great setup. Thank you for being so open and going into the details, I really appreciate it!

  2. 1

    I would use Stripe as the payment gateway, but would consider using a product like Outseta (www.outseta.com) in tandem with Stripe. This will allow you to get your product to market significantly faster and will also give you a UI that you can use to add plans or experiment with pricing without needing to write new code or update your website. You'll also get a suite of other software tools that you'll inevitably need to run your SaaS company.

    Here's an overview video that will bring this to life for you: https://soapbox.wistia.com/videos/qiepGQxBqm

    I'm a Co-founder of Outseta, so happy to answer any questions that you might have.

    Geoff

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