What is the state of recurring payments that most startups / companies use?
Been meaning to use Stripe for everything, but not sure why other competitors such as fusebill, chargebee, memberstack, chargify, recurly etc, exists or what their benefits are, not sure I even know the difference.
Do you use any of these in the list above or something else to handle recurring payments and how was your experience?
Thanks.
But it's the last 5% - 15% that will keep you up at night and/or eat up your time. Accepting payments from EU customers and international users. A typical B2B SaaS will eventually end up accepting checks in the mail, bank transfers from a half dozen countries, and (heaven forbid): PayPal. And you have to support tax compliance on top of all of that, and integrate it with your single source of truth for billing, and company accounting software.
Billing is a pain. Nothing is perfect. Stripe is a wonderful component of a complete solution, and a great starting point.
Most of the alternatives you listed handle a very narrow set of credit-card dunning issues, which Stripe is getting better and better at every day.
One thing on my radar is Paddle. They seem to be tackling a broader set of issues upstream/downstream of actual payment processing in an integrated way.
The main draw for me over Stripe is Paddle handle all country specific sales tax and VAT for me. Paddle send me a single pay out every month, I file that as income in my tax return and I'm done. Without Paddle, I'd need to charge the correct VAT for sales to each country plus keep on top of the changing rules (I'm in the UK).
How do other people do this? I'm curious how many people just don't know the rules around e.g. EU VAT and ignore it when they're small.
B2B? I'd go with Stripe for credit cards and SEPA debit but also offer bank transfer for larger tickets / customers. For our services we offer the latter for all yearly plans as some companies don't want to pay by credit card and prefer getting an invoice that their accounting department can handle. Depending on your location there are various services that can provide you an API for your bank account balance and transfers, you can then match them against the invoices mostly automatically.
There are higher-level services like Chargebee that offer multiple payment gateways and do some of the legwork for you, personally I find Stripe + some homebrew code for invoice generation and bank transfer handling easier, plus it amounts to less personal / sensitive data of your clients being stored on third-party services (if you value that kind of thing).
https://www.mollie.com/en does this for example. (Disclaimer I worked in the same office as the dutch payments provider Qantani. They sold all their users to Mollie.)
I know of some dutch companies that check all the prices and based on the payments option the customer wants they sent the user to a different payments provider to save money on processing fees. I'm not very familiar with Stripe, I have only set it up on a wordpress website once. but if they do not allow you to do cheap recurring payments then just implement a second provider and switch between them.