HACKER Q&A
📣 tuyenhx

How do you collect payment as Startup from Stripe none support country?


I wanted to use Stripe to collect payment. But I'm a founder from Stripe's none support countries.

I see there is an option Stripe Atlas. I'm a little hesitate about this option. I totally understand the cost, set up fee and yearly fee. But is there any other hidden fee after this? Like taxes? ...

I did research and saw a few posts tell that, it costed them about 10k/year (When using Stripe + Stripe Atlas) with many hidden fees.

I asked a lot of people around me, they avoided answering this and I don't know why. I even contacted Stripe's support, and they redirected my to a lawyer site with no clear answer. I'm so frustrated.

I have a dumb question.

How do you collect payment if you're in my situation?

Paypal seems a better option for this.


  👤 flothebre Accepted Answer ✓
There are a couple of alternative that I used before Stripe was allowed in my country:

- Flurly, they take 1% on top of Stripe fees but provide super easy payment setup + dashboard, fraud management. You can be paid by direct transfer or PayPal

- Paddle, never tried but has really good reputation

- Gumroad, kinda same as flurly with higher fees and custom payment pages.

You should consider alternatives before open a US company IMHO (except if you have others reasons to do so) Gumroad (not really appro


👤 carlosleyva
You can also use Wise as an alternative.

For a certain fee they'd give the option of having a "local bank account" in that country so customers can do deposits there. Then you can withdraw to your main account elsewhere.


👤 ReadTheLicense
Is there not a local payment gateway company where you're headquartered? If not, then a bank should be able to help you with accepting cards, they might even have their own online payment gateway with a simple enough API, or they'll point you to their online payments partner.

👤 mikhael28
… Bitcoin?

Well, only if the transactions are substantial - otherwise you are getting bones by transaction fees.

You can run your own Lightning node - check out https://stacker.news for an example of proof of concept.


👤 alexmingoia
I’ve used PayPal to accept payments in non-Stripe countries. Even for Stripe-supported countries PayPal is probably an easier checkout experience because most customers just have to login to PayPal rather than getting their card or bank info out.

👤 ev1
I think phrase you are looking for is "merchant of record"

👤 illegalmemory
Please check paddle, another decent option for solo founders.