What are some low cost payment processing alternatives to Stripe?
I'm looking to process ~20k transactions a month with an average ticket size of $15 per transaction. Would ISOs(Independent sales organizations) with sponsor banks be good options to consider?
The most low-cost I know of with widest reach (most countries) is https://www.adyen.com/pricing
Because you can choose which processor you want to use and there are many low-cost ones, including some inter-bank ones with fixed cost (no %)
Most shops like WooCommerce and Shopify have ready-to-use plugins for it.
(I'm not affiliated, but i build e-commerce for brands)
Have you considered going to one of the archaic platforms and getting a proper merchant account? Moneris, banks (Chase, Wells Fargo), etc? Pretty much all of them will probably offer better support (a customer support line) and cheaper transaction fee.
You lose the developer friendliness, so you'll have to debate if that matters to you. To me it never did.
Or you could take a look at stax https://staxpayments.com/
Depends on where you tap into the digital payments chain. At the highest level (with highest fees) are the payfacs (Payment facilitators). Above them are the payment acquirers with comparatively low fees, higher joining fees, more rigorous certification process and the PCI compliance is a chore you need to repeat every year. Above that is not that easy to tap into such as direct link to credit card networks and banks. At your volume, PayFac like Stripe is the best option IMO.
While we're talking about Stripe alternatives, anyone have a good Stripe Tax alternative?
Their pricing is actually insane as they charge per API call rather than transaction amount. That sort of pricing made sense for TaxJar because it was their whole deal, but post-acquisition it would've made more sense to treat the tax product as a complement to the core business and just tack on a small 50c fee for successful tax collection.
Has anyone used Helcim or Stax? These processors pricing seems to be around $0.15 per transaction. If this is true why don't so many people use it?
Every country has couple, if not dozens, of payment processors. Most of them will support foreign customers as well. So you have hundreds and thousands of options here. Bottom line will be that they are all essentially the same when it comes to functionality and pricing because they are the middlemen between you and visa/mastercard/... and not much else. So there is very little variety possible in this little space. It will mostly come down to how "pretty" their gateway is(unless you are doing direct integration without redirection), how responsive their support team is and how they bill you and provide transaction information. Again, not much variety. So pick the cheapest one and be done with it.
Not at your volume. It would probably cost you more to switch than you'd save, considering the time and training investment involved.
Assuming $250k per year at $15/transaction gives ~16,666 transactions a year. With base Stripe pricing, that means you're paying $5k for the $0.30 per transaction fee and another $7.2k for the 2.9% interchange plus fee. So $12.2k in fees per $250k processed, or 4.9% of processed dollars. Adyen is probably going to be about the same given your volume.
It's important to know that Stripe charges the same fee even though the fee for processing American Express is different from Visa, which is different from Discover and all are more expensive than debit cards. If your business skews highly towards American Express, than Stripe is actually giving you the best rate you could hope for. If you're volume skews debit cards, than Stripe is giving you the worst rate.
Only tangentially related, but does someone know good competitors to Stripe in Japan? I need support for subscriptions in USD and EUR.
Last time I checked, there were a few choices (besides Stripe and PayPal), but many supported either only JPY, or only one time payments...
Bitcoin lightning network
https://www.kevin.eu/ looks interesting. Apart from card payments, it supports instant account to account transfers.
For non-US residents (digital nomads), besides Stripe and PayPal, other payment companies have strict KYC requirements. Most payment companies require local residency and SSN. Why should Stripe be avoided? Is it difficult to pass their underwriting policy?
Hello,
(I’m co-founder of MonoPayments, white label payment platform for fintechs.)
If you want to pay less, you have to use local processors with local currencies. This would be a complex operation.
1. Establish a company at that jurisdiction
2. Make agreements with processors, it could be banks or wallet providers.
3. You need a treasurer (or CFO)
4. Foreign Exchange rates will be a concern after a while.
https://recurly.com/ maybe, I can't find this in their pricing page, but from what I know it looks like this: revenue fee 0.500% transaction fee $0.08 and selected plan (there is free one); with your volume that would be around $3.2k a month in fees.
Not sure if this previous thread from years ago will be of any use, sharing it just in case any of the alternatives are still relevant or could be of use for you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22596082
Mentions Adyen, Braintree, and Paddle
I have seen a few alternatives to stripe, but this depends a bit on your location and services you provide.
Check out: https://atlas.scoutflo.com/?q=stripe (They have listed all open source, stripe alternatives)
One that comes to mind is LemonSqueezy
Hey NavyG - Khem from the Paddle team here. We offer a merchant of record model which takes all of the manual work/integrations away and can migrate customers seamlessly over so you can focus on the product. Happy to chat if you'd like to learn more.
Highly depends on in which country you are. For Switzerland I can recommend payrexx which also accept Swiss payment systems such a Twint.
https://payrexx.com/en/
Full disclosure, I work for Stripe. The question you want to ask is why are these alternatives cheaper than Stripe? What is the tradeoff.
I would like to know, if i'm correct in thinking, this is what GNU Taler could solve, too?
So...there kind of isn't any good alternatives?
According to some people on Twitter, this should've been deleted lol
For over a decade I've been having free bank accounts with free Visa and MasterCard debit and credit cards, and I've been using them with services that allow me to create as many free virtual credit cards I wish.
I thought these services were already widespread.
Are people still paying for debit and credit cards?