I've paid them hundreds of dollars in processing and other fees since we started out, but have tried to do most things through ACH to avoid paying more. I totally understand the processing of cards, which has real costs and middlemen. I definitely don't like that they take the higher processing cost, even when a card is debit. Even with ACH, they do still charge $1, which is pretty fair in my opinion.
Jump to today, where I was hit was a $16 fee / charge for using Invoicing Starter plan and had a negative balance when looking at my payouts. After investigating, I see their pricing, which has changed recently to be 0.4% of all invoicing totals and / or not include 25 free invoices like it may have previously. To put it clearly, this means that I am now paying anywhere between $20 (more like $40) and $60 (plus ACH transaction fees and CC fees) per month (more than I was) to essentially use a SaaS based invoicing service that really just has a few line items and a bank account number on it with the convenient option to also accept a card if needed. This is a huge pricing change for a business that essentially has non-payroll costs of less than $200 a month, and it only gets worse the more money that I make or the higher rate(s) that I can command. Stripe was probably one of our biggest expenses per year by the raw numbers, but now, it is more than double and is doubly so by our biggest expense per year.
In addition, I think the part that really irks me the most is the the fact that they are also probably making money off of my money while it sits in their accounts, but to then double dip and charge me what appears to be outrageous costs for a simple SaaS product with some banking / automation backend seems a little much. I get there is probably some complexity that I am not covering and fraud protection and such, but I honestly don't care how they make it work, I only care the value that I get out of their service versus what I am paying, and frankly, the value to cost ratio just took a nose dive today for me for my use case after seeing these new costs associated with their pricing changes.
Am I crazy for thinking this? What is everyone else's opinion here?
This trajectory will not stop, so it's probably best to figure out a solution if it's already this dire after just over a year with Stripe.
This isn't only Stripe but all companies since interest rates started increasing and companies had to maximize their profits.
Stripe is a particular case because they want to IPO and look good for investors. And everybody knows that in 10 years, payments will be significantly simplified by the central bank's free instant transfer software being deployed around the world.
They are in a strange situation where they don't want to IPO now (not such a good economic time), but if they wait too long, they might not be as valuable.
Payment companies will still exist after that, but they'll likely have even more razor-thin margins, and you'll probably only pay for their value add. I doubt they'll manage to get around charging you a % instead of a fixed subscription fee.
I believe only services on top of your sales that involve credit, installments, and Buy-now-pay-later will manage to extract a % fee. This will be hugely deflationary for payment companies on their revenues but will make it cheaper for customers and merchants.