HACKER Q&A
📣 voidspaced

Isn't this price hike from GoCardless kind of insane?


I run a small non-profit and have been using GoCardless for years to collect recurring direct debit donations. I just got an email from them that updated me about some “Important changes to your GoCardless plan”. This didn’t at first sound so ominous, but apparently they want to move us to the “advanced” plan, based on “on your current payment volumes and product usage”. As it turns out, the “advanced plan” a bit more expensive than the standard plan. After reading the linked PDF (as they interestingly enough didn’t write it out in the email), instead of paying 1% per transaction, you pay 1.25%. A very interesting move indeed, to just move customers to a more expensive plan without their explicit consent. However, this isn’t what’s insane about this. Apparently they have also changed the constant fee per payment from 2 SEK to 5 SEK (1 SEK ≈10 cents). The latter fee change applies to the “standard” plan (which we’re currently on), so essentially they want to stealthy increase fees by 150%.

As we are a small non-profit that are reliant on small recurring donations, 5 SEK (~50 cents) per payment means that ~6% of every transaction (up from ~3%) goes to GoCardless, even if you factor in the 25% fee discount you get from GoCardless from being a non-profit. Isn’t this incredibly greedy? I have never been through anything like this with the many different payment gateways I have used. This change means our organisation will have to change our budgets for 2024 significantly.