from Hacker News

Stripe increases price for business in the European Economic Area

by mike97 on 2/7/23, 10:16 AM with 230 comments

• by bjackman on 2/7/23, 11:20 AM

  I have been pondering transaction costs lately. Seems like this is an area where intervention could have massive impact: these costs are effectively a tax that incurs deadweight loss so according to prevailing economic theory if we can reduce it the whole economy should be catalysed.

  IIUC governments already introduce price caps for certain elements of this market but I think we could be doing more? Like mandating incumbents to implement open standards and subsidising their competitors?

  Dunno though I'm not very informed about the topic, just suddenly discovered recently how much of my income is just funding a fairly small number of payment providers.

• by burdapoint on 2/7/23, 12:13 PM

  UK/EEA businesses who are paying out in USD to a US-domiciled bank account will now incur a 1% fee, with a minimum fee of US$2.50.

  My business does most of it's sales in USD and pays out to a US bank account, I don't understand this fee at all. Just because they can I guess? Stripe is really becoming the new PayPal. Will definitely be exploring options to move to Adyen or continue moving more customers over to Paddle as we've found Stripe to be increasingly frustrating to deal with.

  Now we're looking at 3.25% + £0.20 for the card payment in the US, 0.5% for Billing to handle subscriptions, 1% to payout, 0.4% if you want invoices, 0.5% if you need to handle sales tax. Already at 5.65% + £0.20 - that's without any of the paid radar tools.

• by Laaas on 2/7/23, 11:45 AM

  > Dispute fees (also known as chargebacks) will increase from €15 to €20. Due to costs for managing dispute evidence submissions (regardless of outcome), we'll no longer refund this fee if the customer's bank resolves the dispute in your favor.

  > If you or your users have an account located in an EEA country that has not adopted the Euro, here are the fixed fees of €20 in local currencies: Bulgaria: ЛВ40; Czech Republic: 550Kč; Denmark: 200kr; Hungary: 7,000Ft; Liechtenstein: 20CHF, Poland: 90zł; Romania: 100LEU, Sweden: 200kr.

  200 DKK is almost 27 EUR. This seems a bit expensive considering that you don't get refunded if you're in the right anymore.

• by throwaway67743 on 2/7/23, 11:28 AM

  It says something when traditional banks are basically the same price now and are almost as good in features (and many other card processors are cheaper, especially if eg you stick to a processor in the EU for EU cards) - I'm not sure why anyone would pick Stripe anymore, especially as they have just as many "hidden" costs as others (eg fraud stuff)

• by poxrud on 2/7/23, 7:32 PM

  Stripe stopped being competitive when they began keeping all of the transaction fees, including a percentage of the entire transaction, when issuing refunds. A customer changed their mind... well you just lost a lot of money.

• by csomar on 2/7/23, 8:12 PM

  The carding ecosystem is going down. In the last two years, I saw a surprising uptick in the number of businesses that will charge a 2-3% fee if you pay with card. This is from the US to Europe to SEA.

  My guess is that most commerce will start offloading this cost to customers especially as new payment methods become available (ie: wallets)

  Lest government impose cards monopoly and force transactions with them, I think we have reached/are close to the peak of mastercard/visa.

• by kylehotchkiss on 2/7/23, 6:11 PM

  > Dispute fees (also known as chargebacks) will increase from €15 to €20. We’ll also no longer refund this fee if the customer’s bank resolves the dispute in your favor, due to the costs Stripe incurs for managing dispute evidence submissions (regardless of the outcome).

  Is Stripe testing dispute fees for all chargebacks out in EU before rolling out in the US?

  1) This is gonna be bad for NGOs

  2) So now people can just DDOS an org with chargebacks to put them in the red?

• by prepend on 2/7/23, 12:08 PM

  It’s interesting how these fees slowly inch up. It’s a slippery slope argument or more like a glacier. But once the market stabilizes, I think there’s lots of pressure to eat these fees over time.

  I wonder if everyone will end up with the apple model of only getting 70% and letting some huge conglomerate fight over fees, or just vertically integrate.

  I’m not a fan of government regulation but this is an area where it may be worth having some digital cash mediated exchange where the transaction fees are meant to be absurdly low, like 1% or 5 cents whichever is lower. It would provide all the insurances of cash, so none, but would be a strong financial infrastructure that helps consumers and business.

  This has been my hope for crypto since 2009, but the fees have always been higher than visa for consumer purchases.

• by reisse on 2/7/23, 11:34 AM

  I don't know how Stripe can justify these pricing, except for "oh we can extract more money, let's do that!". In other (non-Western) countries pricing for local payment systems can be less than half of what Stripe charges, e. g. Alipay (one of the biggest Chinese payment services) charges about 0.55% merchant fee without per-transaction cost.

• by petesergeant on 2/7/23, 11:46 AM

  > premium cards [are] commercial, corporate, or business cards issued by Visa and Mastercard [and attract more expensive fees, even compared to Amex]

  Does anyone know more about that? Why are they more expensive? Is there a different underlying cost structure, or simply price discrimination by some intermediary?

  There's more information on "premium cards" here[0], but it doesn't explain the price difference or why a separate category is needed.

  0: https://support.stripe.com/questions/what-s-the-difference-b...

• by baby-yoda on 2/7/23, 3:55 PM

  Assuming this is related to Stripe trying to decrease the effect of the next funding devaluation. [0]

  Hard to imagine they are still in a cashflow burn despite being around for so long and seemingly capturing a large marketshare of payments. Perhaps its primarily for insiders to take money off the table before an IPO lockup, with a not-so-great 6 month post IPO forecast?

  [0] https://techcrunch.com/2023/01/27/fintech-stripe-tried-to-ra...

• by jambojumbo on 2/7/23, 12:06 PM

  the beginning of the end of stripe. Instead of attracting more customers and building the ground for a healthy startup ecosystem, stripe chose the shortsighted 'let's just charge more'. this immediately makes other alternatives like adyen more attractive...bad move and I don't get how patrick collison who roams around here let this happen. the 2.9%+0.25 was already allowing for healthy margins, and was higher than competitors.

• by mtmail on 2/7/23, 10:41 AM

  related 6 days ago "Stripe increases fees for EU and UK-based businesses in April " https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34609182

• by rr888 on 2/7/23, 1:57 PM

  Its crazy there isn't more competition. I was hoping that would be one thing cryptos would be good for.

  One thing I think regulators could do is force cc fees to be added to the price instead of hidden. Eg a $10 item costs $10, $10.20, $10.40 depending on which payment method you use.

• by m3nu on 2/7/23, 12:07 PM

  Together with the new payout fee this is a +46% increase for charging USD cards. 2.9% to 4.25%.

• by sensibar on 2/7/23, 12:06 PM

  So what to do as a German company to avoid the 1% fee on payouts to US USD bank accounts?

  Does anyone know if one can add a German USD-bank account to Stripe by now? (Was not possible a year ago)

  Does the 1% fee also apply if the company is based in Switzerland? (strictly not the EEA)

  Does anyone at which MRR scale one can negotiate fees down with Stripe?

• by switch007 on 2/7/23, 11:54 AM

  I thought they would be benefitting from everyone else raising their prices. Isn't this double dipping?

  Edit: and isn't it quite likely it's easy for companies just to pass this charge straight on to customers, given the climate? Maybe that was Stripe's intention with the timing

• by sschueller on 2/7/23, 11:55 AM

  In Switzerland Stripe is already 2.9% + CHF0.30 which is higher than the new rate in the EU.

  If you want a local solution that also can do Twint (Swiss p2p payments) without extra contracts then I would recommend you try Payrexx[1].

  Per transaction fees are also less than what Stripe is charging although you have a monthly fixed fee.

  [1] https://www.payrexx.ch

• by freedude on 2/7/23, 4:58 PM

  I know this is in the EU, but do yourself and the businesses you love a favor. Pay with CA$H. The value you receive from local small businesses is worth the time it takes to avoid the tax on our economy.

• by matips on 2/7/23, 12:09 PM

  Interesting, I did not know that internet payments are so expensive. In Poland (UE) max interchange is 0,3%. Blue Media (Polish payment gate) cost 1,19%. 1.9%-3,25% + €0.25 looks expensive.

• by CalRobert on 2/7/23, 12:24 PM

  Well as it so happens I'm only in the first day or so of integrating Stripe in to my subscription-based side project in the EEA. What should I use instead? Molliepay?

• by 12907835202 on 2/7/23, 4:15 PM

  So what are the main alternatives to Stripe?

• by zhuzhu on 2/7/23, 4:41 PM

  UK too. I think I need to try other payment processor?

• by Anon4Now on 2/7/23, 11:41 AM

  Those charges don't look exorbitant. They seem to be inline with what PayPal charges.

• by glintik on 2/7/23, 12:35 PM

  «Dispute fees (also known as chargebacks) will increase from €15 to €20. We’ll also no longer refund this fee if the customer’s bank resolves the dispute in your favor, due to the costs Stripe incurs for managing dispute evidence submissions (regardless of the outcome).»

  That’s very interesting. Stripe is so greedy and dishonest.

• by metacritic12 on 2/7/23, 4:34 PM

  Preparing for an IPO, I see.

• by zhuzhu on 2/7/23, 6:54 PM

  Stripe said: Amazon is my sugar daddy now. What do you want to do?

• by TekMol on 2/7/23, 10:58 AM

  How can Europeans use Stripe when they can't use Google Fonts and Google Analytics on the grounds that sending even a single IP packet to a server under the control of a US company violates the GDPR?