Ask HN: Best Stripe Alternatives?

ceffio · 2020-03-16T18:52:36.000Z

Recently, we've been having a lot of problems with stripe (transactions are falling because some issue when passing the token/customer to stripe). We are considering moving to another provider. I've used stripe in all my previous companies.Any recommendations on which payment gateway to use? We want to own the entire checkout experience.I am interested in hearing your experiences :)[Edit] We are trying to find the root cause of the issue, a processor that allows us to talk to an engineer would be great.[Edit] Checkout works correctly on test mode, but fails when running payments live. Customers have used their cards on other websites using stripe and transactions went smoothly.

mootrichard 6 years ago |

Full disclosure: Dev Advocate for Square

Feel free to try out Square, but I'm going to be transparent in that any issue that you might be having with passing tokens from a front-end to your back-end for payment processing isn't necessarily going to be solved by switching processors.

It sounds like someone else mentioned that you might not be supporting Strong Customer Authentication (SCA). Additionally, just because you got a token and created a customer, doesn't necessitate that a transaction would be successful. There are many other factors that can cause a transaction to fail.

Sometimes the transactions fail for fairly vague reasons sent from the bank, so you'll just have a generic declined message. Your best bet is to attempt to root cause the reason for the failures with your processor. You want to find out if this is only for transactions with a particular bank, credit card network, etc...

If you're unable to root cause the failures with your processor, then that might be your actual reason for switching.

[EDIT] Not going to be linking out here, but you're always welcome to talk to engineers on our team in our community chat channel that is linked throughout our developer docs. Only adding this having seen an edit above regarding a desire to talk to an engineer.

edwinwee 6 years ago |

Edwin from Stripe here. Sorry you've been having trouble as of late—do you know yet what’s causing those transactions to fail? I'm happy to help troubleshoot if you email edwin@stripe.com.

xrd 6 years ago | |

Edwin reached out to me when I had an issue with Stripe and was really thorough in getting everything resolved to my satisfaction. He's top notch.

ceffio 6 years ago | |

Wow Edwin, just wanted to thank you for replying. I'll email you latter.

jbkiv 6 years ago | |

Thank you for stepping in Edwin, much appreciated!

eajacobs 6 years ago |

I may be biased, but I work at a competing processor called Adyen. We process payments for many of the world's leading e-commerce companies (Uber, Netflix, Spotify, FB, MSFT, etc...).

Merchants switching to Adyen from Stripe generally experience increased performance (higher authorization rates, no downtime), and more transparency into what's going on with their transactions. We've put a lot of effort recently into making our APIs and documentation more developer-friendly-- an area where we know Stripe excels.

Feel free to reach out directly if you'd like more info! eric [dot] jacobs [at] adyen [dot] com

jesterson 6 years ago | |

As someone who can compare Adyen and Stripe, I must say Eric is mostly right - initially I was hesitant choosing Adyen but on practice it happened to be a very robust platform allowing more fine-grained analysis of our transactions comapred to Stripe.

On the other side of the coin, as the moment we were working with Adyen it totally sucked during initial phase. It took ages till we started processing because someone on Adyen side said but didn't do, then did but didn't update, etc. I had to escalate issues to Eric :) However once it was sorted out, I couldn't complain at all. Hope you guys managed to get processes run more smoothly now.

lucb1e 6 years ago | |

That text "merchants switching to $us from $competitor experience $benefits" sounds very marketing-y. I can't find it literally on your website (I expected this to be the description on the homepage) so it does seem to be your own words. Is this statistically measured and somehow controlled for any new feature on the site / newsletter going out, your personal experience, or from some sales kit?

rupert1234 6 years ago | | |

He didn't publish a science paper. It's a specific claim and you can easily call Adyen customers and find out if it's true. It's not an outrageous claim and he goes on to acknowledge said competitors strength in another area. FWIW, if you've spent time in payments you will know his claim isn't bogus. It might be pretty close these days, but it's far from a bogus claim.

IdontRememberIt 6 years ago |

> We want to own the entire checkout experience

The less you see, the better. Being PCI DSS compliant (as soon as you see/store sensitive transaction data) is a pain...

ceffio 6 years ago | |

What I meant was, we don't want to redirect them to another website. I agree with what you mention.

Sorry if I wasn't clear.

thestepafter 6 years ago | | |

You don’t have to redirect to another website. I recommend getting a better web developer because integration with Stripe can be completely seamless.

ENGNR 6 years ago | | |

Stripe is starting to inject themselves into the transaction, turning more into Apple Pay by saying the charges API is deprecated

I think OP is just looking for something similar to Stripe. I’ve found Pin Payments to be pretty good. If they’d support ‘connect’ I’d migrate everything over to them

erulabs 6 years ago | | |

I believe you're talking about Stripe Checkout - which is totally optional and helps developers really quickly add a payment form to their site (like PayPal). I use Stripe on a number of my projects and at my startup and users never need to know "Stripe" exists unless I want them to. Disclosure: I am a former Stripe employee.

simlevesque 6 years ago | | |

> Stripe is starting to inject themselves into the transaction, turning more into Apple Pay by saying the charges API is deprecated

That's not at all what is happening. Do you have any idea why they deprecated the charges API ?

ENGNR 6 years ago | | |

All I know is I went with Stripe so I didn’t have to see the PayPal logo (or any logo) in my checkout process

You don’t have to confuse things with an intermediate brand to wait for a user to auth a transaction in their banking app, just leave the timer on the screen until they do it

lucb1e 6 years ago | | |

> we don't want to redirect them to another website

As a security consultant and user, I would prefer actually seeing whoever processes my data for a few reasons:

- I know who gets my data; it is not sent to them in the background and one can only find out through legalese (if at all, since "a payment processor" is all you're legally obliged to say)

- Payment data processed by a third party is likely more secure than an average-sized web shop (even if you just proxy it, a hack can impact that but it couldn't impact paypal's security without messing with the URL, which the user could observe (and if you say "but you're a security dude" yeah, but I also teach others to do the same and I've seen companies train their users on the concept of a domain followed by a slash, it isn't hard))

- I know what many of those companies' security reputation is

- And I may know the general reputation of the company, e.g. PayPal has a rich history of issues with both merchants and users so I would rather go back and choose another option if possible

eljimmy 6 years ago |

If you don't know what's causing the issue, how do you know the problem isn't on your end? Switching providers won't fix that.

ceffio 6 years ago | |

Hi, Stripe's support keep telling us it is a a bank error.

According to stripe logs, a successful transaction has 3 steps: create a token (/v1/tokens), then the customer (/v1/customers) and finally generate the payment (/v1/charges). At the moment, all the transactions are falling when they receive the customer (/v1/customer). I am not sure what's causing the issue, I am requesting to talk to an engineer to get any response other than "talk to your bank" (we have talked to them 4 times already :(

Thanks for giving me the chance to clarify what's going on.

trevorhinesley 6 years ago | | |

I don't see the payment intent endpoint listed here, which means you're not allowing for authentication challenges (SCA/PSD2). So it's possible the bank is denying the charge, but your flow isn't accounting for it if it's not using payment intents. See here for updating your implementation to account for SCA: https://stripe.com/docs/strong-customer-authentication/migra...

sunaurus 6 years ago | | |

This was my first thought as well. OP, your symptoms sound very similar to an app I recently updated to support SCA - it was just dropping a portion of the payments.

sixhobbits 6 years ago |

Braintree is probably the closest to stripe. I only implemented the sandbox version though.

If stripe says it's the bank's fault though, it probably is. We had issues with a lot of payments failing with "no not honor". It was the same with other providers and did turn out to be the banks

rococode 6 years ago | |

> We had issues with a lot of payments failing with "no not honor". It was the same with other providers and did turn out to be the banks

Useful info, thanks for sharing! We've also been getting some "do not honors" and have been wondering if we might see better results with other processors.

tehbeard 6 years ago |

> transactions are falling because some issue when passing the token/customer to stripe

That reads more like an issue in your stack than with stripe. Has this happened since 3d secure rolled out? Perhaps something with the same site cookie changes? Ca bundle out of date if this is backend passing to stripe?

Without knowing why you are having issues, you're running blind.

jsumrall 6 years ago |

Too vague of a question, given the different ways a PSP can be regarded as “good”. Some have nicer docs, some have cheaper prices. It’s all in what you need and your volume, margins, return rate, etc.

I’d take a look at something like https://www.spreedly.com/ or https://www.verygoodsecurity.com/ if you want to avoid lock in with Adyen, etc. Something like VGS can work where you don’t store credit card data but also don’t rely on a single PSP for everything.

martinkivi 6 years ago |

When you are saying that you want to own the entire checkout experience, what exactly do you mean? Do you want to own everything related to processing credit card payments, including card data storage etc? It would also good to specify where your company is located.

We've had good experiences with Braintree, Adyen, Stripe and multiple other payment services for our customers at Shoperb (www.shoperb.com. It does sound like the problem you are facing may be technical implementation related. Have you done a custom implementation or using what Stripe provides out of the box?

rmedaer 6 years ago |

I'm going to build a small online service with only one product and a subscription fee by month. I had to compare the Payment Gateways to know which one fit my needs.

To do this comparison, I made a small spreadsheet which could (maybe, or not) help you. Here it is: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/12-sWEe-gsoGm0kT5LMcM...

Feel free to add comments if you find any issue.

pbreit 6 years ago |

If you're having problems with Stripe, you're probably going to have more problems elsewhere.

rickitan 6 years ago |

I recommend Shopify's Checkout

Disclaimer: I work for Shopify (But I also use it for my side hustles)

The biggest benefit is that with the Shopify checkout you can support credit cards, Paypal, Apple Pay, Google Pay, Crypto and more with ONE integration.

You also get discounts codes and logic out of the box (buy one get one, X percentage off, fixed amount off, etc)

And all you have to do is listen to the order completion web hook and do whatever you want on your side.

You can use the JavaScript SDK to send your users to the checkout. https://shopify.github.io/js-buy-sdk/

Hope that helps!

payguru 6 years ago |

Ceffio, Payments integration can be a tad bit overwhelming if you are new to payments. But, in my limited experience of about 12 years integrating payments with Authorize.Net, Stripe, Braintree, I can advise that switching mostly won’t fix the issue. There are a lot of edge exceptions in the response payload returned from Stripe (or just about anyone else) that you can must account for.

Also, it is fairly easy to build a PCI compliant stripe checkout experience without having to send customers visually to another stripe.

I can help with a quick look if you want to hit me up. Always happy to help. Rc at 44tables dot com

ethanpil 6 years ago |

I have also been looking for an alternative. In my case I often incorporate Stripe for clients projects. Would love a solution which offers a referral commission...

throwawaysea 6 years ago |

Stripe is also willing to deplatform those they ideologically disagree with. We need better, more neutral, more reliable payment services.

jeremiahlee 6 years ago |

I can recommend against using Zuora and Adyen based on my two years of working on a large scale migration to them.

seanwilson 6 years ago |

I use Paddle for https://www.checkbot.io/. The major reason I chose them over Stripe is Paddle deal with country specific tax laws for you (like complicated EU VAT). Paddle take a bigger transaction fee though.

turingbombe 6 years ago |

you can chat with devs on IRC if you go to freenode and the #stripe channel. it's proven to be an invaluable resource on some issues.

simlevesque 6 years ago |

Don't try to own the checkout experience.

rogerkirkness 6 years ago |

We had the same issue with the token/customer thing. It seems to be an issue with client libraries.

llegnaf 6 years ago |

I think GoCardless is another type of payment service that could fit your domain possibly.

gautamkmr89 6 years ago |

Paypal ? Square ?

A lot depends on your use case.

josefresco 6 years ago |

Authorize.net was my go-to before Stripe. PayPal if you like pain.

lucb1e 6 years ago | |

Paypal if you want me looking for alternative places to purchase your goods

josefresco 6 years ago | | |

If it's just a gateway (no transfer to PP), the consumer won't know the difference.

lucb1e 6 years ago | | |

By gateway you mean proxy right?

Is that even within Paypal's TOS? Can you front-end their web service and capture users' passwords purportedly for proxying?

I know that Sofort does that and I'm flabbergasted by my bank switching their stance from "wait, who's capturing our login tokens?" to "oh, you're talking about Sofort. Yeah, we can't control what others do on the internet [I mentioned they could just block the Sofort servers]. This is fine." Checking back what the official statement was, in summary it came down to that (use of) Sofort doesn't comply with the TOS but they're currently allowing me to use it until they came to a more permanent agreement in current talks with Sofort.

josefresco 6 years ago | | |

I meant just their gateway services. It's been a few years since I used it but I do remember a $20/month plan where you could use just the gateway to process CC orders, no PP account required. This thread is old, we should move on ;-)

wilg 6 years ago |

We use Paddle because they handle taxes for you, unlike Stripe.

robshep 6 years ago | |

Paddle don't list their prices. My rule of thumbs is: If SW companies don't list their prices it's probably too expensive for me. This proves correct for me more often than not, so I'm not going to stick in an email address to find out. Can anyone share indicative pricing for paddle?

sparkling 6 years ago | | |

5% + 0.50ct

Including all third-party fees from card network or paypal

They may give you a better deal if you are making 100k/month, but that was the starting rate last time im checked.