Stripe

Deciding what tools to use to set up selling from a JAMstack site. Stripe, PayPal, Braintree, @snipcart, @gumroad, @foxy, @memberful, Chargebee, Recurly.

i use Stripe for payments and billing because the API and documentation is well thought through, and the web UI is great for getting a running start. We spent about a month writing a mocking and testing framework for billing with Stripe (all a part the Zulip open source project); join us on https://chat.zulip.org if you're considering integrating with Stripe and need some code or advice!

Gonna talk about the #business side a bit by chiming in on our decision for a #billing software with Livestorm. Like many (all? :p) SaaS softwares out there, we're accepting most payments as a subscription via Stripe & credit card. While implementing it in 2016 and accepting our first payments, we soon realized that some customers needed other ways of payments and some had specific needs when it comes to invoices. We also needed ways to create coupons, offer refunds, find delinquent payments etc. Finally, we also wanted an easy way to measure our business metrics (number of customers, MRR, churn etc), even if there are other dedicated solutions for it. So that's how we ended up choosing Chargebee. Chargebee helps us be more flexible and quick to react to customers' needs. Everything can be done by our CS people without any dev time. We're in the process of updating our billing system, and although it's a big project, Chargebee's doc makes it as painless as possible.

As a small startup we are very conscious about picking up the tools we use to run the project. After suffering with a mess of using at the same time Trello , Slack , Telegram and what not, we arrived at a small set of tools that cover all our current needs. For product management, file sharing, team communication etc we chose Basecamp and couldn't be more happy about it. For Customer Support and Sales Intercom works amazingly well. We are using Mailchimp for email marketing since over 4 years and it still covers all our needs. Then on payment side combination of Stripe and Octobat helps us to process all the payments and generate compliant invoices. On techie side we use Rollbar and GitLab (for both code and CI). For corporate email we picked G Suite. That all costs us in total around 300$ a month, which is quite okay.

To accept #payments on updown.io, we first added support for Stripe which is by far the most popular payment gateway for startups and for a good reason. Their service is of awesome quality: the UI is gorgeous, the integration is easy, the documentation is great, the API is super stable and well thought. I can't recommend it enough.

We then added support for PayPal which is pretty popular for people who have money on it and don't know where to spend it (it can make it feel like you're spending less when it comes from PayPal wallet), or for people who prefer not to enter a credit card on a new website. This was pretty well received and we're currently receiving about 25% of our purchases from PayPal. The documentation and integration is much more painful than with Stripe IMO, I can't recommend them for that, but not having it is basically dodging potential sales.

Finally we more recently added support of BitPay for #Bitcoin and #BitcoinCash payments, which was a pretty easy process but not worth the time in the end due to the low usage and the always changing conditions of the network: the transaction fees got huge after price raise and bitcoin because unusable for small payments, they then introduced support for BCH and a newer Bitcoin protocol for lower fees, but then you need a special wallet to pay and in the end it's too cumbersome, even for bitcoin users, to pay with it. I think unless you expect a bit number of payments using cryptocurrencies it's not worth implementing this solution, and better to accept them manually.