I hear people keep recommending Stripe, but almost everyone I talk to here in Raleigh, NC says that it is way too expensive. Any thoughts? What is the best alternative that happens to be cheaper?
Most of Stripe's fees go straight to credit card issuers. We wish the underlying costs were lower, and would happily cut our rates if so.
Compared to other companies that help you accept credit cards, though, I think that Stripe's prices are very good.
The main difference between Stripe and other companies is that 2.9% + 30c is pretty much our only fee. There are no international card surcharges, monthly fees, American Express rates, etc. By design, those details aren't always obvious with other providers.
Braintree seems to offer a good combination of lower prices and a modern API, since you can negotiate the processing rates directly with the banks. But here's the catch: their merchant underwriting process isn't as nice as Stripe's.
I have no desire to hand $30K to anyone on $1M for counting money electronically. Currently, we just employ someone to take care of the checks and it is only a fraction of her time.
Around $10K it becomes an interesting proposition.
You can't get that on credit cards, period. The issuing banks charge more than that; anyone offering that is losing money on every payment - way beyond what you could make up for with volume. Even by becoming an acquiring bank and eliminating every single middle-man possible you can't get CC rates that good.
We (WePay) offer 1%+50c for ACH, and we can probably knock it down if you have reasonable volume. Ping me if you want more info, or just check out the website.
Thanks for the pointer; That is a completely valid instance of being a shill. :)
We'll take a look when appropriate. Naturally, it will only make sense if we can either forbid CC's, or explicitly charge higher for the CC payments. (Basically, the customers have to be willing to choose their payment method, and be charged for their chosen method.)
You can require ACH payments and block CCs both with our invoicing tools and over our API. You can also have the customer pay the service fee, rather than eat it yourself. The only thing you can't do is split the cost depending on the payment method (i.e. I'll eat the 1% ACH fee but if you want to pay by CC you're going to pay the extra 1.9%), though we've had some of our API customers ask for that kind of thing and are considering it.
