[HN Gopher] Stripe App Marketplace
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Stripe App Marketplace
Author : vladikoff
Score : 195 points
Date : 2022-05-24 16:16 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (marketplace.stripe.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (marketplace.stripe.com)
| orliesaurus wrote:
| I was in the beta for this and it's been really cool to hack
| around on this platform. Been working on making a read-write
| stripe app to connect to an external CRM. To be honest the only
| struggle I experienced is that sometimes the console of the
| browser doesn't return the error and therefore it requires a
| little digging to figure out what's going on that causes the app
| to not render.
| adithyasrin wrote:
| Great to see a fair bit of apps already built. I also see apps
| reading a lot of your sensitive data, so I'd wait to see how it
| works out.
| revorad wrote:
| This looks cool. Took it for a spin but got stuck at this
| confirmation message after running the create app command:
|
| _To continue, please accept Stripe Apps terms and conditions for
| your account. Press Enter to open the browser or
| visithttps://dashboard.stripe.com/apps/accept-terms (^C to quit)
|
| Waiting for confirmation..._
|
| After waiting for a few minutes, it terminates with this:
|
| _please accept Stripe Apps terms and conditions before
| proceeding_
|
| I've already accepted the terms.
| judge2020 wrote:
| It states "Stripe Apps are coming in the next few weeks.
| Explore the Marketplace, and get notified when an app is
| available" so maybe it's just how they're gating access.
| jmtulloss wrote:
| The developer experience is live today though! The OP
| encountered a bug, we're looking into it internally.
| jmtulloss wrote:
| Thanks for the report; we're tracking this on the public Github
| repo for Stripe Apps: https://github.com/stripe/stripe-
| apps/issues/608
|
| You can follow that issue for updates (hopefully shortly!) and
| if you have additional details to add, adding them there will
| get them to the team directly.
|
| Thanks again and sorry for the launch day bumps :)
| bspear wrote:
| Is it just me or does Stripe ship something big every week
| ultra_nick wrote:
| Let's agree they do it frequently
| elietoubi wrote:
| [deleted]
| anurag wrote:
| We (Render) are a featured app in the marketplace [1]; the app
| lets you run real time queries against your Stripe data in a
| fully-managed PostgreSQL database that's always in sync. Happy to
| answer questions about our experience building it!
|
| [1] https://marketplace.stripe.com/apps/render-sql
| smotched wrote:
| Not quite sure what this is solving, doesnt stripe already
| allow you to query for data?
| christophilus wrote:
| Yes. Very slowly and inflexibly.
| fidrelity wrote:
| While the Stripe/Render integration looks interesting for our
| latest startup, more than anything I just wanted to take a
| moment and say 'Thank you' for building such a decent product.
| sunjester wrote:
| we need more of these comments please.
| anurag wrote:
| Much appreciated. I hope we can continue to help as you grow.
| sl9dmk2 wrote:
| Stripe always on a tear
| therusskiy wrote:
| Do they allow apps they extend Stripe's functionality but charge
| for it?
| tyingq wrote:
| Seems so,
|
| _" Transparent and consistent pricing You must clearly state
| your app pricing up front, without hidden costs or fees. App
| pricing must also be consistent with off-marketplace prices."_
|
| https://stripe.com/docs/stripe-apps/review-requirements#app-...
|
| Though I suppose Stripe is watching for apps doing things
| Stripe should/could do itself as a real-time _" what would
| people pay extra for?"_ list.
| schnebbau wrote:
| Yes but if you create something worthwhile they'll just copy it
| and make you sad.
| [deleted]
| fumar wrote:
| I am always pleasantly surprise by Stripe's output from Increment
| to this marketplace. My spouse uses Stripe for two small
| businesses and we haven't had any issues. I work in ad tech and I
| point to Stripe's documentation as a great example of clear comms
| and instructions.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| Ok - so asking the inevitable question - what is the one thing
| Stripe does not provide that you want to build / have someone
| build for you?
| heipei wrote:
| Using Stripe for B2B / Enterprise SaaS subscriptions. A few
| things that would improve my life, though I suspect Stripe
| might already working on a few of those: Easy
| way to create a recurring subscription based on a one-off
| price, currency and product description (just so this is still
| recognised as recurring revenue). Recurring subscriptions
| that automatically pause and remind me 30/60 days before
| renewal so I can reach out to the customer and get a new
| purchase order. Customer templates - Many customers
| purchase through resellers, so having templates for different
| resellers would accelerate the process to add new customers
| with the same bill-to but different ship-to. Dashboard
| with upcoming renewals for annual subscriptions. Saved
| export settings (columns) for payouts, so I can export these
| each month for my accountant.
|
| Yes, you can do all of those through the API, and I'm sure
| Stripe will tackle these sooner rather than later, still, just
| to give you an idea.
| cyral wrote:
| I really want a wrapper around the terrible in-app payment APIs
| of Google and Apple. There are some companies doing this
| (RevenueCat) but in my experience they are super buggy even to
| this day, which sorta goes against the entire problem they are
| trying to solve. The APIs that apple and google provide are a
| mess and full of weird edge cases and hacks (like polling for
| changes rather than webhooks), so a wrapper around it with
| proper webhooks and a well designed API like Stripe's existing
| products would be amazing.
| jefago wrote:
| Hey, RevenueCat Head of Product here. I'm sorry that you have
| had a bad experience with RevenueCat - we definitely aim to
| provide just what you outlined. Could you let me know what
| kinds of bugs you experienced? We're doing our best to
| abstract those messy APIs, and unfortunately some things are
| outside our control, but if there are any issues we can fix,
| we'll do our best to do that!
| cyral wrote:
| Hi, I have two tickets open which are really causing a lot
| of issues for us:
|
| - Expiration webhooks are not always sent, so customers
| keep their entitlement way after they should: Ticket 13919
| (although it's been spread across a few as it must close
| them after a while or something)
|
| - A much more urgent issue I opened a couple weeks ago:
| Customers that cancel and then re-subscribe for a trial at
| some point in the future have no webhook sent at all. The
| dashboard says their trial has started, so revenuecat knows
| the trial exists, but no webhook event is actually sent for
| it. This is causing a mess of customers who sign up but
| don't get their entitlements and end up asking for a refund
| or sending an angry email. Ticket 16016
|
| - I've noticed a bunch of weird bugs, sometimes only
| affecting one customer so I haven't opened a ticket, but it
| just makes me question things. For exmaple, we implemented
| trials in April but our dashboard shows trial signups and
| conversions from last year. That is not possible, so I
| question the accuracy of the trial stats as well. Another
| issue from long ago was that the product_change event on
| android commonly sends the wrong new product ID, so we just
| have to ignore it. I was told this is a limitation of the
| play store though, but it wasn't obvious from the docs back
| then (not sure if it is fixed now). This makes it difficult
| to reflect what plan a user switched to within the app,
| since the product change event can't be trusted. Like most
| of the issues, the RC dashboard shows it correctly, it is
| just the webhook that is wrong (which is why I couldn't
| understand the response that it is a play store bug, when
| RC shows it right on their end but sends the wrong/old ID
| in the webhook) Since android downgrades are immediate, the
| initial_purchase that follows will actually set the correct
| ID, so that is the workaround for now that I found.
| (Hopefully I got that right, I'm reading the comments for
| the workaround we added)
|
| I really want to see revenuecat work and succeed, because
| it is a great idea and for the most part made implementing
| subscriptions much easier, there are just a lot of edge
| cases we keep running into. Support is also not the most
| helpful, but I understand they are probably swamped. The
| android bug I mentioned above, the solution was to just use
| the RC api to fetch the status rather than using the
| webhook. Why would the API return a different ID than the
| webhook sent 50ms before? I'm not sure why there is such a
| disconnect between webhooks and what the API/dashboard
| returns. It would also be great if you could add a
| dashboard for support tickets rather than having to use
| email, it would keep things more organized, as I often need
| to contact support directly because the community tech
| support forum is a graveyard. I understand technical issues
| should be directed there, but they often sit for weeks with
| no response. Even with these issues I'd still recommend RC
| in general though. If these issues are happening with a
| company who's purpose is to handle them, I can't imagine
| how difficult it would be to implement a subscription
| system from scratch.
| jeiting wrote:
| Hi, RevenueCat CEO here. Thanks for sharing honestly.
|
| I dug into both tickets. A bunch of failures both in
| product and process on our part. Going to dig in more.
| cyral wrote:
| Thanks for taking a look, I believe I sent you an email
| about the first one actually since it had been months
| without any updates. They did get on it and released a
| fix soon after, but last I heard it was rolled back and
| then (maybe?) re-applied. Unfortunately it is still
| happening, but the second issue is much more urgent for
| us right now.
| jeiting wrote:
| Ah! Right, yeah that was me kicking it back to the top of
| the stack. IMO, these core issues are more important than
| almost anything else we do, but I think we aren't as good
| as we should be as making sure we are resourcing them
| over the new and shiny things.
|
| I've made CEO-noise again and hopefully we can keep
| pushing on these two.
| markyc wrote:
| merchant of record (like paddle)
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| Afaik the merchant of record takes on the full liability,
| cost of fraud etc. It's pretty rare is it not?
| onphonenow wrote:
| We do relatively lower volume of higher value ACH transactions
| (ie, 20K/transaction).
|
| What's interesting is strip invoicing is pretty uncompetitive
| here.
|
| Fee for sending one invoice is $100/invoice. For every 100
| invoices you are spending $10,000.
|
| OUCH!!!
|
| In other words, if someone was allowed to do an invoicing app in
| this marketplace it might do ok for a group out there. A target
| would be folks doing ACH payments (you need to cap per invoice
| including payment fees at $10 to be competitive here I think).
|
| EDIT: Sorry, corrected to be $100/invoice from $500/invoice which
| is still much higher than we see elsewhere to send out an
| invoice.
| 101008 wrote:
| Sorry, question by someone who is not part of the USA (not even
| Europe, if it's a common case in Europe too). Why would you
| have to pay to send an invoice? It isn't just a PDF? Is there
| an extra mechanism that I am missing?
| stu2b50 wrote:
| When people say "invoicing" in this context they generally
| refer to both the PDF and the transfer of money per the
| details on that PDF. How that money is transferred will incur
| different costs.
| 101008 wrote:
| Ah got it. So you can send the invoice for free but if they
| pay you then the fee will be deducted from that payment.
| Thank you very much!
| notyourday wrote:
| Startup: (n) a weird entity that would risk $20/k customer
| because $100 invoice is too much.
| jmuguy wrote:
| They charge 0.5% per invoice for the higher tier, so for 20k
| that would be 100 bucks. Which is still excessive imo, but not
| 500 bucks.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| Why is invoicing a percentage and not a flat fee? Does it
| cost more to transact it?
| antaviana wrote:
| Pricing works best when aligning with value instead of
| costs. In general you should also try to align your pricing
| with value for better margins (especially if you are have a
| monopoly condition).
|
| The rationale is that Stripe believe that a small
| percentage will align better with customer acceptance of
| pricing than a flat fee per invoice, which allows them to
| capture more dollars from the relationship.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| I firmly believe that transaction fees (incl invoices,
| etc) should be fundamentally a constant flat fee. Whoever
| builds a competitor to Stripe will blow everyone away.
|
| The cost of transaction is the same. Customers are being
| robbed in day light with % based transaction fees since
| the dawn of time.
|
| This entire industry is begging for disruption.
| lmeyerov wrote:
| Until you want value-based fraud prevention layers like
| insurance. Keeping fixed fee would knock that out of
| alignment. But perhaps your point would be that should be
| some sort of opt-in higher SLA tier so the transaction
| layer fee is low but the insurance etc. add-on layers are
| variable.
| kasey_junk wrote:
| Transaction costs are not the same price per transaction.
| The major costs for most transactions are the risks
| (credit, irr, fx etc) associated with it not the fixed
| costs of infrastructure.
|
| Those costs go up with the value of the transaction.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| Good points, this was my oversight/ignorance. Surely it
| is not 100% value-based costs?
| kasey_junk wrote:
| No. And you can do pricing that's flat if you are really
| good at risk management but note that means the price for
| smaller transactions begins to subsidize the big ones.
|
| See Atlantic Monthly vs Wise for different pricing types
| in fx transactions as an example.
| onphonenow wrote:
| Sorry - correct - $100/invoice - which is really way way
| above standard market for invoicing software.
|
| There is an additional payments fee that applies.
| edwinwee wrote:
| Yes, this math seems more accurate. And for businesses
| sending _many_ high-dollar invoices, we have custom pricing.
| (Get in touch at https://stripe.com/contact/sales or email
| edwin@stripe.com.)
| gkedzierski wrote:
| But would you allow invoicing app into your app store?
| onphonenow wrote:
| That's really my question - I think there's room for a $5
| or $10 invoicing solution (ie, cap invoicing fee at $5 or
| so). Maybe somewhat simplified. I'd like custom domain as
| well of course.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| Every time I use any of these apps, there is always a nagging
| sense of instability. I don't want to base my business
| transactions that relies on a 3rd party Shopify app that fulfills
| orders over a fragile API, run by one dude hanging out on the
| beaches of Bali.
|
| Some of these may be very stable but this is always on the back
| of my mind: "Is this going to work in 5 years?"
|
| If you ever want to witness horror, jump over to Shopify forums:
| Zapier integrations gone wrong, unresponsive APIs, App owners not
| responding, businesses adding free integration apps that were
| last updated during the Obama administration, etc.
|
| While Stripe API and their core services are stable, none of this
| inspires confidence.
| costcofries wrote:
| This is great, congrats on the launch, I love ecosystems! One
| thing I'd really love to get Stripe's take on is how they are
| thinking about utility of 3p apps within Stripe. For me, it's
| much easier to work within the native app than to figure out how
| to use that same app, with limited functionality, within Stripe.
| xeeton wrote:
| The "Build an App" link in the header 404s. Looks good otherwise!
| edwinwee wrote:
| Sign in to Stripe and it'll work. (Updating now to work when
| you're not signed in too.)
| jmtulloss wrote:
| This works now!
| possiblelion wrote:
| Somewhat unrelated, but I've found it really difficult to stop a
| recurring payment with Stripe. A company which has shut (website
| down and email unresponsive) keeps trying to charge 299 bucks on
| my card via stripe. No way to stop it either, if the client
| website is down.
|
| Ripe for failed founders to exploit
| edwinwee wrote:
| Could you email me at edwin@stripe.com? Would like to see
| what's going on here and stop the payments. (We stop recurring
| payments when a business shuts down their Stripe account.)
| sodality2 wrote:
| What if a business does not shut down their Stripe account?
|
| My business uses Payment links and a customer asked to cancel
| their subscription. Of course I canceled it but I stopped to
| think what would happen if I was hit by a bus. Is there no
| other option but a chargeback if a subscription does not have
| a cancel option?
| Jugurtha wrote:
| Hi, Edwin. I'm in the process of integrating Stripe to
| https://iko.ai. I recently discovered Portal
| (https://stripe.com/docs/billing/subscriptions/integrating-
| cu...) and I thank you for that. Less code for me.
|
| I'm a bit ashamed to say, but I'm having trouble with
| checking if the customer has a valid subscription. I'm
| currently only storing the customer_id in the database and
| retrieving the information from Stripe to have it as a single
| source of truth and avoiding putting the Stripe info in our
| database and having to make sure it's synced.
|
| On the other hand, I can't make a request to Stripe with
| every request, so I'm thinking of memoization or something.
|
| I could find guides on how to accept payments and create
| subscriptions which are trivial, but no examples on what
| happens after that.
|
| Suppose I have an API with a single endpoint and set up a
| subscription for a customer, how do I not hit the Stripe API
| with every request to check if the subscription is still
| alive without storing customer info in my database and having
| to sync it (i.e: keep everything in Stripe)?
| edwinwee wrote:
| iko.ai looks neat! Our developers hang out in Discord
| (https://stripe.com/go/developer-chat) -- this seems like a
| good question you can chat with them live about.
| Jugurtha wrote:
| That's great, I'll definitely /dev/pay* a visit.
|
| Next question: Algeria is not covered by Stripe. Many
| people here incorporate in the U.K or the U.S. just to
| accept payments.
|
| How can I put a country on the map here:
| https://stripe.com/global
|
| What conditions that, if satisfied, would enable someone
| in Algeria to use Stripe directly? How can we make this
| happen?
| redshirtrob wrote:
| I had this happen with a fraudulent charge once. To be clear, I
| don't know that it was a recurring payment with Stripe, but the
| behavior was similar. It took me about three years and a half
| dozen new cards to finally kill it.
|
| At one point I asked the customer rep if there was any way to
| rid myself of this nuisance other than completely closing my
| account. She responded with the normal "that's your decision,
| blah, blah, blah...", but I was legitimately asking, not
| threatening.
|
| I think I said something like: "No, let me be clear: I don't
| want to close the account. I just don't want to deal with this
| every six months either. I'm seriously asking if this is the
| only other recourse because it seems we've tried everything
| else."
|
| It did get resolved eventually. It was also for a trivial
| amount so nothing like what you're looking at. It was still
| very annoying though.
| upupandup wrote:
| seems like a lot of YC IPO companies are struggling to keep their
| share prices afloat and this seems like something to send more
| paying customers to its network of YC backed businesses.
|
| ex) Docusign is down by at least 80%
| ctvo wrote:
| A lot to unpack here.
|
| 1. Stripe is a private company, it hasn't IPO'd.
|
| 2. YC was an early investor in Stripe, but as a late stage
| company, Stripe has many, many stakeholders that are investors:
| https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/stripe/company_finan...
| to think that they're beholden to YC and would make business
| decisions for the sake of YC companies -- oof.
| upupandup wrote:
| Lot of the companies featured in the marketplace is what I'm
| referring to I don't think its esoteric knowledge of those
| points you listed.
|
| But I'm sure you been paying attention to the markets....
| ctvo wrote:
| > Lot of the companies featured in the marketplace is what
| I'm referring...
|
| This isn't actually what you said in your original post,
| but sure, let's breakdown this too. Under "Featured apps"
| there's Mailchimp, Dropbox, Google Drive, Bench Accounting,
| Ramp, and Render. Dropbox is the only one I recognize as a
| YC company.
|
| I pay attention to a lot of things. What do you pay
| attention to?
| upupandup wrote:
| Do you work for YC? Why do you care so much?
| ctvo wrote:
| No, I don't work for YC. I do get value from this site
| and would prefer it not be a cesspool of ignorant
| conspiracy theories when possible.
| upupandup wrote:
| so its a conspiracy that Docusign is down 80% from ATH as
| are many YC backed IPO stocks?
|
| Just open up a chart and have a go at the numerous
| tickers YC is involved with. Are those stocks that you
| would trust your life savings with and that its a
| conspiracy that they are struggling with potential
| problems to capital and liquidity?
|
| If you are going to simp for YC at least have skin in the
| game
| cschep wrote:
| "...this seems like something to send more paying
| customers to its network of YC backed businesses."
|
| Is a baseless conspiracy. Back it up with facts! If you
| can, we're all here to listen. Accusing someone of being
| a simp because they think your argument is baseless and
| weak is not a great way to strengthen your argument.
| xwdv wrote:
| YC has no real clout anymore.
| [deleted]
| upupandup wrote:
| careful you might get shadowbanned for that!
| kache_ wrote:
| So stripe is trying to emulate what made skyrim so successful?
| Modding for Saas? Cool :)
| shillalert wrote:
| wdb wrote:
| Looks nice but I can't find a Sketch template to help designing
| the Apps only Figma seems to be available
| orliesaurus wrote:
| I think Figma is the de-facto in SV - I haven't heard of any
| designer friends using Sketch since at least 2019
| throwaway110535 wrote:
| So this is what happened to https://openchannel.io/
| tikkun wrote:
| This was inevitable.
|
| App marketplaces are great all around. Great for users - more
| functionality. Great for partners - easy access to
| distribution/users. Great for the marketplace owner - improve
| your product, while adding network effects that deepen your moat
| against competitors.
| [deleted]
| onphonenow wrote:
| The question is often how closely they let apps compete with
| them. Ie, can I roll out a (cheaper) invoicing solution with
| for example a $5/invoice cap. Quickbooks et al do allow this.
| Some players do not like that.
| DantesKite wrote:
| If history is any indicator, Stripe can always Sherlock the
| service and build a better native feature.
| boringg wrote:
| It's almost like any successful developer needs to develop
| an app thats popular but not that popular and verging on
| slightly more difficult so that the moat holder (in this
| case Stripe) doesn't want to build it themselves.
| Alternatively make something that catches fire really
| quickly and sell very quickly before they can build it
| themself.
| FpUser wrote:
| Welcome to capitalism. These are shark infested waters.
| Either be a shark or learn how to swim safely ;)
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(page generated 2022-05-24 23:00 UTC)