Show HN: List of Stripe Alternatives

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34281730

by NetOpWibby • 4 years ago

122 44 4 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Seems like every time there's a negative Stripe story on here, the inevitable question, "any alternatives?" gets asked. Hell, I was tempted to ask myself. Instead, I decided to search hn.algolia.com to see for myself what others have recommended in the past.

Might as well share the list with y'all, make it meta.

2Checkout | https://www.2checkout.com

Adyen | https://www.adyen.com

Amazon Pay | https://pay.amazon.com

Authorize.net | https://www.authorize.net

Balance | https://www.getbalance.com

Braintree | https://www.braintreepayments.com

ChargeBee | https://www.chargebee.com

Chargify | https://www.chargify.com

Checkout.com | https://www.checkout.com

DigitalRiver | https://www.digitalriver.com

Dwolla | https://www.dwolla.com

FastSpring | https://fastspring.com

GoCardless | https://gocardless.com

MangoPay | https://www.mangopay.com

Mollie | https://www.mollie.com

Opayo (previously SagePay) | https://www.opayo.co.uk

Paddle | https://www.paddle.com

Payoneer | https://www.payoneer.com

PayPal | https://www.paypal.com

Qonto | https://qonto.com/en

Spreedly | https://www.spreedly.com

Square | https://squareup.com

Verifone | https://www.verifone.com/en/us

White | https://whitepayments.com

Observations from my data collection:

Sassy appears to have been acquired by FastSpring. Balanced Payments apparently went under but I found another payment service called "Balance" instead. Paymill is defunct but their Github org has a bunch of code. No idea what happened to Spryng Payments but Spryng still exists.

It's also worth mentioning that a true "Stripe alternative" simply does not exist. No one does everything they do and I'm pretty sure most services are lacking in the developer documentation department. Still, having options is always great.

NetOpWibby11• 4 years ago

Oh, forgot to mention that 2Checkout and Verifone are the same product but still have different sites for some reason. Or at the very least, Verifone owns 2Checkout.

zzz345345• 4 years ago

Any of those support crypto and credit card? I added Coinbase commerce to my site as an option but unfortunately it doesnt support Monero.

colesantiago• 4 years ago

Why would Coinbase or any other exchange ever support Monero? It's only usecase is illegitimate payments, the risk isn't worth Coinbase adding it.

In fact, please don't consider using crypto at all, it has no usecase other than speculation and you are likely to lose money due to volatility.

Consider bank transfer instead.

hot_gril2• 4 years ago

Consider bank transfer instead.

That stuff is a nightmare. I've dealt with both USD and cryptocurrency payouts and can see why some legitimate businesses would prefer the latter.

donatzsky• 4 years ago

Skrill (not on the list, but seems to be in the same space as PayPal) has some crypto features. No idea about the details, since I just saw it mentioned on the website, but didn't go further.

NetOpWibby11• 4 years ago

You should just use something like OpenNode and accept Bitcoin.

- https://www.opennode.com

pyronite• 4 years ago

We're excited to see how the open-source Lago (https://www.getlago.com/) develops. Does anyone here have experience working with it?

NetOpWibby11• 4 years ago

AFAICT they don't process payments.

eps• 4 years ago

Who are "we"?

efortis• 4 years ago

- Visa | https://developer.visa.com

- Masterpass by Mastercard | https://masterpass.com

NetOpWibby11• 4 years ago

From Visa's site:

Visa Checkout does not accept direct merchant connections. You will need to work with a partner to integrate Visa Checkout into your solution. You can find Partners to integrate with Visa Checkout here.

Masterpass looks like it operates similarly.

paxys• 4 years ago

While this is a good list of companies that operate roughly in the same space as Stripe, a more useful one for the intended audience would be finding replacements for the specific Stripe services/APIs they are using. It's not as simple as saying "just switch from Stripe to PayPal/Square". Most of these companies specialize in a specific problem with very little overlap with the rest. Stripe doesn't have a real 1:1 competitor.

NetOpWibby11• 4 years ago

We're back to patchwork quilting the services we need...this is the sixth day of 2023. I wonder what enterprising HN reader is gonna take up the mantle to embark on building a true alternative.

huhtenberg• 4 years ago

2Checkout, DigitalRiver, FastSpring, Paddle and Payoneer used to be reasonably popular in "old-school" shareware circles.

These aren't payment processors. They all come from pre-Stripe times and they are so-called "registration services".

These are effectively resellers, providing "full service" that includes order processing, customer callbacks (fraud detection), distribution of activation codes, first line of support for licensing inquiries, etc. -- all the things that used to be complicated in the era when people ordered by phone, fax and email, paid with cheques and the software was licensed fully offline using either procedurally-generated codes or codes hardcoded into executables.

They all are still stuck there - rigid, clunky, buggy and, above all, unnecessary expensive.

These aren't Stripe alternatives. These are dinosaurs desperately clinging to life.

transitivebs• 4 years ago

Paddle has a pretty legit API from my experience. Agree on the other ones for sure.

dividuum• 4 years ago

Cannot speak for the others, but paddle also does handle all tax related issues for you. That can quickly get pretty complicated if you have international customers.

phphphphp• 4 years ago

I have no relationship to Paddle but they deserve defending, as they’re absolutely not a “dinosaur clinging to life” and are in fact a very valuable player given the changing regulatory and tax landscape across the world.

The phrase to use to describe Paddle is “merchant of record” and it’s more valuable today than it was a few years ago, and it’s more valuable than Stripe in certain circumstances. There are many scenarios in which a business selling digital services would have a rational reason to choose Paddle over Stripe today.

Paddle may have started out as you describe but that’s not what they are today. Personally, I’d argue they’ve done a better job innovating in their niche than Stripe has.

j453• 4 years ago

Second this about paddle. They seem to handle the international tax feature a lot earlier than most. Having a merchant of record is handy.

The extra fee for international sales is less in the beginning than hiring accountants or having a keels presence in other countries and the overhead associated with that.

Functionality like this more easily lets you sell globally from the start, and optimize later when beneficial.

With a future likelier to include digital taxes, it’s reasonable to focus on product and customer.

hot_gril2• 4 years ago

Some of these are viable payment processors, but if you're trying to run anything vaguely like a market, it's hard to replace Stripe. I've tried.

In detail, something that handles both credit card payments from users and ACH payouts to users, possibly with some substitutions like debit instead of credit or wire instead of ACH. Ideally allowing user-to-user payments without having to float the money yourself. Stripe is handling some big regulatory hurdles for you, like KYC.

NetOpWibby11• 4 years ago

Personally, I'm looking into Checkout and Mollie (hope they're not UK-only) and will use OpenNode as my crypto payment provider.

AlexITC• 4 years ago

I investigated a bit about this and found Square promising because it allows creating a link to allow customers engage in a subscription, which is super helpful to not code such a flow when validating a product.

I don't know whether Paddle supports this but a customer is super happy with them, it was also super simple to integrate from the developer side.

Thanks for the list.

Geee2• 4 years ago

Not really a Stripe alternative - but if you run out of alternatives, there's always Bitcoin. That is, if you want to accept payments without using any third-party service.

I wish more people implemented Bitcoin (Lightning) payments on their websites. I always pay with Bitcoin when there's an option; simply because it's easier and faster, compared to typing in my CC info and 2FAing it with my bank app. Bitcoin requires just scanning a QR code with a mobile wallet.

BTCPay Server[0] is the most popular (I think) self-hosted software for accepting Bitcoin payments. It's also available as a hosted version.

[0] https://btcpayserver.org

andrewflnr• 4 years ago

Most of our customers want to pay by credit card, so no.

danpalmer• 4 years ago

For some people this might imply a certain opinion from the business that may turn them off. It’s a little like if the cashier at the store is wearing a MAGA hat. Certainly not that extreme for most, but it would make me think twice about if this is a company that I want to buy from.

Geee2• 4 years ago

For small websites, it may just be an easy and practical technological solution, sparing the need to integrate with third-party services or platforms. I'm not sure why you see it as a negative, but for the merchant it's just another payment gateway. Also, in some countries these payment services might not be so readily available, and Bitcoin might be the only solution for accepting payments globally.

Also, I think it's quite a small group of people who associate Bitcoin with something negative. Some people might relate it to drugs, but that is really based only on the early days of bitcoin use and hasn't been the main use case for years. For 99% of people it's an investment, and some of these also use it for payments whenever it's possible.

carlosjobim• 4 years ago

We've accepted Bitcoin as payment on our website for years. Not a single customer has chosen that option.

AussieWog93• 4 years ago

I use these guys (based in Australia): https://pinpayments.com/

Excellent support, and no bullshit. It really as simple as creating an account, installing the plugin on my website then collecting payments.

NetOpWibby11• 4 years ago

Ah, they seem to only serve Australia and New Zealand.

scrolls to footer

Oh, their parent company is Checkout.com!

llagerlof• 4 years ago

checkout.com is bad?

folli• 4 years ago

I'm specifically looking for a payment provider handling SaaS subscriptions (monthly/annually).

Any recommendations?

alberth• 4 years ago

Stripe is the only processor I’m aware of that is self-service and you can be accepting payments within minutes.

But that comes with a major downside, you don’t actually get a merchant account.

If having a merchant account is important to you, Adyen is pretty great.

1xdevloper• 4 years ago

Lemon Squeezy [1] is another great option. I use it on my site RemoteFriendly. They are take 5% and handle all the tax, fraud stuff for you as a merchant of record.

[1] https://www.lemonsqueezy.com/

screamingninja• 4 years ago

Is there an inclusion criteria for this list? You listed PayPal as an alternative. I cannot imagine recommending Paypal to someone complaining about Stripe- arguably there are more complaints on HN about Paypal than Stripe!

NetOpWibby11• 4 years ago

I decided to search hn.algolia.com to see for myself what others have recommended in the past.

ju• 4 years ago

SumUp | https://sumup.com/

NetOpWibby11• 4 years ago

I don't think PoS fits the bill...

mbirth• 4 years ago

It has an API for online payments: https://developer.sumup.com/docs/online-payments/introductio...

j453• 4 years ago

Great list, thank you.

One option is to always have more than one payment processor activated.

Splitting payments across providers early on doesn’t have to be a bad thing.

There are libraries focused in billing and payment management and leaving the payment processing only to stripe, etc. These libraries that can handle multiple payment providers and help reduce dependency on the a single payment provider for payment management functionality.

It’s always felt like a risk.

One stand alone library that I’m looking at is https://killbill.io/

If there are alternatives to this that folks have experience with - it would be great if you could share

anton-stigg• 4 years ago

Hey, there's Stigg (http://stigg.io/) and its like an abstraction layer on top of billing for SaaS. I think it counts as an alternative to killbill in some way.

j453• 4 years ago

Thank you, didn’t know this existed

isuleman• 4 years ago

Snipcart

rajnathani• 4 years ago

TIL about Amazon Pay.

Show HN: List of Stripe Alternatives

Related Stories