Long story short, I've used Stripe since June 2022. We are a small agency business, and we probably do anywhere between 10 - 15k in revenue per month. I really just use Stripe as a simple way to invoice and then collect the associated payment. I've also used instant payouts, and tried out revenue recognition to see if that was useful.
I've paid them hundreds of dollars in processing and other fees since we started out, but have tried to do most things through ACH to avoid paying more. I totally understand the processing of cards, which has real costs and middlemen. I definitely don't like that they take the higher processing cost, even when a card is debit. Even with ACH, they do still charge $1, which is pretty fair in my opinion.
Jump to today, where I was hit was a $16 fee / charge for using Invoicing Starter plan and had a negative balance when looking at my payouts. After investigating, I see their pricing, which has changed recently to be 0.4% of all invoicing totals and / or not include 25 free invoices like it may have previously. To put it clearly, this means that I am now paying anywhere between $20 (more like $40) and $60 (plus ACH transaction fees and CC fees) per month (more than I was) to essentially use a SaaS based invoicing service that really just has a few line items and a bank account number on it with the convenient option to also accept a card if needed. This is a huge pricing change for a business that essentially has non-payroll costs of less than $200 a month, and it only gets worse the more money that I make or the higher rate(s) that I can command. Stripe was probably one of our biggest expenses per year by the raw numbers, but now, it is more than double and is doubly so by our biggest expense per year.
In addition, I think the part that really irks me the most is the the fact that they are also probably making money off of my money while it sits in their accounts, but to then double dip and charge me what appears to be outrageous costs for a simple SaaS product with some banking / automation backend seems a little much. I get there is probably some complexity that I am not covering and fraud protection and such, but I honestly don't care how they make it work, I only care the value that I get out of their service versus what I am paying, and frankly, the value to cost ratio just took a nose dive today for me for my use case after seeing these new costs associated with their pricing changes.
Am I crazy for thinking this? What is everyone else's opinion here?
