Ask HN: How should I accept payments from pilot customers?

4 points·penguinium··7 comments

Is it best for me to set up an entire Stripe integration with my website, or before a public launch should I just ask my first customers to venmo me? Would that make my project look unprofessional and worth less to them? It's a B2B SaaS and I plan to have monthly recurring payments.

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I’d go for Stripe because you’ll seem more professional, especially as a B2B SaaS. It’s really not that bad, they’ve made it easy to integrate payment collection and a few webhooks to get you started.

A pretty decent in-between approach, if you aren't willing to go all-in with payment integration, is to use Stripe's hosted invoice page: https://stripe.com/docs/billing/invoices/hosted

does that cost extra?

It all depends on the resources you have and whether you are a B2B or B2C business. In the pilot phase I would not put in a payments component - because it could create a lot of holes that you might not want. Try to do things manually at this point - talk to each customer and charge them manually

My worry is that this will look less professional, directly asking them to Venmo me. It may also look less trustworthy, if I'm negotiating a price directly with them and don't have a standard one on the website.

I had the first one Venmo me just to verify people are willing to pay. Then I setup a quick solution using a no-code platform.

Maybe down the line I’ll build a fully custom one but for now it’s been working great.

Can you elaborate on the no-code platform? I am working on a SaaS, so the most obvious thing is to just integrate Stripe... but that sounds like it'll be very tedious.

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