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EU support is coming! The market is quite different, as you obviously know, and we want to take the time to test Billing properly with European users. But enabling support for Europe is a high priority for us.

Yes! Just drop us a line.

Yeah, we messed up in not having this be clearer. Apologies!

Period!

Stripe cofounder here.

For anyone wondering about pricing, here's our approach.

- For new Stripe customers, this is free up to the first (lifetime) $1M of payments.

- For existing customers, there's no pricing change. You just get more functionality than before for free. This is what we generally try to do: we want Stripe to continually become better value for you over time, as you get more functionality for the same price.

- What we've seen over Stripe's history is that customers handling large amounts of revenue have been forced to pay substantial amounts for expensive third-party systems. So, we've decided to build something that we think will be better and cheaper -- and that will, over time, increase the net revenue of businesses built on Stripe.

I'm sorry about any confusion in our communication around this!

Stripe cofounder here. I think you're reading too much into it. We do think Bitcoin is cool. We're just trying to be as plainspoken and clear as possible about why we're doing what we're doing.

HN is good at detecting and penalizing this.

> BTW on https://stripe.com/about I only found "Help us build the universal payments infrastructure of the internet." But it is listed on https://stripe.com/press.

Good point! We should clean that up.

The main thing we can do is free up Courtland to spend more time on it rather than having him sell ads. We're also going to invest in it so that his brother, Channing, can join him. On top of that, we expect that there'll be some Stripe users who'd benefit from discovering it earlier in their lifecycle and getting advice and feedback from other community members. Most people building a business on Stripe are doing it for the first time.

Longer term, there's a lot that we're interested in adding. (The site isn't even a year old yet -- check out https://indiehackers.com/timeline. There was no forum or podcast in the beginning.) But we're flexible on the details there and we'll experiment and adapt based on what we learn along the way.

It's very hard to know upfront -- what made us interested in Indie Hackers wasn't just the idea per se (we'd thought about it before and looked at other sites in the past), but rather the fact that it was executed so well. There are tons of things that we'd in principle be open to acquiring if the right company existed. In general, we look for small, highly-effective technical teams with a very high bar for execution quality. (Indie Hackers, which was pretty much just Courtland operating solo, cleared this threshold by a significant margin: https://twitter.com/Shpigford/status/851851923502268416) To the extent that the team really understands either developer tools or startups, that's a bonus.

Patrick from Stripe here. I wanted to quickly chime in to emphasize that our goal in acquiring Indie Hackers is to simply ensure that the site becomes as successful as possible. The Stripe upside we're hoping for is that more companies get started and that they're more successful. We already see a very large fraction of new internet companies choose Stripe; we're mainly hoping that Indie Hackers can help us grow the overall number rather than to grow our fraction. (Our product has to do the latter part.)

Also: congrats to Courtland on building an awesome site! I've been enjoying the interviews on it since it launched. It's very refreshing to hear from so many people who are quietly building real businesses with real revenues.

RethinkDB is one of the developer tools that we at Stripe most looked up to.[1] The team had so many good ideas and rigorous, creative thoughts around what a database could be and how it should work. I'm really bummed that it didn't work out for them and have enormous respect for the tenacity of their effort.

I'm also excited to have them join us here at Stripe. As we've gotten to know Mike, Slava, and the other Rethinks -- and shared some of our plans with them and gotten their feedback -- we've become pretty convinced that we can build some excellent products together in the future. I'm looking forward to learning from all of them.

[1] (And, for me, even before Stripe -- I started learning Haskell with Slava's Lisp-interpreter-in-Haskell tutorial back in 2006... http://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/lisp-in-haskell.html)

Correct; the brand risk being referred to is card network brand risk. (Which they're very sensitive to.)

> The entire post, and John, basically indicated that they do want to take a more progressive moral stance. Their stance being that they want to fight for servicing certain businesses on Stripe.

Yes, we're going to remove the first sentence from the post -- you're right that it's, strictly speaking, inaccurate in the sense that we do want to take a stance in favor of certain kinds of businesses.

We're never going to definitively solve them; it'll always be a process. But we did try to lay out some examples in the post of cases where we've been able to make progress.

We work hard to avoid ever inconveniencing legitimate businesses (and are constantly iterating on our processes to make it less likely that we do so). I suffered at the hands of many of these processes from other companies in the past; part of the point of starting Stripe was to do a better job on this front. However, thousands of new companies launch on Stripe every week and many of them do intentionally breach our terms of service (or commit outright fraud). So, it's a tricky exercise. I pay a lot of attention to individual cases where we ever make mistakes (and make my email address very public) to try to ensure that we rapidly repair any false positives that do occur.

We'd love to investigate any issues you may have had with your card. Feel free to email me and/or mlm@stripe.com (who helps to build our machine learning fraud models that detect our merchants from fraud) and we'll take a look.

Hm -- can you drop me a note? (patrick@stripe.com.) I'd like to dig into why. It's still invite-only but you shouldn't have been turned down because you're in the US.

It sounds like there was some confusion here -- you do not by any means have to be from a "disadvantaged" country. Can you email me (patrick@stripe.com) and tmf@stripe.com so that we can investigate what happened?

US startups are very welcome to use Atlas -- many already have!

Actually, it was. (Structurally speaking.) Greg and I had had plenty of conversations about what he was looking for and I asked Sam to share his honest assessment with him. It's no good for Stripe to have a CTO who wants to be something else :-).

This is not designed for cloning businesses :-). But we do definitely want to support other incorporation hubs beyond the US.

You should definitely email the fraud team! Try mlm@stripe.com. (Feel free to CC me; patrick@stripe.com.)

Dwolla also charges monthly fees: https://www.dwolla.com/pricing. You need to pay $1,500 a month in order to charge more than 10 bank accounts.

In general, most providers have a lot of fine-print. We tried to come up the simplest and fairest pricing we could.

No immediate plans. ACH is mostly popular for B2B use-cases whereas Checkout is optimized for "lightweight" transactions. You can obviously imagine cases where an integration would be useful but we decided not to hold up the launch in order to build that. We'll calibrate based on feedback going forward.

Sorry about that -- this only affects a small number of users, but we'll have it fixed momentarily.

(Stripe's CEO here.) It is ​emphatically​ against our policy. The employee involved was identified before the article was published and they no longer work at Stripe.

I'm delighted that this essay exists. Jessica helped out in so many different ways during the early days of Stripe that I can barely remember half of them.

(John and I became interested in startups in large part as a result of reading Founders at Work. And then, because John and I were immigrants without credit history, our residence of the Bay Area started with Jessica helping to convince a landlord to rent a place to us. Once the company was underway, whenever John and I had a major decision to make, figuring things out generally involved biking over to Jessica's and PG's place for an invariably clarifying discussion.

I recall one particular decision that John and I had been debating for weeks. We just couldn't decide. Jessica's response, when asked, was immediate and adamant. We were surprised but trusted her. John and I often remark at how differently (and, I'm confident, worse) things would have ended up had Jessica not convinced us to make that call.)

> Because I can guarantee you that the "valuation" of $65B+ is a totally meaningless number. This includes every single company that had a huge, unsustainable up round which will almost certainly be devalued based on future financings or exits.

"Meaningless" is hyperbolic. How much would you pay for a share of Airbnb? More than nothing, I assume. I think one can conclude something from consummated, informed responses to this question.

I'm one of Stripe's cofounders. It's about the functionality, not the promotion. The whole premise of Stripe is that a richer, more powerful stack of APIs -- rather than the bare-bones electrical outlet to the credit card networks that existed before -- is a better solution for most businesses. Whatever success (and any recognition) we've had to date follows from that; not the other way around.

I wish something like Stripe existed in 2004. If it had, we wouldn't have had to start the company...

Yeah, now the challenge is just that I don't remember the exact amount :-). I believe $20k or $30k. We'd raised ~$1.8M by this point and so it seemed like a reasonable amount to spend.