Stripe Payments

Stripe's developer experience and high attention to detail are genuinely best-in-class. As someone who's integrated multiple payment processors, their API docs are clear, comprehensive, and include practical examples that work well. Their dashboard and overall UI is top notch, which makes it a joy to use. They are also extremely reliable, we have experienced minimal downtime if any, and their API responses are consistently fast. Stripe also has very competitive pricing and was able to counter any other competitor's offer.

The page where you view incoming orders in real-time is fantastic. I also love the ease with which I can pull and export reports as and when I need it, and dictate what is and isn't in said reports. This allows for less noise in my reports, as I always have exactly what I want. Having spoken to colleagues who were involved in the setup of Stripe, they have indicated that this was extremely simple to setup for our business needs.

Central dashboard, clean interface, CRM integration, APIs for integrating with our product payment interface, and great for record-keeping and accounting at scale

When we first implemented Stripe 4 years ago, their limited out-of-the-box subscription features weren't quite sophisticated enough to handle our specific needs - usage-based pricing with multiple tiers and a complex discount structure. While their subscription product has likely evolved since then, we had to build our own billing system on top of their payment APIs, which meant we couldn't take advantage of their other products like Checkout, Billing, etc.

The level of service and ongoing support is not good at all. I have to live chat often to request certain pieces of information to do with my accounts, and I am constantly having to explain the same thing to them and often get passed in different directions. To follow on from this, I sometimes don't have all the information I need to do my job effectively, namely the metadata on accounts.

Making and implementing custom plans is difficult, especially in bulk. We have been blocked in issuing upgrade discounts for certain customer cohorts because of the limited time ranges discounts can be issued, and the manual process of setting them up. We need to be able to calculate discount amounts and time ranges based on dynamic fields. Our product team has to spend a lot of hours finding clever out-of-the-box workarounds for this, and we wont be able to do it repeatedly. Also it would be great to be able to customize notification emails, with branding, to trigger in certain scenarios to remove the many steps it takes to set that up in other tools