Ranking the domain providers I've used:
1. Google Domains (Simple and easy)
2. Namecheap (Pretty decent)
3. Gandi.net. Perfectly fine.
4. Godaddy (cheap/ubiqutous, a bit of a hassle)
5. Oneandone. Spammed me constantly.
I'm shocked Blogger made any changes at all. Always assumed they were in maintainance mode. I'm really curious how many people are still on the blogger team at Google.
I appreciate the security and the clarity on this issue. I only wish you didn't sneak in a pricing increase for long-standing users a few months ago, and I wish Stripe was more honest about its enterprise pricing.
I apologize that anything about the pricing change felt sneaky. (We tried to do the opposite: we emailed every single impacted customer!) I posted a few thoughts about the refund change here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22893388.
We're not transparent about enterprise pricing since our costs on any given user are so country/business model/implementation-dependent. It's less that our sales team isn't willing to share the details and more that the models themselves are very complicated and change frequently. (Visa and Mastercard are both making big changes to their pricing this year, for example, and that will change almost all of them.)
I appreciate that. My particular beef with the enterprise negotiation experience was that Stripe lists a specific number after which they're open to negotiating and when we'd far exceeded that number (with minimal fraud risk due to the nature of our business), their answer was "You have too many Amex customers, but aren't you happy you're grandfathered into x, y, and z feature we now charge extra for [which we don't even use]".
Then shortly after, Stripe raised pricing on a model I'd just been told was grandfathered in.
Stripe is cheaper than most other processors and charges a flat rate for the transaction, regardless of the upstream cost. Amex is more expensive than Visa for example. A fact of doing business is that things will go up in price, as I'm sure your company also raises prices from time to time.
I think what is being mentioned is that Stripe started keeping the original transaction fees on refunds. In my opinion this is borderline fraudulent since visa/mc/amex do not keep these charges and refund them back to Stripe.
You do realize that this is a free market? If visa/mc/amex are so much better, people can use them. Charging a flat fee for a service doesn't seem that fraudulent to me.
Based on your comment you're clearly not a Stripe user, so I'm not sure why you felt the need to post this.
If visa/mc/amex are so much better, people can use them.
Stripe uses visa/mc/amex, it is not a competitor. You completely missed my point. Stripe uses visa/mc/amex to process credit card transactions, then when a refund is issued the CC companies return the charged amount to Stripe, but Stripe does not return the full amount back to the customer. They keep a percentage. This is what I consider "borderline fraudulent".
Charging a flat fee for a service doesn't seem that fraudulent to me.
But it is not a flat fee. They keep a percentage of the refunded amount. So if a customer bought a $1000 item, then changed their mind and cancelled the order 5 min later, Stripe would still keep $40 just for the fun of it. A small flat fee to cover network expenses would be more appropriate, not a percentage of the amount.
So you have to charge $1000 + ($40 * % of users who return + cushion) for the product. That means non-Stripe businesses can start to out-compete you on cost.
What makes it so that Stripe has such a unique position and can impact your costs and competitiveness to such a large degree?
> A small flat fee to cover network expenses would be more appropriate
That sure seems like the solution a free market in processing would settle on. Something is up.
So you have to charge $1000 + ($40 % of users who return + cushion) for the product. That means non-Stripe businesses can start to out-compete you on cost.*
If you charge your customers more you will still end up paying more. The $40 was based on a 4% fee. (I'd like to make a correction, as in my case it is actually 3.5%)
What makes it so that Stripe has such a unique position and can impact your costs and competitiveness to such a large degree?
Stripe and PayPal are the biggest players in this space. There are others but they are either built on top of these two or do not have the easy API's and/or integration with other 3rd party services. PayPal was the first to start keeping the fees for refunds, and then Stripe followed.
Stripe is a great company otherwise, and I will continue being a customer but that doesn't mean that I can't get upset over such an blatant money grab.
Does an email server processing n emails per second require more power to process n+1 emails per second? My suspicion is that unless that +1 hits some capacity limit, the number of emails we're talking about required to organize union activities would be undetectable.
That said, even if it is detectible, I think that employees should be allowed to drain some small amount of a company's resources to organize. I am allowed to use company resources for emails like "who wants to go for beers after work?" why should I not be allowed to send "who wants to go organize collective action after work?"
There's still some drain from resources spent monitoring and stopping it. Even though you're already monitoring, you just end up with two cancelling out "essentially zeros."
Scaramucci was his comms director. Big difference. The position of press secretary is one of the most important in the West Wing (It's been diminished a bit in recent years, but there is absolutely a policy component).
