Stripe brings a lot to the table that we’ve had to build and manage ourselves in the past.
Stripe handles all sorts of recurring billing, lets us do different types of metered billing (eg: per user), it handles off boarding and what happens if a card doesn’t go through after a while.
In short, stripe was developed over a decade ago as a full solution for software companies that wanted to do subscription billing, we’re left disappointed with what PayPal offers, and needed to focus on their core product instead of rebuilding banking functionality.
Their ux is pretty and fast. Their reports make sense. They keep us from having to manage balances and issue payouts on our end, which is time that could be better spent on our core cms.
The only complaint I’ve heard from other software companies using stripe is that the fees can be high, particularly if you’re doing 5 figure transactions. My sense is that’s a great problem to solve when we’re doing 100x the volume we are today and looking for a way to save a point or two on what we pay. Cost would be rebuilding quite a lot of billing functionality they offer and maintain well today.
Oh also, it’s a well known standard in the saas space, so there’s all sorts of extensions for it to solve more complicated problems if we run into them