Thanks for the response, Patrick. We run a platform with a large average transaction value, large enough that 0.5% is very meaningful. We would love to take over the onboarding process and entire user experience, but 0.5% is too much to swallow. Braintree provides us with the same functionality and a flat $0.25 payout fee, which is a better alignment of incentives for us.
If we were to use Stripe managed accounts we would start bearing all transaction risk plus a 0.5% fee. As a result our payout frequency would decrease drastically as we'd implement a huge delay, only paying out once we were positive the transaction was risk free.
Is Stripe's preference for platforms to continue to use standalone accounts vs managed account long term? We have a strong affinity to Stripe as a fellow YC company, but struggle with this offering.
Specific to your case, if your transaction volume is very high you should contact us. We're certainly open to volume pricing depending on your specific situation, and would love to learn about how to best serve/price your specific use case. sales@stripe.com is the best contact there. bkrausz@stripe.com also works :).
More generally, international KYC and compliant payments are quite hard, and our pricing there is very competitive. Domestically we saw that many companies were already paying similar rates on our fixed-fee pricing, so we weren't actually hurting customers in the US (on the contrary, we were encouraging more frequent payouts for the same rate, which would help everyone by making a more efficient system). We felt that the benefits of consistent pricing were worth it here.
Re standalone vs. managed accounts: our preference is that we make standalone accounts such a great and easy-to-use experience that everybody starts using them, because dealing with things like information collection and tax reporting is annoying. However, we're letting our customers dictate that. If managed accounts become immensely popular, it means we haven't made standalone accounts easy enough to use, or we've made an incorrect assumption about the world (likely a combination of both). Regardless, we intend to support managed accounts for a very long time, and have already had them around in some less-built-out form for quite a while.
If we were to use Stripe managed accounts we would start bearing all transaction risk plus a 0.5% fee. As a result our payout frequency would decrease drastically as we'd implement a huge delay, only paying out once we were positive the transaction was risk free.
Is Stripe's preference for platforms to continue to use standalone accounts vs managed account long term? We have a strong affinity to Stripe as a fellow YC company, but struggle with this offering.