I will say that Stripe Connect was a game-changing product for some types of applications.
A firm I worked with did booking for sports camps. The tech was positive-- give the coaches neat rosters and record keeping, and let parents easily pay the camp fees with a credit card.
The original architecture was to let the individual programs plug in their preferred merchant processing account; assuming Authorize.net or the like by default, and they'd just add their API key during the onboarding process. We'd bill them our fees once a month and it would slot into their business accounting neatly.
Wrong. These guys weren't running grown-up businesses with documentation and full-scale merchant accounts. They were basically half a step above collecting Mrs. Crampknicker collecting $10 bills for field trip deposits from fourth graders. So it ended up that the booking site acted as the merchant, and treated the coaches as fulfillment providers. We'd end up having to cut them checks once a week for the net after our fees.
With Stripe Connect, we had them click a link in their user control panel, walk through a three-screen enrollment form on the Stripe side, and then they were getting a direct deposit as soon as payment cleared, without paper or manual intervention.
Yeah, you could pull together a bunch of seperate services before to get the same results, but Stripe Connect put it within the reach of a team with 1 1/2 developers.
A firm I worked with did booking for sports camps. The tech was positive-- give the coaches neat rosters and record keeping, and let parents easily pay the camp fees with a credit card.
The original architecture was to let the individual programs plug in their preferred merchant processing account; assuming Authorize.net or the like by default, and they'd just add their API key during the onboarding process. We'd bill them our fees once a month and it would slot into their business accounting neatly.
Wrong. These guys weren't running grown-up businesses with documentation and full-scale merchant accounts. They were basically half a step above collecting Mrs. Crampknicker collecting $10 bills for field trip deposits from fourth graders. So it ended up that the booking site acted as the merchant, and treated the coaches as fulfillment providers. We'd end up having to cut them checks once a week for the net after our fees.
With Stripe Connect, we had them click a link in their user control panel, walk through a three-screen enrollment form on the Stripe side, and then they were getting a direct deposit as soon as payment cleared, without paper or manual intervention.
Yeah, you could pull together a bunch of seperate services before to get the same results, but Stripe Connect put it within the reach of a team with 1 1/2 developers.