Cheap Recurring Payments with Stripe and AWS Lambda

Remember that if you use stripe subscriptions you absolutely <i></i>must<i></i> setup a webhook, or otherwise examine your logs every month.<p>Why? If a customer is subscribed to a &quot;plan&quot;, and their payment fails it is retried three days later, then five days later, then eight days later, and if all three payments fail they&#x27;re quietly unsubscribed without any notification being sent to you!<p>I have a toy project which has paying customers and last month realized I&#x27;d had people using my SaaS for over a year without having paid me. A few failures in a row meant they were unsubscribed, and since I didn&#x27;t read the reports every month I didn&#x27;t notice.<p>I reworked my payment system now, to subscribe to webhooks and ensure I find out promptly in the future.<p>Not a huge deal at my volume, but a surprise I could have lived without.

~3%, dirt cheap?!<p>Why are so many of you so happy to throw so much cash away to process money? I <i>know</i> Stripe is lovely to integrate but as a business you have to shop around.<p>In the UK (and EU) card processing is much cheaper. Stripe is closer to 2% but if you shop around, you&#x27;ll find somebody who&#x27;ll offer you 0.8-0.9%, give you free terminals and no monthly contract fees.<p>Edit for those asking: Worldpay and Handepay are the best rates I&#x27;ve seen recently. Both for online and off. But again, don&#x27;t just cluster around one company, harass a few yourself. They&#x27;re willing to compete.

It&#x27;s unbelievable how easy this is with Stripe in comparison to PayPal. I had to do the latter a week ago and it was horrible [1]. It&#x27;s no wonder Stripe is so successful.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fman.io&#x2F;blog&#x2F;paypal-for-saas-99-problems&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fman.io&#x2F;blog&#x2F;paypal-for-saas-99-problems&#x2F;</a>

Stripe charges 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction, the others mentioned have a monthly fee and then lower transaction fees. So Stripe isn&#x27;t remarkably cheap.

This is what people are missing on Lambda. It&#x27;s pay-to-play, and for 90% of the sites out there, they&#x27;re paying too much in comparison.<p>If you&#x27;re running server instances 24x7 for an application that is doing &lt; 25 requests&#x2F;minute on average, you would probably find your hosting costs come down (perhaps to zero) and your reliability would increase considerably if you moved to Lambda-style applications.<p>serverless.io is a decent framework to get started (allows for local dev and testing, manages deployment) and is agnostic in terms of deployment target: AWS, IBM, Google coming soon, etc.<p>The only reason we&#x27;re not rolling it out everywhere at work is because it assumes all developers are deploying directly from their term with god-like CloudFormation access. Nope, nope, nooope. We just need to build the deploy pipeline for it, and then off we go.

I&#x27;ve been using Laravel Spark [1] for recurring payments built on top of Stripe, and at a 100$ one-time fee for Spark and a small server setup (that I needed for the service in the first place) I think it&#x27;s a cheap option for recurring payments, too.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;spark.laravel.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;spark.laravel.com&#x2F;</a>

The problem is that Stripe is still not usable in the half of the world, including my country, Romania.

I maintain a small open source library for managing payments websites that uses this architecture [1]. My Lambda costs have been about $0.04 per transaction.<p>Also you can provision AWS from the browser using a CloudFormation template and a Launch Stack URL [2].<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;christophercliff&#x2F;flatmarket" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;christophercliff&#x2F;flatmarket</a>. [2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;christophercliff&#x2F;flatmarket#automated-deployments" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;christophercliff&#x2F;flatmarket#automated-dep...</a>

I never got around getting the true value prop of recurring solutions such as chargebee etc when used on top of stripe. Stripe already provides excellent recurring subscription payments api out of the box, so why use any of these services. Am I missing something ?

Thanks for article. Though I known about Lambda for long time, but this is one nice example, how Lambda can be used. Now I am planning to use to develop some zapier like integrations.<p>-=-=<p>Having said that, before you jump into making free payment forms for your static site, keep PCI compliance in mind. (even if stripe is rendering form using js).

I&#x27;ve seen several comments on here about how high a percentage is being charged by credit card processors and this is something I&#x27;ve wondered about for a while. There are some sites where I feel like I must be missing something.<p>As an example; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sendmoneytoschool.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sendmoneytoschool.com</a>.<p>The site is used to pay online with a credit card for your children&#x27;s school lunch and it typically charges a $1.50 &quot;convenience fee&quot;. It is my understanding that they are not charging schools for the use of this service (I may be mistaken); at Stripe or PayPals fee rates this service would be losing money. Every $100 would incur at least a $2.00 fee. Here a low cost processor like Worldpay and Handepay would allow for a profit; albeit a very small one.

This is pretty cool but to be pedantic this is actually API Gateway proxying requests to AWS Lambda not just a Lambda function. Zappa and other Serverless Frameworks sort of obfuscate the fact that API Gateway is setup in front of Lambda but that is what is happening here. Again, cool example.

I can see many cases where there is need for more control. Yes, we can start and end manually, but is it acceptable to be that flaky with payments. I mean, I have managed my personal server in pretty ad-hoc way and more often than I expected there are some problems with something. I don&#x27;t think I can trust myself with lambda.

Now if only my property manager could get with the beat and take electronic payments ... I still have to bike over to their office and drop off a physical check every month because they don&#x27;t take anything else.

This is simple and cool.<p>You&#x27;d still need some way to authorize subscribers on your website, no? Therefore, you couldn&#x27;t create a serverless subscription blog&#x2F;website... unless I&#x27;m missing something.

id rather use XRP