Stripe Billing is much more than a cron job. It's an end to end solution for invoicing. It includes emails, trials, hosted billing and subscription management pages, PDFs, and a lot more.

I've implemented IAP -- and it is eons better than the 8 calls it takes to do any of this in Stripe. By the time you get done writing and handling the numerous API calls, errors, checks, etc for this, you've basically built the cron without storing the card information and having to do full PCI of your own gateway, which is exactly what Stripe offers as their service, everything else is window dressing.

I say this, still about to use it in production. It upsets me that the amount of work I have to put in to getting Billing working doesn't seem to justify a percentage price. A set fee, sure. Riding along with my services' value? No.

I've been working in fintech since 2014, and in tech since 2004.

Whether Stripe's price is worth it is subjective, but something that is absolute fact is that whatever you've built doesn't compare. I can tell you that with absolute certainty, even without having seen any of what you've built.

Consider this. Consider that you don't understand why what you perceive as the added value from Stripe Billing "isn't justified" (despite a LOT of businesses paying for it). Consider that you might be missing something. And you say you haven't even used your service in production yet?

This is a case of "could build the service in a weekend". Hey, have at it, but when customers come to you asking for a billing-related feature and you don't have it because you'd have to build it (instead of toggling a switch in a dashboard), or when your cron fails which causes incorrect billing and costs your business a lot of irrecoverable money (instead of just asking support for a correction), then think back about your choices.

Again, have at it, plenty of businesses do this themselves. But most of them regret it in hindsight, because it's not their core competency and shouldn't be.

I appreciate you writing this out in full — and my original post asked to be educated on this…

However, I still don’t see the specifications difference in the checkouts (self hosted pages, pdfs, fraud protection) and Invoicing (reminder emails, retry payments, and end of service notifications, etc) - save the repeated nature of the subscription and if a stretch for you the subscription management / trials.

I’m saying 9/10ths of billing is covered in their 2.9 + .30 offering…

Again please tell me where my perception is off - I’d much rather learn - I just don’t see it

Also note that IAP is the infamous in app purchase from Apple — that I truly adore for the 30% because it actually does the things that are hard to do.

Your perception is correct, a lot of Stripe’s service is included in the base 2.9.

Making the cron job somebody else's problem has value in itself, though... see the cliched Dropbox example.