Ask HN: My Startup is in talks with the first customer. How do I charge them?
I have been working on an SAAS system over the last months. I put the demo online, and now I am in talks with the first company who ist interested in using it. I am not sure how I should charge them. I am in Europe and they are in the USA. I heard bad things about PayPal, so I guess it's not a good idea to tell them to send the money to my PayPal account? Should I just give them my IBAN and SWIFT code and tell them to wire the money via bank-2-bank transfer?
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We've used Stripe + https://plasso.co/ ↗ for the first SaaS customers. Zero coding, invoices look professional, supports recurring subscriptions. The customer data remains in Stripe so nothing keeps you from building a full system around the Stripe API (or other tools) in the future.
Bank transfer should work. Be prepared that questions about the full bank postal address come up. Not all US banks are used to intl transfers it seems. Some banks, well credit unions, don't do intl transfers at all.
Have a look at https://transferwise.com/ ↗ as well.
I would recommend using Stripe and keeping the interface for billing as simple as possible. From working with directly with the people that have to make the payments the easier it is for them to pay, see last payments and generate previous invoices and see if they were paid the happier they are.
If you are using Stripe and Plasso or any of the other companies that make your work look professional, the companies should also feel comfortable using a credit card and subscribing or doing manual payments for your SaaS. Just remember as your SaaS grows, if the money people are happy and the SaaS is great they will normally keep coming back.
I am too building a SaaS app in europe and are looking at getting us customers, here in europe we charge by invoice but in the us we will use either stripe or cleverbridge as payment provider.
Edit: The nice about cleverbridge is that they handle all vat and EU Vat moss - Stripe is faster to setup.
Off topic but I am curious to know - how did you manage to land your first customer? Sales has always been an enigma for me
most americans can barely send a wire. go with stripe or something easier.