You are correct. We are more expensive than Stripe if you're just looking at money.
But we look at it from a time and capital perspective. With Stripe, you have to code and maintain your own payment solution on the backend and your own checkout form. You also have to worry about a million other things like emailing your customers when they place an order, and handling refunds. If you don't have the coding skills to build that yourself, you have to hire an expensive developer to build and maintain that for you.
If that extra 2% cost savings is worth it to endure the hassle above, then Forge isn't for you. We're aiming at people who don't want to deal with all that and would rather concentrate on growing their business doing things like launching a new product and marketing their current ones.
Absolutely. If you're doing enough business, that 2% really adds up. At that point, it is financially worth it for you to build your own backend payment solution using Stripe or Balanced to save money.
But when you're first starting out selling something, it's a huge capital investment to build that payment processing code on top of Stripe/Balanced, likely $5,000+ if you do it right. We're trying to make it as easy as possible to get started.
The word "forge" seems to me an odd choice for a company that deals in finance. Three of us here independently saw negative connotations when it comes to money, security, trust, etc. but nobody else has brought it up yet so perhaps it's just us. Best of luck to them.
That's certainly a valid point. We're trying to convey that you're forging a lasting online business and doing the hard work to be independent from a corporate job.
If the name turns out to be losing us business, then we'll have to address it.
Why is this different (in a worthwhile way) from existing payment options? Like Stripe?
What else can you cite that Paypal does wrongly that you can implement correctly?
I don't mean to be critical, just asking hard questions. "Taking on" big companies like Paypal has been a de facto way to bring attention to projects since the early 2000s, but it's hard to actually achieve that level of eminence and market share. Being good isn't enough.
Those are both great questions. We're aiming Forge at people who cannot write their own backend payment processor to use Stripe, and only know basic HTML. If you have the skills and the time to code and maintain payment processing and a checkout form, then Forge isn't for you. We're aiming it at non-techies who want to sell something online.
PayPal certainly has its advantages, but we're trying to solve two main problems: the checkout experience and the withdrawing of funds. The checkout experience on PayPal has 5 or 6 steps and redirects you away from the merchant's site to complete a payment. Ours is on one page and is embedded directly in the merchant's site. Click "buy product", checkout form pops down, fill out 6 or so fields and click "buy now." Done.
Also, we automatically deposit your profits into your bank account every Friday. Our goal is to get this down to the next-day. You sell something Tuesday morning, ship it Tuesday afternoon, and the money is in your bank account on Wednesday morning.
Stripe checkout button only sends a charge token to a backend that you have to write. A backend that needs to trigger the actual charge and everything that goes along with that, like generating emails and receipts.
Forge takes care of all of that so you don't have to worry about it.
I don't see us competing with Stripe. If you're a developer and have the time to write and maintain a payment solution around Stripe, then Forge definitely isn't for you.
We're going after the people who don't want to code all of that themselves and just want to sell something and get money deposited into their bank account.
And of course once you back out the overhead and direct costs of selling, the amount of your potential profit that eats up is some multiple of that.
They charge 2.9% + $0.30, and then 2%.
Stripe charges 2.9% + $0.30.
So they are approximately 65-70% (2/2.9 = 0.69) more expensive, depending on your average charge.