I started my career with Brackets, then Sublime, then Atom for a short while.
Then switched to VS Code for a few years and just recently switched back to Sublime because of how slow VS Code became.
Also great pricing! One time purchase for Sublime is still available in 2025!
The license does not expire after 3 years, it is perpetual, but it doesn't apply to versions released more than 3 years after your purchase. If you don't want any newer features or fixes you can simply turn off updates. We warn you before updating to a version not covered by your license.
I find this to be a very reasonable license. Cost is low but provides an ongoing revenue source. I like free or perpetual licensing as much as the next guy, but us programmers gotta eat and pay the rent.
There's not much to it: we wanted steadier income and our customers wanted more consistent updates but also perpetual licenses. This model was the natural conclusion. We tried it out with Sublime Merge and then brought it over with ST4.
I can't speak for blogging usecases, but for agency websites we would disable revisions and a bunch of other things for every single wordpress installation(even the blog posts that show up on the main admin area)
"Every WP Engine site has WordPress revisions disabled by default... Revisions can only be enabled by contacting Support... Support can help you enable 3 revisions for your posts to start. Revisions should not exceed 5."
> bank starts fiddling with the numbers in your account
If a bank messes with your money, you ask for your money when that happens. Not defame the bank based that they updated their database, business as usual, but you liked the old one.
how exactly did they mess with your stuff? where's the attack you're speaking about? where's physical harm?
I see no reason why one wouldn't self host this. Subscription and billing data is such a crucial part of any business, I'm surprised more don't handle it internally.
For my current project, I pay nearly 5-7% on each transaction to Stripe.
For my next project, I'm implementing custom billing and using Stripe just as a payment processor.
i don't use a 3rd party billing solution. I straight up created my own.
If you have a single type of pricing(eg, variable, or tiered) its very easy rolling your own.
The issues happen when you change from variable to tiered(or vice versa), change from anniversary to calendary dates, add coupons, per user custom pricing, credits, etc etc.
I don't recommend building your own if you aren't familiar with Stripe or any other billing system. Once you understand how billing works, feel free to make a custom billing solution.
You are right! The issues usually happen when you add more complexity (tiers, discounts, credit notes, coupons, prepaid credits). Also, what I find very tough is that this is not a « one stop shop »: every single company has it’s own definition of what should be included or excluded from the MRR. I am pretty sure you never end up on an universal definition
Paddle is pretty bad.
Support is bad in general, the API is bad, you never win a chargeback (you still have to worry about chargebacks). I wanted to try lemonsqueezy but now it's been acquired by stripe, so it will likely turn into another expensive Death Star.
MoR solutions are a good idea; the tax (F*K VATMOSS Europe) / accounting overhead is likely not worth it. Having a single B2B transaction whenever you want is much easier to deal with.
When your income is large enough that the % you'd be saving let you afford developer time to implement and maintain taxes / billing and extra for accounting of thousands of transactions, then go for it and switch to a cheaper solution.
Let's say you make 100k per year: the 2-3k you save on pure stripe won't pay for the extra developer / accounting time to maintain all that.
Currently we use a processor agnostic billing engine - sticky.io - but they were purchased by private equity and are doing private equity things. Raising prices, charging per transaction fees, etc. Plus, their software and api is downright terrible but it's what we decided on 12 years ago so here we are.
Vendor lock-in sucks. Open to payment stack suggestions.
I previously bootstrapped a business to 30M ARR and was sick of paying the "subscription tax"
We give you all the tools you need to build and run your subscription business without having to integrate a dozen different tools together and tear your hair out (and also break the bank). Feel free to reach out to us via the contact form–we're giving people on HN one year free
I don’t run any commerce sites, myself, but is there a big difference in using stripe vs a more traditional processor, like working with CardPointe or something?
I'm the founder of OpenPay (getopenpay.com) and a lot of Stripe customers migrated to us as an alternative. We give you all the functionality that Stripe provides without the "Stripe tax"
Feel free to reach out to us and we'll hook you up
That implies you're only charging a few dollars per transaction (where the $0.30 fixed cost per transaction with sticker pricing is 2-4% of the transaction). That's about $7.
It's great to want to charge only a small amount, but this is easily fixed by billing annually and allowing payments through lower-fee payment methods like ACH.
I was in your shoes when I started my business, charging $5/mo. I increased my prices to $10/mo and enabled annual billing (with a $10 discount) and saw MRR grow, both through added sales and increased retention (fewer payments means fewer opportunities for failed payments). And increased revenue on volume, since I pay less in fees.
I used to work at Stripe and I'm very familiar with the pricing. I'm simply perplexed at how you can possibly be paying them up to 7% if your payments are B2B-sized. BNPL acceptance is the only thing that even comes close to that. You'd need to load up on nearly every single metered feature (billing, Tax, chargeback protection, revenue recognition, radar for teams, etc) to pay that much with sticker pricing.
I ran into the same issues / frustrations as you when I bootstrapped my previous business to 30M ARR. I hated paying the "Stripe tax" and having vendor lock in with Stripe
Feel free to reach out to us on the website and we'll take care of you with free subscription management for a year
There are industries where billing is a service for very good reasons: Telcos have been buying entire billing packages, paying a mint for them, for decades.
The issue is whether one needs a battleship sized, super flexible, yet expensive billing solution for much smaller problems.
A tesla base model is 60k, which is just below the luxury tax. If you purchase this car, you'll get all the ev tax benefits without the luxury tax downsides.
Exactly. I get where the author is coming from but if you allow tech companies to perpentually save your data and try to cross link it to new accounts, it sets a bad precedent.
I started my career with Brackets, then Sublime, then Atom for a short while. Then switched to VS Code for a few years and just recently switched back to Sublime because of how slow VS Code became.
Also great pricing! One time purchase for Sublime is still available in 2025!