A cute marketing trick. No you're not doing this just because you want to "help new startups". That's a nice way of rationalizing it, but really
1) Braintree is suffering from the competition, especially on HN, Stripe is loved like no other
2) They're not giving away 2 million dollars. With so many startups failing to ever generate significant revenue, I wouldn't be suprised if less than 10% of companies that are the first 1000 to register actually wind up generating $50k in revenue through their service. I'm sure Braintree have their own internal calculations about how much this will cost them and that number is certainly no where near 2 million dollars.
3) The primary purpose of this is to bind new businesses to Braintree. The scenario of "getting their free processing here and then going somewhere else before they pay us a nickel." is cute, but misleading. At that point in the company's development switching the entire payments system is much more expensive and would not make any economic sense.
Props to Braintree for coming up with this, I think in the end it's beneficial to the startup community, though I dislike the "second coming of jesus christ"-vibe of the announcement. They're doing this for business reasons, not because they woke up yesterday and felt a little charitable.
I think you are getting downvoted because your comment embodies the easy snark that is REALLY hurting this community. IMHO, seeing that your comment is currently at the top tells me we still have room for improvement.
I don't think anyone is deluded into thinking this is a charitable gesture, certainly not on hackernews, so I am confused why you spent so much time to (in an agitated way) make it seem like Braintree is pulling one over us.
I tried to clearly differentiate on what I think about the offering (beneficial to the community) and how they worded their announcement (misleading).
Yes, I realize the majority of my message was spent in negativity. That is something, I, myself am working on.
>I am confused why you spent so much time
I enjoy the discourse on HN. It's good practice on how to express oneself (especially seeing as how English isn't my native tongue) and I enjoy the upvotes from people who I consider peers in the tech community (who there's very little of where I currently live)
I don't understand why people get offended when someone tries to find a motive behind something
“So, what’s the catch - is this just a marketing promotion.” There’s no catch, no strings attached, no BS -- we just want to do our part to give back to the community that made us successful and this is our way of paying it forward.
Clearly Braintree wants us to think they are doing it to do 'their part'. Pointing out that this might not be true shouldn't offend you. The parent is not challenging your intellect. He is just making an observation. I got a few negative comments on something similar I wrote about github http://minhajuddin.com/2012/09/29/github-is-not-really-free-... .
> Pointing out that this might not be true shouldn't offend you.
Speaking for myself, I'm offended by such comments not because they aren't true but because yes, they do offend my intellect and waste my time. We all know that Braintree and Github are not charities, let's talk about something interesting instead.
The first point is plainly false. Braintree isn't "suffering." The third point is true, but cynical and obvious. Is it really surprising that you probably won't change payment processors, or that they want to keep your business? Is that really the most interesting point you can make?
The second point is actually a very good one, and it would be interesting to see what actually happens to the 1,000 startups. I suspect we'll see most fail to make anything close to $50,000 and a select few make significantly more.
The thought of "middlebrow dismissals" came to mind when I saw the ensuing discussion. Now I don't think I fully understand what is meant by the term. Further googling didn't bring up anything else, but if it's meant that I simply dismiss what Braintree is offering here, that is completely false. I welcome it. It's a good move. What I found issue with, and discussed at length was the wording of the post. It's not charity and I don't think anyone can disagree with that point.
>The first point is plainly false. Braintree isn't "suffering."
"suffering" may be a little colorful in choice of words, but I don't think it's strictly false, especially on HN where Stripe.com gets beaten in per-domain popularity only by the almighty domain-overlord himself, paulgraham.com
>The third point is true, but cynical and obvious.
I disagree that it's obvious. I think many people underestimate the potential cost of binding their entire business to a single platform, especially when that platform is payments, something that inherently people _do not_ under any circumstances try to mess with if it already works.
>>The thought of "middlebrow dismissals" came to mind when I saw the ensuing discussion. Now I don't think I fully understand what is meant by the term
A middlebrow dismissal means you are giving it only a half-thought before dismissing it, as opposed to critically thinking about it from multiple angles and offering an opinion that can result in a highbrow conversation.
Ah thanks! I knew there was some part missing to my full understanding of the term.
If I were to criticize my original post, I'd say it's overly negative. My tone was dismissive and that's probably what most people found issue with. It's a good lesson. I can present the same content without come across as negatively. Though I do love a good controversy :)
I first saw the term middlebrow in that thread, and I'm still not sure how i feel about the term, but "lowbrow" refers to completely non-intellectual things, and would not appeal at all to someone that values intellectual thinking. I hadn't heard the term until that comment thread, but apparently it has its own Wikipedia page, and has been around since 1925.
>It certainly doesn't cost 50,000$ to switch payment providers. Your argument is therefore invalid.
Well, I certainly do apologize for "offending your intellect" and "wasting your time".
But you seem to be missing that Braintree doesn't cut new startups a check over 50k. It's only the fees that are waived for the first 50k in revenue.
As someone below calculated, new startups save about ~3k by signing up for this promotion. And yes, after a couple months of working on a code base, breaking your payments code apart just to fit the new API cant VERY quickly cost your 3k in dev cost. Half an hour payment downtime because you didn't plug things together just right? There go a few more k in revenue.
And also if stating such isn't the deepest of insights, I don't really see a problem with that. You certainly felt that it wasn't a problem to state that startups can save 50k by signing up with Braintree, even though that is not only completely insane by any standard, it's also easily dis-proven by reading the above article.
Also, vendor lock-in with a payment processor is pretty strong. Kudos to Braintree for supporting portability, but you're still locked to an API unless you want to re-code everything.
In other words, the first $50k is free, and then you're tied intimately to BT's API. The path of least resistance is to just keep going with them. You're making money. They're making money. Everybody wins. I don't think this is a bad thing, it's just not all charity.
All that being said, if they announced this 4 months ago when I was migrating my payment system over to Stripe, I'd have been all over it. BT seems awesome and this is a great deal. Stripe won based on price[1], but $50k free really tips the scales on that.
Competition is good for consumers. So in essence this is probably one of the positive effects Stripe has on the payments landscape. Not only are they offering a well-received service. They're also forcing their competition to come up with ways to make themselves appear more attractive. Would Braintree do the above if they were the only company offering such a service? My bet is they wouldn't even think about it.
>Would Braintree do the above if they were the only company offering such a service?
But they aren't the only company now, so why the hypothetical? Who cares if they did it due to competition, due to the goodness of their hearts, our due to an acid trip? If the end result is the same, and that end result is helpful, then that's a net positive in my book.
EDIT: Since everyone is offering disclaimers about who they like/use, I have used both Braintree and Stripe, for my own startup, and for a few freelance jobs. I've had nothing but help from any support tickets/calls I've had to make, from both companies. So in my mind, this really is a scenario with something good happening and all else is held equal.
Out of the 19 comments in this thread, 3 were by 3 distinct Braintree employees.
In all of my time reading HN, I don't think I've ever seen so many employees of a company post in a single thread.
I'm not really surprised there's a few initial downvotes for negative responses. I initially wanted to ask the downvoter to explain their reasoning, but decided not to as it would probably just read "people reading this response goes against the interests of parties I'm associated with" :)
I downvoted you because I dislike that attitude that is prevalent here... "You're not our preferred vendor so this is a cheap attempt at getting our business!".
If you think this is spam, flag it as so, but it's annoying to me that the crowd has favorites, and when those favorites have promotions people glow about how great they are, but if the competition does something similar it's an evil attempt to gain market share. We know this is marketing, no one is being duped. (Disclaimer, I'm a Stripe user!)
I think my initial post is being misunderstood. That's probably my own fault. I like what Braintree is doing here. I don't like how they've worded it. It's as if they think their customers are dupes, stupid enough not to see that they're not actually spending millions of dollars on the startup community.
Would you ever see such marketing BS come from Stripe? Not in a million years. And that's why I originally wrote the reply.
I downvoted your original comment as well, though I will admit that I was somewhat conflicted in doing so. My reasoning is that the crux of your argument is based on the statement you just made -- "It's as if they think their customers are dupes," -- and I think that's a strawman.
It's common knowledge that companies offer sales to move product. It's also common knowledge that is a benefit to the companies. My opinion is that affect does not, or should not discount the news of the sale. It's like critiquing a television ad for being self-interested. Of course it is, it's an advertisement, as this is. That doesn't mean that we should dismiss it any more than we should dismiss any product that has a price attached (unless that's the point you're arguing -- I don't mean to rule out an RMS-style argument here).
For what it's worth, they are losing millions of dollars on this deal. You're right, it's a loss-leader, but they are losing revenue by offering the sale. That's how a sale works. You offer a discount to get people in the door and hope that the quality of your product can sway them into becoming loyal customers. If they are unable to convert those prospects into customers because their products aren't strong, then they will have simply lost the revenues otherwise entitled to them had they not offered this sale.
In summary, you took the obvious point and made it sound much more negative than it is. On a more meta tangent, I recently posted something like "Now that I know what a middlebrow dismissal is, I'm worried that every dismissal I make will be categorized as one." -- I made that as a joke, but I'm honestly concerned about it and now that I'm aware of it, I believe that it is a problem on HN. I believe there are numerous problems on HN, and through downvoting, comments and my own behavior, I would much prefer it be fixed than abandoned. My personal fix against the middlebrow dismissal is to not be dismissive, which happens to fall under my own personal HN guideline of "assume good faith."
By 'assuming good faith' of all parties and not being dismissive without being constructive, I think we'd have a much better environment, though I do worry that it would become too 'vanilla' (as my own posts often tend to be when I reread them.) Regardless, the easy fix for you at the moment is to just quit caring about karma altogether, and then you can probably ignore these meta-discussions outright.
Because the announcement was about rainbows and puppies, and buddy boy over here is being a wet blanket. He also openly stated what others (like myself) were thinking.
I think his comment offered a different perspective. Nothing wrong with that. It's healthy.
Well, yeah duh. But who cares what their true motives are? Why are you complaining about free credit card processing?
Also, everyone is trying to do cost calculations based solely on their transaction costs. You are not counting all the customer support they have to provide to setup all the accounts and maintain them which is significant.
1) Braintree is suffering from the competition, especially on HN, Stripe is loved like no other
2) They're not giving away 2 million dollars. With so many startups failing to ever generate significant revenue, I wouldn't be suprised if less than 10% of companies that are the first 1000 to register actually wind up generating $50k in revenue through their service. I'm sure Braintree have their own internal calculations about how much this will cost them and that number is certainly no where near 2 million dollars.
3) The primary purpose of this is to bind new businesses to Braintree. The scenario of "getting their free processing here and then going somewhere else before they pay us a nickel." is cute, but misleading. At that point in the company's development switching the entire payments system is much more expensive and would not make any economic sense.
Props to Braintree for coming up with this, I think in the end it's beneficial to the startup community, though I dislike the "second coming of jesus christ"-vibe of the announcement. They're doing this for business reasons, not because they woke up yesterday and felt a little charitable.