I have a very specific Stripe and Stripe + India question. I have a Stripe India account which is authorized for international payments. Doing this for a side project. Pricing of the product is in USD. Found out today (should have known) that Stripe will not allow Indians to pay me via USD. They have to pay me via INR. So now, I have to add additional India specific pricing in INR. This is also OK. In a perfect world, Stripe would show INR pricing to Indian customers & USD pricing to everyone else. (This does not happen) While creating a Checkout session on Stripe, you need to pass in the

price_id

which is specific to every price. So separate

price_id

for INR and separate

price_id

for USD. Which means, I need to now: 1. Detect the country of the person on my pricing page (using IP or something) 2. Show the INR pricing and USD pricing accordingly 3. Send INR or USD price IDs to Stripe accordingly. Is this correct? Or am I missing something very basic. Has anyone used Chargebee or something similar which would take care of this for you? (Please reply in comments if you have any experience with this). Thanks!

@tall-advantage-5586 @colossal-rocket-18368 Was talking to these folks about this recently. It's a real PITA that they don't allow Indians to buy in USD

@loud-glass-33663 I spoke with Chargebee support, they also told that we need to write code to detect the locale and send the price id accordingly.

Thanks @colossal-rocket-18368 Is that how you are managing payments as well?

@loud-glass-33663 I haven't started supporting Indian customers yet 😜

Got it. If someone from India pings you to purchase, you could send them an invoice or special payment link or something I guess

I'm in the same boat as @loud-glass-33663. I still don't accept payments from CloudSkew's Indian users for this very reason; unless of course they can pay in USD and have a foreign billing address. PS: @loud-glass-33663: Also note that people cannot use american express while paying in USD if the merchant (i.e. you in this case) is Indian. Details: https://support.stripe.com/questions/american-express-card-support-for-india-based-businesses

I personally think a very low effort solution to deal with this scenario is by keep showing prices in USD. Then on the billing page ask customers their country instead of detecting it (a lot of them use VPN or they are traveling), if the select India show them a note stating that they will be charged in INR else USD.

Thanks @magnificent-solstice-42554 Just got off speaking to their support and it does seem like I would need to just support dual payments and have the detection logic on my end. @witty-gigabyte-47737 Yeah - not a lot of effort but still a pain and as you rightly said, if people are on VPNs, throws your logic out of the window. What I’ll need to do is guess on best effort basis — and then have a dropdown somewhere that allows them to switch to USD or INR. (Plus not to mention my architecture wasn’t built to support this 🙈 - so need to do something there as well). Thanks for your feedback guys. Appreciate it!

Could do something like chat support thing mentioned. Send payments link generated by Razorpay. I recently did this to order something from a small shop in Delhi. Requires trust though. Not sure if this is one time or repeating subscription. In case of yearly/one time, I guess decent solution.

My long term plan is to open a US LLC and just do all my business transactions via Stripe US.

We've done exactly what you've described @loud-glass-33663 at here https://www.yogami.fit/signup/card. Not detecting location right now to select currency, have defaulted to USD. One thing to note if you go ahead with this implementation is that once you create a stripe customer with a currency, they won't be able to go back and change the currency even if they run into errors.

Thanks @tall-advantage-5586 - I like the dropdown approach - which I am hopefully going to have on the UI in the future. Currently, I have reverted to auto-detecting the region (

INDIA

or

NOT INDIA

) and then show the pricing accordingly once you go to Stripe. For those on the thread, I host the UI with AWS Amplify - which in turn hosts on Cloudfront — and a happy side-effect of this is that Cloudfront returns the country code in a header to the API. Which is how I could turn this very quickly (a few hours including changes to my pricing architecture in the backend). Else, I was looking at getting a $49 / annum subscription to https://www.ip2location.com/ They are extremely accurate - at par with CloudFront in my tests (using NordVPN and going around a bunch of obscure and non-obscure countries). Some folks recommended https://ip2c.org/ which is a free and fast public API with a nifty

/self

end point — so you don’t even need to extract the IP out and send to the API (like you need to do with ip2location) — but in my tests, I found a whole lot of requests turned out to be wrongly identified — which did not inspire confidence. Thanks for the heads up on the currency thing Sankalp. Will keep that in mind.

cc @gorgeous-garden-90780 (^ for detecting countries)

@loud-glass-33663 I have found that https://www.geoplugin.com/ provides accurate IP information. Maybe try it out before you opt for a paid plan?

@cool-garage-76023 Thanks - I use AWS Amplify — which uses CloudFront — which gives me the location of the visitor as a header 😊 So I don’t need to use a third party service.

have you guys had any experience with razorpay, they support 100+ countries?

A friend (CEO) and my CA told me their clients face payment failures with razorpay intl

Same here .. I think if you are selling internationally, the Stripe branding also adds a bit of confidence to the buyers. I use RazorPay for all my domestic projects and invoices ..

ah thanks for the heads-up. will stick to Stripe only.

Razorpay doesn’t support subscription payments on international debit cards, but Stripe does.

@loud-glass-33663, just noticed the thread about Stripe India and I’ve done exactly the same at Remote Leaf. I’ve been asking customer county(which is relevant to my service) and based on that I show them the correct checkout portal.

@witty-gigabyte-47737 why US LLC? Singapore is a better choice if you're planning to save taxes. sg is very startup-friendly country.

@calm-gigabyte-36239 Indian citizens can register in Singapore?

yes, you need to apply and they'll give you EntrePass i.e. enterpreneur visa.

From what I have read, you need to be physically present to start a company in Singapore. Not sure if that is still required. However, a US LLC or C-Corp can be started and operated without ever going to the US

@calm-gigabyte-36239 EntrePass is a pain man. I had that when I was in Singapore. You need to hire Singaporans and follow some rules. Might have a limited perspective, but this is what my frinds have told me

@calm-gigabyte-36239 Singapore has tax exemption for first 3 years or on your first $100k which is cool short term benefit. After that, I think it has a lot of compliance and you also have to find a local resident I guess. US LLC is very straightforward to register & it has a wide ecosystem of services to make this whole process easier. For instance, I could use firstbase.io, starterpack.io etc to register and maintain my company.

@loud-glass-33663 physical presence is necessary for registering a biz in sg but then you can move out. you need to hire locals from 3rd year onwards afaik. @witty-gigabyte-47737 is right about tax exemption but have heard sg has lower tax rates than US after the exemption. I didn't know that US LLC can be registered from anywhere and there's an opportunity to get 0-1 visa later. thanks for the links.