What's the recommended way to pass on Stripe fees to customers on subscriptions?

Question

I want to pass on stripe fees to customers paying with card, thereby encouraging them to use ACH payment methods.

I've considered making the fee a separate charge, but there is a fee on the fee, and so the customer would end up paying more than the Stripe fee rate.

Also, I could add invoice items when the invoice.created webhook is sent, however, there's the issue of how to deal with a customer changing their payment method after the invoice is finalized.

So, any ideas?

Answer 1

Generally passing payment processing fees on to customers is discouraged and, in some cases, may be against the law.

That said, Stripe has a support article that includes the formula you need to use to pass fees to customers while accounting for the overall increase in the charge amount:

The logistics of applying this formula to Subscriptions would be quite tricky. As you pointed out, the customer may switch to a different payment method after the Invoice is finalized, and if your goal is to only pass on the fees based on the payment method used it's probably not practical/possible to do this in the context of a Subscription/Invoice in Stripe.