That said, we've seen a big spike in signups over the past few weeks. If any HN readers have integrated recently and have feedback, we're always eager to hear it. Feel free to email me at patrick@stripe.com and I'll route to the right team(s).
As always, thank you to the many HNers who are also active Stripe users!
What are the strategies/thoughts in the industry? Holding and batching payments on a per-user basis? Trying to get agreements so you can batch payments on a per-processor or per-network agreement? Hourly? Daily? Weekly?
That's pretty much the story :-). And so the questions are then whether we subsidize the transactions, batch them (as you say, though that makes refunds and statement descriptors tricky), get card networks to change their policies, or somehow shift how the payments are made (e.g. encouraging cheaper payment methods).
The various US credit card & processing companies have an extraordinary thing going for themselves. Visa and Mastercard have cartel-like margins (Visa's operating income margin for 4Q19 was 66%, you don't see that outside of maybe illicit drug operations or Facebook's monopoly in its earlier thinner incarnation pre-Russiagate). They're super sensitive to giving any ground on their fee levels, out of fear (correctly so) that they'll never get them back.
Before the market drop, Visa was worth more than all publicly traded banks in Europe combined (frankly that may still be true post market drop, as Visa hasn't declined all that much).