Outgrowing a Full-Service PSP

As we can all agree, we outgrow things way too fast—clothes, phones, even the tools we use to build a business. The trouble is, we often don’t realize we’ve outgrown a platform until we’re scrambling for a backup. 

For early-stage startups, full-service PSPs like Stripe offer a fast way to implement billing, payments, and vaulting within a single developer-friendly platform. But what gets you to Series A can also be the roadblock to Series B.

Simple subscription billing is where full-service PSPs shine. However, offering usage-based pricing and bespoke enterprise contracts on a global scale is what becomes difficult to execute and manage.

“Your billing system shouldn’t dictate your pricing strategy—it should empower your monetization goals. The highest-performing companies revisit and refine their pricing and packaging every quarter, making billing flexible not just a feature, but a competitive advantage,” says Kim Verkooij, Co-Founder and CEO of Solvimon. 

Outgrowing Stripe Billing: When Flexibility Matters 

When the billing system is tightly coupled with the PSP, it does not play well with other PSPs. This limits the merchant or platform to offer only the specific PSP's billing and payment options. The limited pricing and billing options constrain revenue growth as companies scale to Series B, C, and D. By adopting a flexible pricing and billing platform, businesses can unlock new revenue streams (e.g., embedding AI) and have less revenue leakage due to bespoke contracts. 

Decoupling Stripe Billing or other full-service PSPs is also an opportunity to take a modular approach to payments. Next to increased pricing and billing flexibility, there are several other reasons to consider finding a Stripe alternative:

• Need for more local payment methods and support for multiple currencies.
• PSP redundancy.

Pick and choose what you need—and where you need it. 

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Portable Tokens: The Key to Multi-PSP 

As is the case with billing, full-service PSPs store tokens on behalf of the merchant or platform, accepting the PCI compliance burdens. But this convenience comes at a cost: the tokens generated can only be used and stored within the PSP’s ecosystem. 

And this is manageable when all your transactions run through a single PSP. As needs evolve, you quickly realize you don’t own the tokens, and trying to make improvements like implementing a cascading payment strategy becomes much more difficult. 

“This is where having a vault that is agnostic from any specific PSP makes all of those tokens completely accessible,” says Colin Luce, Basis Theory CEO and Co-Founder. “This can truly enable payment optimization with orchestration, smart routing, and logic that you control. True payment optimization starts with an agnostic payment vault.”

With a PCI-compliant, agnostic programmable payment vault, a company can:

• Store payment methods once, and use the token across any PSP.
• Programmatically update the token when card information changes.
• Route transactions based on success rates, fees, or geography. 

Portable tokens are an ideal Stripe alternative, providing more control over the payments infrastructure without having to chase down customers for new payment details. 

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Where to Find Stripe Alternatives 

There is no better way to get an idea off the ground than using a full-service PSP. The speed, simplicity, and all-in-one experience is everything you need. But as a company evolves from Series A to B and beyond, the payments infrastructure must keep up. 

• Solvimon brings flexibility to billing, and doesn’t tie you to a single payment provider.
• Basis Theory decouples your token vault from any single PSP. 

Together, these types of platforms move from the “full-service” starter pack to a modular approach that can:

• Reduce vendor lock-in.
• Support the growth of new markets or payment methods. 
• Enable true payment and pricing optimization.

You don’t have to rip everything out immediately, but you should start planning. Start with the docs, or see how other companies build with Basis Theory. 

This was a joint post between Basis Theory and Solvimon. 

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