In October 2021 I decided to ruin all of our simple billing logic and throw Euro and GBP into the mix, been a UK company charging in USD has had its strong advantages with the pound generally getting the weaker and weaker post-Brexit vote (Luck starting a UK business in 2017), but we had heard from customers they wanted to pay in a local currency.
We get it, until we got a good Credit card that didn't charge FX fees we were losing hundreds of pounds a month to our bank and their terrible exchange rates and hidden fees.
It's been a year and I am really curious to see and share what the numbers look like!
The Results
Let's crunch the numbers, I am going to report in % as I am not an open startup at SnapShooter since 2020.
Trials (12 months)
| USD | 67% |
| EUR | 23% |
| GBP | 10% |
As you can see 33% of new users decided to use none USD as their billing currency, now this number might be miss leading as free users might not really care what the currency is set to. So let's run the number of paying customers.
Paying Users (12 months)
| USD | 63% |
| EUR | 28% |
| GBP | 9% |
Looking at the customers who actually paid the numbers to paint the same picture, 37% of customers who signed up in the last year now pay in GBP or Euro.
The benefits
As we have Stripe set to payout to our Wise bank accounts all USD and EUR, (GBP does directly to our business account), We have the added benefit of holding Euros. This has been partially useful when paying our quartile VAT MOSS to the EU as well as the odd contractor who wanted to be paid in EUR. Makes life so much easier when you don't have to convert money to cover a bill.
It's hard to say if those users given the choice of currency would not have signed up if it was not an option.
The drawbacks
Another bank account currency to manage for accounting and bookkeeping. In a way it's nice we don't have to worry about Stripe currency conversion and trying to get the bookkeeping software to understand that. Only when the money physically moves from one currency to another do we need to track the event, each stripe payment is tied into all of the customer's invoices.
It has made pricing more complex and this year when the GBP took a massive hit, thanks Lizz, and we updated our pricing it makes the process more complex.
We are a UK company, but most income is via USD, when the exchange rate changes, where do you anchor?
Conclusion
I will be keeping it, feels like it helps with signups, if not it helps with business operations. If I was to build another product tomorrow I would allow multi currencies, or at least build with that in mind. I can't speak to using Paddle but I would give it a deep look.
Recommendations
If you're a UK business and looking for a good credit card, capitalontap offers really good exchange rates without fees, You also get 1% cashback making paying that AWS bill a tiny bit easier. Sign up here and get a £75 reward.
If your business is charging customers in a different currency and using Stripe, I strongly recommend setting up Wise and letting them do the currency conversion instead of Stripe and saving on their fees and mid-market rates. Signup up here and get free transfers for ~£500. This simple move generated a 2% increase in revenue.
PS
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Photo by Ibrahim Boran on Unsplash
