Why Stripe is the worst choice for your new startup business

They probably don't even have the option of supporting them; their upstream banking partners have restrictions on these kinds of businesses.

If you read the article, they did get some seemingly nonsensical support responses from Stripe. Regardless of their application at the time they were a customer and given the standard customer-no-service support. That is notable.

What part of their business model suggests to you that this company is a "crypto startup"?

For my point of view, it does not seem that Cryptocurrency was their product. They are not selling Cryptocurrency AFAIK.

We are not a crypto startup. We are an ecommerce shop selling pc games. Cryptocurrency is a payment option. We did not sell cryptocurrency and we did not use Stripe for anythin related to cryptocurrency. Stripe was only used to sell video games. Also, we are not high risk, we are low risk. Go read the article.

Serious question: Is initial email support with Stripe handled by bots? Every time I've had an issue the replies from support@ have been so bad and so unrelated to the questions that I'm asking that I've resorted to calling it out publicly as a bot on Twitter. Only after I've done that do I start getting replies that are sane and relevant.

You have our contact information and are more than welcome to look into this.

We did send an email to support@stripe.com as you suggested and we asked for your attention but the response was:

"I'm reaching out to let you know that in case you have questions or concerns, I can personally assist you since Edwin Wee is somewhat not familiar to me."

The email continued like a copy paste with "do you have a question about" and listed 3 things and 3 links. When it was obvious why we contacted with a link to your comment here.

But also "why customer support has turned into a pointless exercise of copy pasting with zero understanding or decency".

Are you sure they sell CryptoCurrency? I thought they are only selling games, not crypto.

Stripe literally says in their tos that you can't use their service to buy crypto

Why and how is their business of a restricted type?

This is being downvoted however the irony is clear: this business seems to be a magnet for fraudulent transactions, so “honest” is a bit funny to me. I have been with Stripe since 2010 and have processed thousands of transactions with only two or three fraudulent transactions during that time period, this company is open five minutes and has to go to pretty strict lengths to combat fraud. It seems like that is a type of business that Stripe is better off not serving. The higher costs for serving those types of businesses means higher costs for everyone else who aren’t working in high-risk areas. Perhaps Stripe could have a higher fee tier for higher risk businesses — such as a 10% fee, but given that payments are such a compliance nightmare, even that doesn’t seem like a good idea.

However, thinking outside the box, it seems that the person who wrote the article might have stumbled on his next startup: Stripe for high risk startups. If the current market isn’t meeting defined needs, create a company to meet that need. If such a company doesn’t seem viable, then who could blame Stripe for not wanting to assume similar risk?