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Comment by SpicyLemonZest | Hacker News Reader

Come on, this is the worst kind of drama boosting. An account named "stripesucks" posts a link to an article written today, discussing the author's individual billing dispute with Skype and urging everyone to use a specific named competitor, and it's on the front page?

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I didn't use a specifically named competitor. I simply stated "direct merchant account." Authorize.net is not a Stripe competitor, it's a gateway, not a processor.

Stripe is just a bundled merchant account + gateway. It isn't like you can break up the bundle, so Authorize.net is losing a potential customer each time a business goes to Stripe. So I would say they are a competitor who works with partners (merchant account providers) to provide the same service as Stripe.

I used Authorize.net circa 2010 at a large cell phone manufacturer for processing micropayments. They changed their API without notification and it broke payments for a few days, and it was really crappy considering they were supposed to be a "big dog" in the industry. Any changes were supposed to happen first in their staging environment and our test-suite ran against it to make sure it still worked before it was signed-off to be deployed into production.

Also, when I was in the UK, getting a payment processor (we had our own merchant accounts) pre-Stripe was a royal PITA. They wanted all sorts of documentation and proof that we were a "real business" before letting us process payments.

TBH, it seems like Stripe and PayPal are being pushed by "risk management" corporate suits into being unreasonable and treating their customers like United Airlines' passengers. A few years back I would ordinarily point people over to FeeFighters' Samurai to shop the best deals on payment gateways, but GroupOn decided to buy them and make them commit seppuku.

Well, they did steal $31K from him. And based on the numerous BBB complaints that he cites, he's not the only one they've ripped off. So it sounds like Stripe is just as bad as PayPal.

And about "drama boosting", if that's a real Stripe person who posted to this thread, I guess that it worked. A little, anyway. Sadly enough, it seems the only way to get attention from jerks like this.

My concern about public shaming as a dispute resolution tactic is that it's toxic, not that it doesn't work.

OK, I get that.

But what else can someone like OP do?

I mean, $31K isn't pocket change, for most of us, anyway. And OP did wait six months before doing it.

Why would it be bad to be toxic to someone who wronged you, hard?

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