Stripe: Thinking Like a Civilization | Hacker News Reader

Stripe: Thinking Like a Civilization

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70 pointsconanxin30 comments

I've always loved Stripe. -Does anyone here have recommendations for a good alternative?

After using them for 2.5 years, our startup finally started to really scale last month. Now that we are doing more revenue than we have ever done - Stripe compliance has decided our business requires more verification and is currently holding payments for an undisclosed period of time. We are an image management platform for eye doctors, nothing has changed about our business or payment model since we started using Stripe. (The crux of the issue seems to be that Stripe has decided that we are charging patients for telehealth visits? Even though we have no SKU's or payments to us that would support this claim (we do allow any eye doctor to use our "virtual visit" feature, for free. Patients are never charged through our platform)

Support has been tough to get a answer from, every morning I wake up to an intro email from a new support rep asking for the same information we sent them yesterday or directing to me to the same article about verification. We even signed up for a premium support plan - simply to try to get a consistent person to work through this issue with.

It's been shockingly frustrating. We are 100% employee owned and self funded. We tripled our revenue last month and are hiring as fast as we can to support new business. Now we are scrambling to send out customer invoices manually this month through QuickBooks and had to take out a short term loan to cover the revenue being held by Stripe. I feel like a complete idiot for not having some sort of backup subscription provider in place.

> Does anyone here have recommendations for a good alternative?

https://www.mollie.com/en

Whether it’s paypal, stripe or whomever else, it’s completely absurd that they can just hold your money hostage for indefinite period of time for no reason.

Banks do this too. It’s an anti-fraud measure.

The amount of fraud that happens in electronic payments is absolutely staggering. As soon as someone finds out your defenses are lower than someone else, you get spammed with people testing stolen credit card numbers.

Your account can, and will, be blacklisted promptly. If your payment processor and the banks they work with don’t stop you, the credit card company will.

This kind of thing happened at every place I’ve been at where financial institutions are involved.

The size of your company does not matter. Visa has so many customers they do not need Amazon. If Amazon fucks up, they will pull the plug if something isn’t fixed.

Sure but for some of these stories, the provider is clearly just incompetent. I’ve read of PayPal holding $100,000 for 6+ months with no reason given or response. That goes far beyond an anti-fraud measure.

If you delay payments to them for similar reason, you'll probably get an invitation to a court. How come you can't complain to the court about such a behavior?

Usually because of the terms of service.

That said the fastest way to a resolution is often exactly this. Either get a lawyer to send a letter saying you're gonna file in court, or just file for arbitration yourself.

If money on that scale is at stake, this is a comparatively cheap way to make sure a real human looks at the problem.

That’s because $100,000 is noise as far as they are concerned. The small company I work at has millions per week in transactions. We have little to no leverage against anyone.

Companies make money on float[1], it is not surprising they would want to hold your money as long as possible.

[1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/float.asp

Reading that on HN, where anti-crypto sentiment is generally very strong, is really ironic.

I work at Stripe. I'm sorry for the issues - we've just sent you an update.

This trend of getting useful support only when complaining on social media is incredibly troubling. Why wasn't this solved by normal support channels? Is it just too expensive to provide decent support unless it's hurting the brand image?

Wow, I'm really surprised and super appreciative.

Thank you for taking notice and totally clearing this up!

Will you stay?

I've had similar experiences with their customer support, both through chat and email.

Multiple reps were writing back and forth with me and I told them twice to please close the ticket as no one understood what I really was asking about. Then the ticket somehow got escalated internally and the next response was indeed what I I was after.

> every morning I wake up to an intro email from a new support rep asking for the same information we sent them yesterday

I understand that companies which operate at the scale of Stripe get flooded with customer support requests and they rotate their representatives for efficiency but it's irritating for the customer at best and counter productive at worst.

I cannot fathom the mental torture on the representatives themselves for having to switch context every few minutes and wonder whether they suffer from long-term attention/focus issues after work due to these.

I'd like to take a moment to mention "Increment" which is one of Stripe's publications. It's really good, and each issue is a work of art, in the literal sense. It takes care to consider viewpoints from more parts of the org than just engineering, which is something we can all appreciate.

Combined with the unique and high quality stripe press offerings they're all quite good. It is a shame it's so hard and expensive to get them if you're outside of the US.

Thanks - I just subscribed to the print edition.

https://increment.com/

wow what a puff piece.

Right, Zuck, too, likes to model himself off Roman emperors. Maybe we can retire the notion that they’re desirable monarchs?

TIL today, Stripe also owns IndieHackers

Stripe gets an unfair amount of love for being a hockey stick VC-backed startup. The Collisons are seen as model cofounders, infallible even, and their docs and blogs are great, but invariably the company will be driven to dubious ends by the pressure of exponential growth.

Why, who are their investors?

How much worse can it get than not having bulletproof customer support?

> One former employee I spoke to mentioned that building products at Stripe was easy.

Building them in terms of knowing what customers want, sure. Shipping is another matter; layers of approval and signoff (don’t use the “bureaucracy” word) have accreted. As you’d expect. Stripe 2021 and beyond is not Stripe 2011, again as you’d expect.

Agreed the leadership is strong. The culture is a moving train and as people from the broader tech industry continue to pour in, it more and more resembles your average tech company. It’s a special, unique place... you know, just like everywhere else :)

Getting the regulatory piece right is also difficult...

Thinking like a civilization is good. When everyone thinks like a civilization there will be no difference between the people.

When there is no difference between the people there will be success and prosperity. Stripe is a model for true socialism.

A new socialism of the future.

A new socialism that will make John and Patrick Collison (and some select VCs) billionaires! Hurray, true equality!

(\s of course, but it's a pretty big jump from "everyone thinking like a civilisation is provides equality between people" to "Stripe is a model for true socialism")

A great leap forward if you will.

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