TIFU by using Stripe as a payment processor for my small business | Hacker News Reader

TIFU by using Stripe as a payment processor for my small business

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575 pointsahiknsr441 comments

(I work for Stripe, and since many of my colleagues are currently sleeping, taking the liberty of saying this on their behalf.)

We are looking into things.

As someone who ran businesses for a long time myself, it would be very alarming to me if customers felt they were being ignored while repeatedly talking to people who work for us. If that ever happens, please bring in literally anyone at Stripe, inclusive of other Patrick. Our email addresses are often available through a quick search of HN; mine is (predictably) patio11@stripe.com if you need it.

We don't comment publicly on individual customers. This is an important part of customer privacy and we're serious about it.

Sometimes situations which result in external complaints are the result of a process failure, and in those cases we try to fix the instant case and improve processes in the future.

Sometimes they are the result of a process operating correctly but coming to a result which someone did not enjoy. The record available to the process is often more detailed than the record available to the public Internet, and may include extremely relevant context.

Corporate process improvement is not an excuse for treating people badly. An individual human who treats people badly is not allowed to say "well I deal with a lot of people and I need algorithms and sometimes my algorithms don't work so I'm doing my best to improve them". Corporations should not get a pass because they need cheap processes that "scale" to maintain their profit margins.

This is the perpetual moral hazard that we constantly see at all big tech firms. These firms promised fantastical profit margins, but only on the condition of scaling at very low cost. What doesn't scale at very low cost? Customer service. That's why you're all so awful at it.

And don't come back with your satisfaction metrics from customers you haven't screwed. Your job is to do right by the customers who aren't convenient for you. Just like it's an insurance company's job to pay out to the tiny minority of claimants. It doesn't matter one bit if the company has a great web site or API that everyone loves. The true moral nature of your company is revealed by how you treat the customers who need you to do right by them.

Perfect

Disagree but a morally commendable position.

Also: Stripe publicly emphasized the possibility that their customer might be a dirty rotten liar.

I feel it is only fair to point out that Stripe might be a dirty rotten liar, too.

It turns out the poster did, in fact, omit extremely material info from their original post. They sold a used company van via credit card via their stripe account: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32264886

This is not something the business sells, and a huge chargeback risk

Isn't the obviously correct behavior by Stripe to suspend that transaction, without interrupting others? Clearly they are able to identify transactions on a case-by-case basis.

I read their account. They only complain of Stripe holding "the" money, from the car. Did they say Stripe locked their account or did any other restrictions?

https://www.reddit.com/r/smallbusiness/comments/wa1zob/dont_...

I read a few of their comments their complain seems to be about the $3000 and needing to wait 120 days to get it.

They also say you can't call, but at least for me I'm able to call Stripe here: https://support.stripe.com/?contact=true

I don't see any phone number there.

If you have an account, you click "call me" and they call you

OP said the options to "call me" is greyed out: https://old.reddit.com/r/tifu/comments/wa230m/tifu_by_using_...

First, that seems to be what happened to OP. They suspended the transaction and are holding funds associated with that transaction.

Second, I posit that having even one (confirmed) suspicious or fraudulent transaction increases the likelihood of having others.

From elsewhere in this page:

> I used Stripe for about a year to run a small cell phone store in Denver, CO area. [1]

> We sold a cheap van in the company name. [2]

Yeah, that explains how they arrived in Stripe jail.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32261868#32264335

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/smallbusiness/comments/wa1zob/comme...

Should’ve used Zelle or cash. At least with your bank, you can apply regulatory pressures. With Stripe, you have little recourse.

I think this negativity is uncalled for. They said that they do their best, sometimes there are mistakes on their end that they try to fix, and sometimes the person complaining is lying or leaving out details that would explain the situation. If you've ever dealt with people, you would know that they often "forget" things or downplay things that would make them look bad.

I think this criticism is called for. The customer tried asking them nicely and it sounds like they did not try very hard to fix it -- which is an experience I can empathize with 100 times over. If you've ever dealt with companies, you know that they often have policies and procedures that intentionally screw customers and they only back off if it blows up publicly. Because they can. Our accountability mechanisms suck.

I don't think you - or many of the people commenting here - read through the thread. The customer personally sold a "cheap" van and accepted a credit card as a payment, which is super, super sketchy. Of course Stripe flagged it. They were smart to do so.

You're bringing negativity as well. Just applying it to the smaller, weaker party.

When so much money is at stake, the negativity is called for. Stripe is not neutral here. They have leverage and power over their merchants in these situations.

I read OP’s reply as a generic criticism about companies that scale beyond their ability to provide sufficient customer support, not a specific criticism of patio11. Silicon Valley is full of companies that scale beyond their competence and ability to operate properly: it’s practically a requirement of the “growth at all costs” mentality. I would argue that if you cannot handle dealing with customers without AI and automation with many false positives, then you have no business scaling further until you can. I don’t know if this is the particular case for Stripe since I’m not a customer, but we can all see this behavior across the industry.

That's an incredibly charitable interpretation in favour of Stripe. The aggrieved party has been emailing their support repeatedly only when this gained traction on both Reddit and Hackernews are they actually replying. How is this acceptable?

I don't see how you can assume bad faith on the user. Have you ever dealt with corporations? If so, you would know that they often lie and downplay things that make them look bad.

> Corporate process improvement is not an excuse for treating people badly. An individual human who treats people badly is not allowed to say "well I deal with a lot of people and I need algorithms and sometimes my algorithms don't work so I'm doing my best to improve them".

I don't think you're disagreeing with patio11 here. To wit:

> Sometimes situations which result in external complaints are the result of a process failure, and *in those cases we try to fix the instant case and improve processes in the future*.

I read that as: they prioritize satisfying the immediate, dissatisfied customer first and address process improvement second, which is exactly the priority that you're suggesting. Especially combined with patio11's other suggestion of personally contacting the upper management of the company.

Maybe if the company had some way, any way at all, to reach an actual human being, this wouldn't be a constantly repeated problem on HN and elsewhere.

As I have observed in other contexts ( https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1463749947858165761 ), many people who say "Ugh, I cannot reach a real human" have in fact spoken to several humans, repeatedly and at length, and are imprecisely stating their desire to speak to a person who would agree with their view of the facts and swiftly enact the resolution that they prefer.

We offer (human-powered, somewhat obviously?) support via a variety of methods 24/7; time for us to reply to email is generally a few minutes. Could we do this better? Yes, and I hope we continue doing it better; if anyone ever has an interaction where we don't meet the bar please flag to us.

In this specific case, the OP claims that the call and chat options are greyed out, leaving only e-mail and social media. E-mail, they claim, is bot responses only.

While I understand you can't comment on the specifics of this case, can you speak generally about whether or not disabling the phone/chat support buttons is a part of some standard process?

Speaking generally, chat and phone support are designed to provide immediate round-the-clock service to a wide range of issues but not literally every type of issue that a financial institution has to be able to deal with.

Sometimes, a financial institution might only be able, due to staffing or other considerations, to deal with you asynchronously in writing, perhaps from e.g. a group of professionals who are not as numerous as front-line user operations.

This is a roundabout non-answer that doesn't explain why chat and phone support were/are greyed out.

Are you just trying to say "we're so short staffed, there's no one to answer your messages, let alone your calls?"

What he is saying is that in the instance of a fraud concern, they don’t have people who can talk about it available 24/7.

They don't have it 24/7. That's part of the answer.

But that kind of phrasing leaves a big gap.

Do they offer it during some hours? Which hours? Or do they offer it never?

There's a big difference between "call and chat are only extended beyond business hours for certain issues" and "call and chat are only ever for certain issues".

The response here could mean either.

On this page where it pops up a support window, https://support.stripe.com/?contact=true (you might need to be logged in to see it) there's a dropdown with various choices, and the Chat and Call buttons get enabled or disabled depending on what you choose from the dropdown. In the default state with no option chosen, all 3 buttons are grayed out, but a lot of the options seem to enable all 3 buttons.

> imprecisely stating their desire to speak to a person who would agree with their view of the facts and swiftly enact the resolution that they prefer.

Wow, one reply in and we're already seeing open contempt for this type of troublesome customer. What nerve, expecting a payment processor to promptly process payments and make funds accessible to the account holder.

This reply is going to look monumentally bad if the customer ends up being right about how they were treated.

The Reddit thread shows that OP has interacted with Stripe through Twitter DMs at a minimum.

Yes, this happened in the thread, after other people suggested it when he asked for help connecting with a human. So if the purpose of your comment is to support the idea that, many people who say "Ugh, I cannot reach a real human" have in fact spoken to several humans, repeatedly and at length, then you do not have enough information to support that here.

The statement that he never talked to a human could be true at the point in time when he first made the claim in his reddit post.

> This reply is going to look monumentally bad if the customer ends up being right about how they were treated.

And will you say the opposite when the opposite is true? Other comments mention facts about how the OP tried to do something outside of normal and the response is expected for "abnormal" behavior on an account.

Anger against companies is one thing... but will you defend them when it turns out the company is in the right or is this only a one sided comment?

This comment should make every Stripe customer run.

You've build up an incredible amount of kudos with your comments and blog posts over the last decade+ here and are willing to burn it for a corporation in a moment? Earning trust takes a long time, losing trust only takes the blink of an eye.

The guy tried to use a cellphone shop account to sell a used van via credit card. If I was Stripe I'd be holding the money until the chargeback period was over too.

They should not accept the payment and then keep the money. Why not reject it in the first place (too large of an amount)? $3000 reasons.

They aren't "keeping the money," it is in escrow until the dispute period ends.

And who owns this "escrow"? I bet it's Stripe. That money is sitting in their accounts collecting interest that they definitely want (spoiler, they make money off keeping your money in your accounts not just off processing fees).

Is selling a van universally against the terms of service? Especially a cellphone shop van?

If it was just bad communication about what this specific business uses the card for, it seems like that should be resolvable without waiting out the chargeback period.

When you get a merchant account, part of the application process is describing what your business is, what it sells, and what your expected sales volume is. These metrics are used for fraud detection and risk management.

Using a merchant account for a purpose which you haven't disclosed to the processor -- like a cell phone store selling a truck -- is a violation of the merchant agreement, and is often grounds for account closure.

I know that. You avoided addressing either of my points though.

1. Is selling trucks against the terms in general?

2. This is a cell phone store selling a cell phone store truck. It's part of the business, not something unrelated.

If they had thought of it, they probably would have made trucks or no trucks a part of the processing agreement up front. They thought it was a reasonable use, and it might have even been a reasonable use! So why can't this be resolved any sooner or with better communication?

> 1. Is selling trucks against the terms in general?

Probably not, but I can't rule it out. It's certainly an unusual thing to accept a credit card payment for, and the fact that vehicles are titled property may complicate matters.

> 2. This is a cell phone store selling a cell phone store truck. It's part of the business, not something unrelated.

No, it isn't. The business of a cell phone store is, generally speaking, going to be selling cell phones and cell phone accessories, and its merchant account will have been obtained with the understanding that it would only be used for charges related to those products. It isn't in the business of selling cash registers or furniture or trucks, even if it may happen to possess those things as a business; if it wants to sell those things, it needs to accept payment through some other means.

> generally speaking

> its merchant account will have been obtained with the understanding

> if it wants to sell those things, it needs to accept payment through some other means

So it's not part of the general business, but it is the business doing the sale, and such a thing was not part of the merchant account negotiation.

...I don't see a single thing you actually disagree with me over?

I can attest to this.

The small company I was working for got card tested (scammers use hundreds of stolen cards to see if they work). I called customer support and talked with a human on a Friday night at 8pm for 15 minutes about our options. 2-3 days later, I chatted with someone from the fraud team.

I was surprised by the high touch service even though didn't have a lot of volume (new account w/ less than $10k of transactions).

Agree. I've been a Stripe customer pretty much since they launched, I'm small potatoes but they have always been very responsive and with smart support staff.

"Am I so out of touch? No, it's the customers who are wrong."

I’m not a Stripe customer, but I’ve often ended calls with other companies’ human tech support thinking “wow, I wish I could talk to a human.” Not because they didn’t take my side, but because I might as well have been talking to a chatbot. Many companies’ tier 1 support can’t go off script, can’t offer creative solutions that are even slightly off the rails, can’t make exceptions, can’t apply human reason or good judgment, can’t update fields in their screens that are read-only… they are basically IVR systems that eat lunch. So I can emphasize with the feeling that customers are always interacting with an API.

Yeah, I'm also not a stripe customer, but it's not unusual for me to email a company, and get back a canned response to a tangentially related question I didn't ask. If I then reply and try to clarify what I meant, I get back exactly the same canned response.

I don't know whether it's a chatbot spitting out replies based on keyword matching, or whether it's a human with a "responses per hour" performance target which doesn't give them time to read the emails they're replying to, but either way it's very different from the "talking to a human" experience I'm used to from daily life.

(And it's not a case of a correct process coming to a result I don't enjoy, except in a very narrow sense. "I understand your request and the answer is no" would be an improvement over what I often get)

This happened to me with Tinder, when I begged them for 2 weeks before expiration to let me renew my grandfathered Platinum membership, since my card wasn't showing up. Their canned response kept saying the account will auto-renew, no matter how I worded "no it won't, because you don't seem to have my card on file, even though my card hasn't changed".

Then, when the account didn't auto-renew because they didn't have any card on file, their canned response switched to "create a new Platinum account" (with much worse benefits).

I requested that this be the same grandfathered type of Platinum account that I lost.

Their canned response was that I should create a new Platinum account.

I said okay, but I want the same benefits I lost.

Their canned response was that I should create a new Platinum account.

I created a new Platinum account. It had much worse benefits.

Approximately one week later, I was permanently banned from Tinder for violating community standards without explanation (after having been a nice member of the community for the past year on Platinum and continuing to be one).

So in your first post you state:

>We don't comment publicly on individual customers. This is an important part of customer privacy and we're serious about it.

But then you heavily imply that the user ("Many people who say...") is a liar? Bad look.

What does "human-powered support" even mean? Is this weasel speak for a chatbot or do you mean actual people replying to support claims?

> We offer (human-powered, somewhat obviously?) support via a variety of methods 24/7

> time for us to reply to email is generally a few minutes

These two assertions are conflicting. A few minutes is not nearly enough time for a human to understand and address a support request. So like most companies, it sounds like Stripe is actually running automated support behind a fleshy humanesque interface. Don't delude yourselves into thinking that this counts as "human-powered" support.

Have you ever worked in a support role? A few minutes is plenty for >95% of support requests. Those last few percent can certainly be a doozy though.

Tech support, a long time ago, in which the quick calls were extremely rare. Diagnosing a problem on the customers end or on our end, each took a lot of time.

I've also wasted hours of my life on hold with customer service "people" who, in the best case, take 5 minutes to hear my situation, 15 minutes to check into it, 5 more minutes to apparently not do the thing they said they were going to do, and 0 seconds to forget about all these details after hanging up, meaning I had to go through the same pattern all again the next call. Even in the cases where I've directed reps to look at previous tickets for history, half the time they still can't find it.

I'm sure that there are many people that use support instead of clicking around to the right option on the website, even though that seems abhorrent waste of time to anyone with half a clue. But companies optimizing for this are doing a disservice to everyone that is only using higher touch methods because they're trying to solve uncommon situations.

I can believe that "modern" support only takes a few minutes per the request, because each individual request is itself just a cog in the larger machine. When I spend an hour on the phone, bounced back and forth between 3-4 departments, how long was each of those conversations? Like so many things these days, the problem is with the overall constructive behavior rather than the myopic metrics that have been over optimized.

And don't get me started on those useless freeform voice prompts. Don't make the customer distill their problem down into a curt description, because once again, they're likely calling with a weird problem. Just give me the numeric options that mirror your business structure and I'll pick the most appropriate one, thank you.

Honestly it sounds like you use call or email support as a last resort, which is how I use it too. I poke around on my own, look through the documentation, check out the website, etc.

Many, many, many people do not do that. Ask any retail business what the #1 and #2 calls are and the answer is always #1: "Are you open right now?" and #2: "What are your hours?". I suspect a big chunk of Stripe's email requests are similarly trivial - "where can I see my $whatever report", "can I take amex?", "how much will I pay for a $.95 transaction", etc. that a competent support person can answer in their sleep. Now if we're getting into complicated technical issues, I'm sure those should be taking more time.

I share your disdain for those "just say what your issue is", although the trick to that is usually to say "cancel" and get immediately transferred to someone who will be expected to keep your business.

> I work for Stripe

Bit of an understatement, right?

He is not Patrick Collison.

https://www.kalzumeus.com/

Wrong Patrick: kalzumeus is Patrick McKenzie. Patrick Collison's site is patrickcollison.com, and he's 'pc' on Hacker News.

thats why he shared mckenzie's website; he's the commenter

> Our email addresses are often available through a quick search of HN

Your customer service strategy is really "go to a small internet forum that only some startup nerds know about and find my email address"?

Makes you wonder who the audience for the original comment really is.

Yes, in Stripe’s case. That’s the only way I’ve ever had a big issue successfully resolved. They empower their customer service team with over a dozen ways to say “sorry the system won’t let me solve this” or “Your issue may be unique to you, but since my solution for somebody else’s different issue wouldn’t work for you, I have no power to do anything”.

I doubt it's the general strategy. Patrick might be assuming that frequenters of HN are less likely to be bad actors and people that legitimately are slipping through the cracks.

Customers shouldn't have to bother random employees to get support on critical issues. In general I think Stripe does a pretty good job with support compared to other big tech firms - the inability to reach humans is problem endemic throughout the industry.

It's a shame because a good customer support interaction can create a serious evangelist (hard to quantify but extremely valuable). Maybe Stripe knows this because they put a lot of effort into appeasing the HN community (many developers/entrepreneurs who make processor purchasing decisions). I wish they'd apply this attitude to all their customers.

Don't worry. I made your correspondence public concerning my account from last year so people can see how you handle complaints.

Customers are publicly asking for your answers for your what in their opinion is an ill conceived and/or villainous process. Not answering claiming that it violates your privacy process from which they specifically exempted themselves could also be considered even more ill conceived/villainous.

They are waiting for your answers, it is a public matter as per your clients repeated requests, it affects more people, money is involved, we are all waiting for your resolution and future mitigation actions. Or rebuttal ofcourse.

If I was a customer and Stripe (or any other company) started releasing private correspondence and financial details publicly because someone on the internet claiming to be me complained about the company, and the company took that as implicitly waiving any privacy obligations, I'd be pretty upset. If they said that the prurient interest of their other customers in the details was part of their decision I'd be even more upset!

> Sometimes they are the result of a process operating correctly but coming to a result which someone did not enjoy

So much to unpack here but this is extremely patronizing ("we're not wrong, you just didn't like what we did). "process operating correctly" refers to holding a merchant's money with no reason communicated, and no way for them to get in touch with the company?

I only have one recurring bug bear that seems trivial for Stripe to solve:

Is there a reason you can't get ARN/STAN refund codes via the Stripe API?

I have never been able to get an answer to that.

A business is a structure of people, and my intuition is to achieve healthy dynamics, people should treat it like this kind of parasocial relationship. If you fuck up, I should forgive you as long as you're not an asshole about it. However, it seems like a recurring theme, that modern tech companies don't actually provide support. If that's not in line with the economics of the situation, maybe I'm wrong to hold it against the company itself.

But maybe the cost of this model is hidden from the consumer, and I'd rather pay a bit to have reliability and fairness. I don't know how much I'd have to pay, but I'm willing to guess it's palatable, or at least in the neighbourhood. If we are being tricked by these hidden costs, it's better (if you can) to move on, there are people trying to compete even if it's a difficult industry to break into. Try not to get locked in. If I were running a small business, I'd definitely be discounting crypto payments and putting the extra work into handling whatever regulatory complications arise, vs yelling at the walls that are the infinitely scaling tech companies

Putting my dang hat on. Related:

Tell HN: Stripe brought my business to a dead stop - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21030633 - September 2019

Tell HN: Stripe shut down my 4-year business with no explanation - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28085706 - August 2021

Stripe banned us for payment disputes but we never had a single dispute - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28522784 - September 2021

Stripe Shut Us Down - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28881026 - October 2021

Help HN: Stripe shutting us down with 48 hours notice on a holiday skeleton crew - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29712023 - December 2021

I'm probably missing a lot of threads.

I'm no defender of stripe (or corporations) but the one thing I always find interesting is that a lot of the complaint stories are one sided as the company can't release any information due to privacy. Many times these complaint stories have cases of fraud or other problematic issues and use the public forum to generate publicity. There are cases of people getting caught up inadvertently as well.

What does it matter if it's one-sided? Reading the complaints and the seqience of events give me perspective on whether something like that could happen to me as a platform user.

In the real world, I am not going to get Patio11 to respond as he's doing here. I'd get a CSR rep working off a script. So I don't really care what the CEO's POV is.

Patio11 is one of the most responsive public internet users out there. On twitter, he’s not the absolute most responsive, but he has a standing invitation for anyone to contact him about nearly anything on his website, and he takes it very seriously[0]. I know multiple people at Stripe who have been asked to look into things he’s found out about, and he follows up. I won’t claim that he’s perfect about this, but I struggle to come up with anyone at any company of remotely similar scale that is more likely to do this.

Disclaimer: I’ve somewhat recently gotten to know patio11 a bit, but he’d previously responded to my tweets and replied to my emails, long before our paths actually crossed.

[0] https://www.kalzumeus.com/standing-invitation/

Unless Patio's email address appears in the customer support section of the website, how responsive he is is immaterial. He's posting on HN, not in their ticket management software.

It is not really different from Elon Musk responding to a tweet about Tesla service, but not actually lifting a finger to escalate the ticket.

The one-sidedeness is that the poster could be lying, and Stripe isn't allowed to call them out

Yes but they have the ability to shut down accounts with no grace period or recourse.

A rare case where one-sidedness goes both ways. Except I'm guessing a business owner will lose more sleep over an account termination than Stripe execs will because somebody criticized their service.

They choose not to call out lying. That could be the right choice! Of course if they do call it out they could be sued for slander/libel, but that isn't the same as "not allowed".

uhhh their privacy policy doesn't apply to disputes

https://stripe.com/privacy

it mostly applies to 'personal information'. it applies to transactions if they're 'end customer' transactions (customer's customer). And per 3d in the policy, 'consent' is a basis for data processing, so stripe could ask to comment publicly on the dispute, and then the customer could let them

If you process more than say $10,000 per year, you should have multiple payment providers.

It's doubtful that Stripe is worse than other payment processors, they just process more payments than most other. Payment processors universally suck, partly because they live in fear of VISA and MasterCard. They tend to overreact or have automated systems that will falsely flag account.

Most have okay support, but resolving issues can take time, especially if the credit card companies are involved. In the meantime, you're kinda screwed.

All the stories you linked share the naive assumption that they could just integrate with Stripe and that's payments sorted.

If you rely on just a single company to handle your payment I assume that what you're doing the a side-hustle and that you have another job that pays the bills. You need multiple payment processors and an easy way to switch between them, that is the sad reality of online payment processing. You may have a preferred processor, typically the cheapest provider, but you always have a backup. That also helps you when your primary processors inevitably have an outage.

You could argue that you have the same issue with using a single cloud provider, but their incentives are a little different. Being too heavy handed could cause customers to leave a given cloud provider, costing the provider money. If Stripe isn't heavy-handed enough, they could lose their integration to VISA, costing them their entire business.

10k? That's a tiny amount to have to get a second payment processor. Additionally if you are dealing with physical cards you probably also need a second set of card readers?

Could be $10K, could be $200K, depends on your tolerance for risk.

And, yeah I was thinking online only. If you need card readers you're pretty much stuck with one provider. Where I've seen people get in trouble with their payment processors it has only been online. Terminals are rather difficult to misuse these days.

If you deal with both online and card readers, keep those on separate accounts. That is two account at the payment processor (PSP) and two accounts with the acquirer company.

$10k is pretty small for a physical business ($30/day if you're open every day), so I'd be surprised if you had more than a tablet with a headphone jack card reader. A second reader from another processor isn't that hard to manage (you might want a second tablet in case the first one has issues anyway).

If it was, say, a $30000 charge I could give Stripe the benefit of doubt, but $3300 is a pretty ordinary amount for any retailer. Could be e.g. a laptop sale, or three phones?

When I see Stripe's apology here it will not be enough for me - not at least without a detailed blog post / postmortem.

Until/if that moment happens, I'll regard Stripe as an untrustworthy entity and will recommend doing the same to do anyone I do business with.

Zero tolerance for Google-style algo-decisions and stonewalling.

i will be keeping all of this in mind the next time im making payment processing decisions for small businesses.

> When I see Stripe's apology here it will not be enough for me

I'm actually just starting a business using Stripe for handling payments, and this makes me very concerned.

Is there an alternative service one could use? Is there a way not to give these shady companies power to steal all my money?

In a different HN thread that has no or positive reaction to Stripe, you'd be seeing many praises for Stripe.

For local businesses, perhaps your local bank has a better solution? They will be cheaper (if they use networks other than Visa/Master), and often has zero fees when you withdraw money to a bank account.

Here in my country, for a business that only caters to local customers, I pay about 2% for payments with no fixed fee and no fee for withdrawals, which happens daily. I can directly call the person who handles my queries, and charge backs have never been anything but a few quick clicks with no mind games. All I do is redirect the user to the payment page, and validate the payment upon arrival. The UX isn't as good as Stripe of course, but many of the locals are quite used to that UI anyway.

Don't know what country you are from but guess your acquiring bank gets orders of magnitude less fraud than Stripe does so your bank can afford to take your calls. It boils down to wildly skewed regulatory environment in the US.

They probably have orders of magnitude less revenue with which to pay customer service agents than Stripe has (or would have, if they hadn't delegated their customer service to the machine in the sky).

We see this in many circumstances: centralization and scale are great for efficiency, but bad for resilience.

Check out PastePay. Great service and a human touch! https://www.pastepay.com

On Firefox page is just going into an infinite loop.

Can confirm! Same here with my Firefox on Windows 10.

Same on Edge/Chromium

Happening on FF, Chrome and Edge for me

Strange!? Any chance you could send me request headers you are receiving?

And Safari on MacOS

Same on Chrome 103

Based on your other comment,[0] it sounds like you work for PastePay, which you should disclose if you're publicly endorsing them.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32263465

Oh no! I am sooo sorry. I don’t “directly” work for PastPay but I do work for their sister company. Thank you for letting me know for the future!

Bit of a bug in your page redirects

curl https://www.pastepay.com

curl https://www.pastepay.com/industry/international-merchants

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN"> <html><head> <title>302 Found</title> </head><body> <h1>Found</h1> <p>The document has moved <a href="https://www.pastepay.com/">here</a>.</p> </body></html>

Thanks! Yeah that is not in the page. Not sure how that is getting prepended. I’ll send to support!

It’s fixed! There was an issue handling request from international clients.

Maybe look at Klarna. This is not an endorsement, I've never worked with them, but as a consumer i like using sites that use them for payment.

https://docs.klarna.com/

Checkout Adyen. They’re practically the same.

Have you compared the backends you get to use as a customer? I'd be surprised if Adyen even comes close to Stripe.

Mollie for one is complete garbage.

Imho Adyen is surprisingly good. You should definitely check out their documentation.

You need to do 5,000 transactions or more a month to be considered by Adyen.

Maybe check out Paddle. I’m not affiliated in any way.

https://sumup.com

Just as a counter-anecdote, my one-person SAAS has used Stripe since 2017 and I’ve had an excellent experience with them, including personal customer support. Of course, YMMV.

> Is there an alternative service one could use? Is there a way not to give these shady companies power to steal all my money?

There are many alternative services listed in other comments, but to be clear, every single one of them has the power to do exactly what Stripe did.

There is no way to accept credit card payments without accepting that power to freeze suspicious incoming payments, simply because fundamentally credit card payments are not final and can (and often will) be reversed afterward, and if someone promised to never freeze merchants' funds, every fraudster in the world would come to try out their services, bankrupting them in the process.

I'm not sure of the facts on this case and always need to hear both sides fully before i would comment on them.

But; I have run 4 different businesses on stripe over about 6 years and have never had a serious issue. Yes there have been ups and downs but even with no phone number I would have to rate their support head and shoulders above most. Maybe 24-36 hours for a response, but we always got one, and in most cases it solved the issue.

We are still with them.

You should always, always, have multiple ways to accept payments. Don't rely on one provider, even if they're the greatest processor in the world. Never have a single point of failure for your business.

I'm not an entrepreneur but this approach sounds way too safe to be competitive. IMHO if you're starting a 2-person company then yeah, be bold enough to rely on a single payment provider, and maybe consider redundancy when you have already have a working business with massive reputation.

Single person company here. It's not hard to do, maybe an extra PHP class that abstracts details of different providers, and a separate class implementation on each provider. But you're right that you wouldn't do it for launch day.

It comes in really, really handy when your tiny 1-person company outlives your giant multinational payment provider. Happened to me a few times now, I'm on to my 3rd (4th?) provider in 20 years. There's a tendency for Borg-like consolidation in the payments industry (eg Avangate acquired 2Checkout, then were bought by Verifone). Anyone who lived through the Digital River era will know what I mean.

If you haven't done that code abstraction, imagine that you're suddenly unable to take any payments or make any sales and you are unable to do so until you rewrite all your payment processing code. That can be a long outage.

Having a backup is also useful when a customer's card gets declined by an overly zealous fraud screen at one provider. You can give that customer a "promocode" that changes the logic of your checkout flow and redirects processing to a different payment processor.

And having different processors active also lets you add different payment options (eg maybe your primary processor doesn't support Alipay or Pay With Amazon). But in practice that turned out not to be a good reason for me, Paypal/Visa/MC/Amex/Optima covered almost 100% of customers anyway. For the tiny handful that use checks I can handle that manually.

Square is one option. https://developer.squareup.com/reference/square/payments-api

Flagging a larger than normal transaction is fine. Placing a 120 day hold is very much NOT fine. This should be resolvable within 24-48 hours after the business provides the requisite documentation showing the transaction to be legitimate. The root cause is a completely automated process devoid of any capability for human review like we see with so many online platforms these days.

Documentation can be faked, and 120 days wasn't picked randomly; customers have that long to dispute charges.

It is a tiny amount of money comparatively speaking. They should not put a freeze over a couple of days. If there is no dispute, then their risk drops exponentially. If the amount were much higher, they should just devote more human resources to verifying the charge, and still keep the frozen period low.

> It is a tiny amount of money comparatively speaking.

It's hardly the only charge of this nature.

What's the OP/your alternative?

Oh Paypal? Look up the horror stories there. Or directly work with a legacy provider like FirstData? They will also freeze your account and won't even accept you if you just have just $3k of sales.

Isn't it interesting that credit card processors really like to give crappy customer support and enjoy freezing accounts? Is it because they just attract misanthropic people? If only a caring company that didn't freeze accounts and gave wonderful support could enter, the field would be better. /s

Actually, the problem is super structural:

- Due to payment processing regulations, there is a fixed overhead from taking a small merchant on. (KYC, AML, ensuring you're not selling drugs). This makes tiny merchants incredibly unprofitable to begin with. Legacy providers like FirstData will reject you outright or make you pay fees to onboard. They will also make you fill out pages of paper forms and put the time cost on you to verify you're a legit business.

We as a society have said the gatekeeping features of finance are more important that making sure tiny businesses have access to payment infrastructure. We should change this parameter if we truly cared about this. I suspect we don't.

- Merchants simply race to the CC provider that is easiest to set up or have lowest fees. If you were OK paying a couple of hundred dollars of setup fees to, you know, properly reimburse your vendor for vetting you, or pay 5% fees for a high risk (read: tiny merchant) specialty account, you probably wouldn't have been frozen like this, at least without them calling you.

This is exactly the problem with Google services. Are you paying Google a bunch of money? If you are a high level enterprise account where the fully-burdened cost of a 1-hour customer support call (~$100) is a small part of your yearly net margin to Google, I bet they would take your call.

didn't stripe (maybe it was a competitor, idk) go to a Paypal conference and took like 2000lb blocks of ice with dollar bills frozen in them and drop them off in front of the convention center? And then posted signs everywhere to the effect "tired of paypal freezing your money?"

apparently it wasn't stripe, it was WePay.

FWIW If you want to be able to quickly switch payment providers without stripe (or any provider) holding your customer's payment info hostage, you should consider using a PCI tokenization service like BasisTheory.com

> What's the OP/your alternative?

Reach out to local credit unions or even smallish bank. They usually are middleman to firstdata, chase paymentech etc. But you get a dedicated account rep at cost of nominal monthly fee. Rates usually are competitive often lower than what stripe and paypal offers.

Implement it all yourself and have the UI be awful is not a good solution. Stripe takes about 1 day to set up. Getting a meeting with an interested bank or credit union could easily take 1 month.

I'd take a shitty ui over a shiny ui backed by an unpredictable algorithm any day.

That people would prioritize ui and initial setup costs over payment processing reliability is insane to me.

I am an extremely small account and have a merchant account with Authorize.net. Most of my customers pay by check so I even have some months where I have zero card transactions.

There is a small monthly fee and the processing fee is variable depending on the card. Plain debit/check card under 2%, compared to an airline rewards card that’s more like 4%…

I’m not even eligible for a Stripe account because a large part of my business could be called computer repair and that is explicitly disallowed.

> What's the OP/your alternative?

Square is one. https://developer.squareup.com/reference/square/payments-api

All the alternative entities will also sometimes freeze funds for incoming credit card payments due to some algo-decision flagging them. Both fraud and such anti-fraud measures are an unavoidable part of the credit card infrastructure.

The major difference is that some platforms offer more hand-holding support and some don't, but even those who will talk to you (e.g. your local bank) can and sometimes will refuse unblocking such funds for a prolonged time.

Without taking away from your point, deep in the Reddit comments the OP states Stripe put a hold on the account after billing the sale of a literal company truck through Stripe and not via selling their normal store merchandise.

https://reddit.com/r/smallbusiness/comments/wa1zob/_/ihyq7tl...

As usual, there’s always an undisclosed fact that changes the narrative and explains the ban. Whether this should trigger Stripe’s scorched earth mechanisms is another matter.

Maybe there's more to the story, but executing transactions which do not conform to Stripe's fraud detection model is not an offense that should be punished.

no the entire store account should not be blocked, at least not for a first offense, but I could understand that the transaction is blocked, and that it might that quite some time to figure out what is going on

I think the fact that a company vehicle was sold for the $3300 hardly matters.

> not at least without a detailed blog post / postmortem.

Can they legally give that considering its, most likely, private customer information? If they give detailed information out in a "Detailed" post mortem... isn't that proof that they are an untrustworthy entity?

Just seems to me this is a damned if you do, damned if you don't attitude against Stripe (or, any company in general that has a complaint but can't do a "detailed" public response because, well, that's private information... .. . )

>>>but $3300 is a pretty ordinary amount for any retailer.

Really? There are entire classes of retailers where that would be a truly exceptional event. I don't know if that's true of the OP (post removed), but if their average transaction is $27 or something this would rightly trigger alarm bells. If they are in fact being stonewalled on support that's pretty inexcusable though.

It honestly seems like it would have been fine if they had been like "you tripped our fraud detection, and because the payment was made with a CC money will be held in escrow until the dispute period ends. There's no point in providing documentation because customer can still issue a chargeback."

I don't really disagree, except I think there are a couple different types of fraud Stripe might be on the lookout for in these types of cases:

1. Customer of retailer buys something with stolen cc, retailer is none the wiser, although Stripe has sophisticated techniques that suggest it might be fraud. Probably looks like a very ordinary transaction. e.g. person filling up gas tank with stolen card.

2. Accomplice of retailer buys something with "stolen" cc, retailer in on it. Probably looks like unusual transaction. e.g. person buying 10 laptops, reselling for cash, waiting until retailer gets money from Stripe, does a chargeback, retailer disappears, they split all the cash.

If it's the first case, sure, tell the retailer. If it's the second (or it could be the second, which I think is what might be the case here), you probably maintain radio silence while you investigate.

Edit: also, by all the documentation the OP wants to provide, it sounds like they understand why it could look like the second. If it's the first they should understand there's nothing they can provide that would suggest it's not a stolen card - it has very little to do with them.

They seem to be using stripe to process transactions for a cell phone stores, but the $3300 transaction is for selling a van. I guess this tripped some fraud prevention system.

The OP later clarified that it wasn't a normal transaction. They sold a "cheap company van" using their stripe business account. That seems like a huge liability, since a used car seems extremely likely to cause a chargeback. I don't think dealerships would accept a credit card payment (other than deposit) for this reason.

https://www.reddit.com/r/smallbusiness/comments/wa1zob/dont_...

lmao why. why would you do this. just use square cash.

I enjoy the power of greenbacks, very visceral too.

And one of the comments below that one explains exactly why this is a problem:

"When you sign up for your Stripe account, you had to state what business you were using it for. If you're doing business with your Stripe account that is not related to what you sign up for, then there are reasons why Stripe is now holding your money."

It's listed in Stripe's terms and conditions on Prohibited Items:

"Use of Stripe products to facilitate transactions on behalf of another undisclosed merchant or for products/services that were not disclosed in the merchant's Stripe account application."

https://stripe.com/en-au/legal/restricted-businesses

Makes sense why this would raise a red flag, but it does not explain why Stripe supposedly had extremely shitty customer service where he can't get talk to a person and get this resolved in less than a week or two (let alone 120 days that is actually arbitrarily indefinite).

I'd bet $20 he's been repeatedly told this, and his definition of "can't talk to a human" is "can't talk to a human that agrees with whatever demands he's making".

From the reddit post, the demand appears to be to not hold the money for 120 days, and there's no reason for Stripe to agree to that. He also appears upset that Stripe reviewed his company docs after he violated his agreement with Stripe by selling a car, rather than the cellphones he told Stripe he sold.

When these stories come up, I would like to hear enough context that enables me to understand whether or not Stripe is behaving reasonably. I understand Stripe takes customer privacy seriously, but even so it would be great to get the missing information in a suitably anonymous form.

In this case, my judgment (as a small business that uses Stripe for similar-sized SaaS payments) is that they acted completely reasonably.

A paper-titled transaction seems like it should have one of the lowest chargeback risks. A copy of the purchase and sale specifying "as-is", plus signed title should be pretty clear cut evidence against a chargeback.

It's also not terribly surprising that someone who develops familiarity with one tool will then apply that tool to new situations. The main problem here is the ever-growing financial censorship regime / decommodification push that insists companies should be prying into their customers' business.

Why should Stripe take on the cost of investigating / handling a potential chargeback, even though it might be likely to be resolved in the business (and Stripe's) favor?

When it comes to chargebacks it's not just customer experience (reputation damage due to fraud) and liquidity risks that Stripes or other payment providers are protecting themselves against - but also the actual support cost of handling each chargeback too.

Chargebacks are a possibility with every single credit card transaction. Routine B2C transactions carry the possibility that a card number was used fraudulently, the product was never delivered, or the customer is otherwise unhappy. A one-time payment for a vehicle with a state-documented title carries none of those risks.

So let me get this straight, you're siding in favor of Stripe not doing what Stripe signed up for by becoming a payment processor, is that correct?

Not correct, OP entered into an agreement with Stripe where Stripe would process payments received for the sale of cell phones (and not automobiles).

The item is irrelevant, everything OP said is something Stripe has to take on for every transaction. It's literally the definition of a payment processor.

Most 2nd hand car sales in the US are sold "As-is", so the buyer has very little recurse after the fact. The consensus is when it comes to 2nd hand vehicle sales is buyer beware and you should be taking the vehicle to be checked over by another garage before finalising the purchase.

Last car I purchased (granted a) it was brand new b) I'm in the UK) I purchased the car using my debit card (I kept the recept for ages until it faded cause it was novel to me to have such a large card transaction on a small thermal printed receipt :-P)

So I'm just wondering why a 2nd hand vehicle sale would be a huge liability thats all.

I'd guess that a manual review for the automatically detected out-of-policy transaction wouldn't be prioritized if it's been flagged as a transaction outside the seller's line of business that they mentioned in their agreement with Stripe when onboarding.

I kind of agree - I don't see why manually reviewing a transaction that probably violates their agreement with Stripe should be prioritized by Stripe - even if the transaction would eventually emerge as legit (not fraudulent and not chargeback-able). Because such a manual review would entail a cost to Stripe that is being forced upon Stripe by the seller's actions.

I'm not questioning the idea that the transaction was outside the sellers normal line of business (and tbf to Stripe, would imo be a valid reason to be extra careful with the transaction and may be justifcation for account termination, even if account termination seems a bit harsh for a first time "offensive" imo, but hey, thats ToS for you), just the idea that "used car seems extremely likely to cause a chargeback" thats all.

Yep, FWIW I hope OP gets their money if not their account

The issue is that the credit card company doesn’t necessarily run through a full legal analysis of the seller’s rights in a transaction when the buyer requests a chargeback.

Of course it may eventually all get settled in the seller’s favor in court, but in the meantime the buyer has their vehicle and their money back and it’s on the seller to track them down and sue.

So people tend to do person-to-person used vehicle purchases in cash-equivalents (cash, cashier’s check, etc) so that there’s no worry about the money disappearing after the buyer drives over the horizon.

But that can be said of any transaction via a card. When ever I've receieved a chargeback (iirc its only happened twice in all my years, but I've been lucky) my payment provider has offered me the ability to dispute the charge back which will send the evidence that the transaction was legitimate back to the bank requesting the chargeback.

At which point you would give the documentation showing that that it was a as-is purchase and a legitimate transaction.

But as I said above, this could happen to any card transaction not just used car sales.

It's a large transaction (by most people's day-to-day standards) with usually a random person who you have no business or other relationship with, who takes the car and drives off, hopefully to never be seen or heard from again. A private seller doesn't want to be dealing with credit card chargeback disputes weeks after the fact to get the money they thought they already had.

A used car dealership is better positioned to spend time dealing with chargeback disputes than a private seller, but why bother with extra work when you can just put up a sign that says "no credit cards" and never have to deal with it?

But my inital question was Why would stripe deem a used vehicle sale as a huge liability enough to flag the transaction. Not the seller having reservations about using the card system as a means of payment for the sale.

The person having the issue with stripe clearly initally thought accepting payment via card was fine, the purchaser hasn't issued a chargeback as far as we can tell, the transaction itself was flagged by stripe.

EDIT: just to be clear. or atleast try to be more clear. I'm not against Stripe "holding" on to the cash for a while, it was an abnormal transaction on the account for an item not normally sold by the seller (as they used Stripe as a back up method as their primary provider was down).

I was just asking the question why would a used vehicle sale be deemed as a huge liability for a company selling their old company van to process via the card network (not your avg joe selling a car from home who might not want the hassle - cash is king for as-is sales at the end of the day) because the fact it was a used vehicle was the reason the person I was replying to stated as the prob cause.

EDIT2: Allow me to word it like this. If the company wished to sell off old networking gear and/or servers "as-is" because they were no longer needed. The size of the transaction and the items sold would be unusual for the business to be selling which may cause the transaction to be flagged for further inspection/validation/hold on the funds just to be on the safe side (Thats fine, I get that, they were doing transactions outside their normal operations and tripped some safeguards).

But I just don't see why the item(s) themselves (the network gear/servers) alone would be such a liability to justify the hold, servers and network gear get sold as-is online all the time, so why would a used vehicle be any different? The person I initally replied to was saying that because "a used car seems extremely likely to cause a chargeback". I just don't get the "extremely likely to cause a chargeback" part.

and this right here is why I avoid larger subreddits. the truth is always buried underneath hundreds of poorly thought out knee jerk responses

Welcome to the Stripe support forum! A founder will be here momentarily.

Or the Content & Communications guy.

any day now

You're not wrong: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32263901

Which country can I incorporate in so I can pay the least amount of taxes by using Stripe? Gibraltar?

You typically pay on behalf of the user, in their local jurisdiction, so where you are matters not.

This "rant" is in general, and not related to OPs case

I would strongly recommend to not rely on stripe, their service level has become a joke. I get it, they have a nice API, their system is technically nice in many ways, and they are (or atleast were ~5 years ago) way easier to deal with for developers than the "old" players on the market.

but they are kinda like google, their support is pretty much non existent when things arent on the "happy path", they will GLADLY ignore any inquiry for months if they feel like it, I know this for bitter personal experience.

Yeah, their fees might be slightly lower than the older players, but the old ones you could call if it comes to it, and they will NOT be doing the same shenanigans on a whim, as it appears Stripe do.

Which “old ones” are you referring to more specifically?

Authorize.net is the old one that Stripe always seems to be compared against. And in that race... Stripe has already crossed the finish line before Authorize.net has taken its first step.

i do not want to name specific names, but in my neighborhood theres a couple of big online payment processors that until somewhat "recently" were the ones that 99.9% of online shops used. I imagine it be roughly similar in other places, though perhaps more the bigger the country

Yeah be that as it may - it's still the easiest option that actually works.

And honestly I feel like Stripe actually responds to support tickets that are related to the integrations side in like half an hour.

until it doesnt work. Yeah, they may well be fast in the support of what essentially is a sales support.

Talking to insurance companies is also extremely pleasant, almost giving a vibe of talking to yes-men and shoeshine boys... until its time to make a claim :)

I feel confident most strip customers never have issues, but when you do, you are screwed. They simply do not care at all, they even feel perfectly justified simply not responding for months

Do you have some examples of bad support you had with us? Could you forward them to me at edwin@stripe.com?

> More disconcerting, it seems that anyone who posts about this issue on reddit gets downvoted and teamed up against by established Reddit accounts, that I have to imagine are owned by Stripe. These account have some established reddit history on them, mainly talking about coding in PERL. It's a little sus.

I too am a little suspicious of anyone who codes in PERL

Try doing RegEx with Bash's native engine before you start judging us :(

We’re judging you for the regexes ;)

That’s no joke! I have only ever been able to write successfully portable RegEx in Bash by evaluating using Perl.

Yet another story of Stripe holding big sums (yes 3k can be huge for small businesses) with no proper support structure. Consumers must rely on social networks to get some form of reaction.A $74 billion company has no proper support structure. Just wow.

I'm sympathetic that 3k can be huge for small businesses, but if you can't tolerate a loss of 3k, isn't your business practically doomed?

Maybe your business is not your primary source of income?

What is this, really?

Is this meant to defend Stripe?

What a weird way of looking at things.

A single instance of holding 3k doesn't seem like (or shouldn't be) a significant amount for a small business.

If you're self employed and your monthly income is 5k$ from your business, 3k is a lot and can mean that you're unable to pay bills or food for this month.

If you have no issue losing 3k without any reason, can I have 3k from your business as well?

It's not losing 3k, it's delayed payment

For potentially 120 (+30) days? That's 5 months. Some people have to survive paycheck to paycheck!

A delayed payment must not exceed 2-3 weeks tops.

So can I borrow it for four months? I’ll invest it and give it back but I’ll keep the interest. Oh by the way inflation will have devalued it. Sorry about that.

Won’t make any difference to you as your business is robust, right?

Average annual turnover for 1-9 employee companies in the uk is ~£500k, £3k represents around 8% of their monthly turnover. There's no world where that is insignificant.

???

I still don't get your point.

Even if it is $1, why would someone take what is rightfully mine?

Well then it should be f-ing NOTHING to stripe, and they should shorten their hold time. No doubt they, with all their supposed programming intelligence, can come up with a fancy algorithm that reduces their risk by 99% but releases the money within a week.

Clearly stated by someone who has never run a legitimate small business.

As someone who has run them for decades, it can be a SERIOUS issue at the wrong time. Sure, there are good times where it'll hardly be noticed, and can be dealt with in due course.

However, there are OFTEN other times when $3K failing to show up when expected can create real problems. Cash Flow is key.

To even suggest that it is OK for a company to arbitrarily cutoff funds, merely because it might be resolved sometime next year and "shouldn't be a problem" is massively ignorant and ethically bankrupt.

For your own sake, and for others on HN, read the room. Stop posting such 'hot takes' that only broadcast your bad assumptions based on massive ignorance of the topic and distract from the actual discussion (or if you're just trolling for responses, pls take it elsewhere).

I have run a small business, and I am somewhat familiar with payments infrastructure. From my perspective, it is the room that is ignorant. Have you ever had a customer fail to pay an invoice on time? Have you ever not been reimbursed for expenses in a timely manner? Have you ever been charged the wrong amount? Had a supplier go bankrupt?

If 3k cash flow made or break my small business, then I would've been toast within months of starting. If it's a real business, then 3k breaking the bank means you're over leveraged.

I'm not saying what Stripe is doing is okay. Nobody but Stripe and the OP have enough context to make a fair judgement. It certainly sucks, especially if OP did nothing wrong. If OP feels this is truly unjust, then that's what small claims court is for. But calling it theft when your payment processor withholds funds is an exaggeration. Is it theft if I pay my bills late?

>>Is it theft if I pay my bills late?

Depending on how late you pay them, YES, it is theft, and can be so judged in court.

>>. Have you ever had a customer fail to pay an invoice on time? Have you ever not been reimbursed for expenses in a timely manner? Have you ever been charged the wrong amount? Had a supplier go bankrupt?

Yes, all of those things. And I pointed out that SOMETIMES, they can go by almost unnoticed and dealt with in due course, but OFTEN they can create real problems. It is one thing when they happen by accident, but when it is the result of capricious and hostile decisions by a vendor, it is an outrage.

Your own argument points this out - if $3K is supposed to be so manageable to a small biz, then it is not even a daily rounding error for Stripe, and THEY should give him the benefit of the doubt, and not externalize these costs onto the small biz.

I'd also point out that just the fact that you're justifying paying your bills late as "well it isn't theft" already tells me that you are in the class of ethically-challenged shady operators with whom I work to avoid.

Just because you make a profit does not mean that you are running a sound or ethical business or personally have either of those properties. I'd suggest you do some rethinking.

> It is one thing when they happen by accident, but when it is the result of capricious and hostile decisions by a vendor, it is an outrage.

I couldn't agree more. Which of these is happening with respect to the OP? It's entirely not clear.

It doesn't matter — even if it started entirely as an accident— the vendor's failure to promptly address it, and the fact that that failure is a systematic property of their operation, puts them into the outrageous category.

It's like when you're on hold for 20minutes hearing recordings about long wait timed due to "high call volume".

No, it is not high call volume, it is the damn company systematically understaffing the call center and overloading their workers to extract more money and externalize more costs onto their customers.

We should avoid doing business with them if possible.

I agree it's ridiculous that the vendor has gone radio silent -- in any other industry this would be deadly behavior.

But I've been in weird, regulatory spots before where communication is forbidden pending investigation or an audit. If you get flagged for money laundering, they're not allowed to say "hey we flagged you for money laundering", and possibly not even allowed to say "we're looking into it".

If someone broke into my house and stole my tv and laptop, I'd be pissed even though I can afford to replace them tomorrow.

But this isn't theft? The funds are being held, they are likely to be returned _at some point_. Inconvenient, sure. But theft?

What would you call it if I broke into your house, stole your TV and laptop, and told you "I'm just holding them, I'll return them someday, probably 240 days from now but maybe later".

I'd still be pissed even if they left a note saying that they would return the TV in four or more months.

Two words: cash flow.

That could be the difference between making a biweekly payroll and not for a low volume small business.

Your issue with the analogy is that it doesn't include an indefinite timeline for the eventual return of the property? You might be missing the forest here.

For small businesses, the margins are that thin.

I imagine their business can tolerate a $3k loss, just probably not a $3k theft by their payment provider of all things.

This reads like victim blaming.. "I bet the business was wearing something slutty. If they didn't want the stripe gang to bother them, they shouldn't have been wearing that".

What does a business soundness have to do with stripe robbing them?

It depends on the business model. For a high margin business, it might be fine, but for a business that has slim margins, it could significantly reduce the amount of product they can buy over the next quarter, which could make net margins negative.

Even in a high-margin business, and even if the funds may eventually be returned, having funds not suddenly held by surprise can create real problems. These create real distractions, extra entirely unprofitable work that is only to secure what is already due to you.

This is not acceptable from a critical infrastructure vendor.

That anyone is willing to reveal just how obtuse they are by attempting to justify it is astonishing.

I was specifically responding to the question of whether or not "if you can't tolerate a loss of 3k, isn't your business practically doomed?"

To which the answer is "It depends on the business." These things also don't happen in isolation; most small businesses will be able to survive $3k frozen for a quarter on a good day, but even well-run small businesses have bad days.

Yup! Good days and bad days (weeks/months) — in the good times, all kinds of bad stuff can happen without much impact, and in the bad ones, small things can become real problems, even existential problems.

This says NOTHING about the quality of the business.

Notice that both Tesla and SpaceX are extremely good businesses yet were within weeks of bankruptcy at several points in their history — a bad event at the wrong moment, even though very small percentage-wise, could have tipped them over the edge and they'd be history.

Stripe actively markets to the smallest of businesses.

My church uses Stripe for various fundraising events. It would cause a serious cash flow issue if our payments for the bbq chicken fundraiser were held up for 3 months. We don’t have $3k to pay the chicken guy.

A key feature of Stripe is daily deposits. To me it’s understandable that they will flag transactions to address risk. But there has to be a process to adjudicate quickly.

Watch the Stripe apologist come out in force soon. They’ll brand you as 100% running a crypto CP arms dealing coke selling dark net platform owner because surely YC darling Stripe would never mess up like this. Truth is they are just horrible.

Exactly. The Stripe fans and its nobility will try to keep boosting Stripe's sainthood as if they do no wrong or won't kill your business if you had fraudulent chargebacks (also known as friendly fraud) and will make sure they are only the exception. In reality, you are going to get destroyed by Stripe with such large payments, even if they are not fraudulent.

They actually are killing businesses when they do that and locking their accounts down for months. Even if you have a sum like that for a business or it was an error, well good luck with support as you are not getting that money back and your business will end up shutting down.

That is the dark truth that the Stripe boosters and that the hype squad won't tell you.

You called it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32263429

Unbelievable right, going through someone’s reddit history to try to defend a corporation and do some victim blaming.

There are also apologists for coinbase. I wonder if these are paid "internet agencies" that realize that brand management is increasingly done through social media.

And in typical Reddit fashion, the post was removed for bending the sub-reddit rules. It's frustrating that a popular and highly upvoted post like this is just _removed_.

Anyone have the original content?

Google cache:

https://imgur.com/a/m0EybDN

Pasted below:

TIFU by using Stripe as a payment processor for my small business. I used Stripe for about a year to run a small cell phone store in Denver, CO area. In the case of my business, I never had an issue processing my small payments for cell phones, ranging from a couple hundred dollars up to $1000. All of a sudden, we run a charge for $3300 because our primary processor in my business was down, and we had a large transaction to fulfill. Stripe flagged the transaction and is now holding the money from me for "at least 120 days"

It is one thing to say this is a red flag, fine... I hear you... no problem. a transaction multiple times the size... sure. I get it. However A normal payment processor would then query you for documents authorizing the charge, bank statements, financial statements, some sort of procedure to remedy the issue. Stripe provides NO SUCH METHOD TO RESOLVE these issues.

I am concerned because there are reports of Stripe continuing to add "30 days" to the reserve hold past the initial 120 days, indefinitely. One article detailed a hold that was surpassing its 240th day. Stripe is taking advantage of a lack of regulation in this space to steal small merchant's large transactions. They see a big, outlier transaction and lick their chops, hiding behind KYC and "Fraud prevention" To hold your money indefinitely.

You cannot call Stripe. They do not have a phone number. Their support page on their website has Phone call and messaging grayed out. You can only email. If you email, you get robots. Even in the same email thread, a different "agent" (with a different name and everything) answers each time with not prior knowledge of your history. There are no ticket numbers to your support request; nothing tracking it. The robots respond with what is quite obviously a template response.

If you do a little bit of research about this topic, you immediately see this is a prevailing issue. Reports of Stripe taking up to $31,000 are all over the internet! Again, Stripe gives no manner to remedy this. There is NO ONE you can call. NO ONE you can talk to. More disconcerting, it seems that anyone who posts about this issue on reddit gets downvoted and teamed up against by established Reddit accounts, that I have to imagine are owned by Stripe. These account have some established reddit history on them, mainly talking about coding in PERL. It's a little sus.

In my case, I sent my EIN letter, Sales Tax Receipt, Articles of Org, Statement of Trade Name, Certificate of Good Standing, Bank Statements, Website links, Signed transaction receipts, and anything I could think of to Stripe to review. I just received robot-responses; never got anything cleared up.

I challenge reddit to connect me to a human being at Stripe that can tell me how to resolve the issue. I'm convinced It can't be done. This is a big problem and should be brought to the attention of small business owners, and regulators!

TL;DR : I used Stripe to process my business transactions. They saw a large transaction come through and used their twisted TOS to steal $3,000 from my small business. They use gray area contract loopholes to be able to hold your money from you indefinitely. While you lose out on your working capital and ROI, they collect free interest on your money; potentially never returning it.

At first glance thought this was a case of a zealous flagging system but upon careful re-reading, I realize this doesn't seem to be an isolated case meaning this guy isn't the only one that had this happen.

Which makes me question just how credible Stripe's market valuation is. It's far likely that as we exit the era of cheap capital and expensive debt, the dominoes have begun to fall and companies are doing everything they can to horde cash. Especially when margins are razor thin.

I could be wrong but this is NOT a good sign. Any other payment processor that pulls this will immediately be sued, so why are they risking this knowing that TOS isnt the law?

>Any other payment processor that pulls this will immediately be sued, so why are they risking this knowing that TOS isnt the law?

What are you talking about? PayPal has been doing this, and worse, for a little over 20 years and has a $100B valuation on the public markets.

What do you think I'm talking about?

That didn't stop them getting sued. Up to certain amounts Paypal/any US processor, whill automatically forfeit in small claims court.

So what OP could do is sue Stripe in their civil small claims court and Stripe won't bother sending a lawyer out as doing so would be expensive.

Up to about $10k this should be possible. I've had many success by taking shady companies that screwed me to small claims and won by simply counting on them not showing up.

Do those successes include getting paid?

At least paypal has a customer service number you can call to get in touch with a real person. Not that they are much better as a company.

https://archive.ph/2022.07.28-123810/https://old.reddit.com/...

This started with Google, but we had years and years of stories just like this about PayPal too. We need regulation to prevent companies from throwing all user-account-related decisions to a neural network, and then not providing a way to dispute its output. YouTube and the copyright cartel is another good example. It's ridiculous to have to say this, but this is what you get when you no longer have a democracy (or representative republic) and, instead, have a full-fledged corporatocracy/oligarchy enabled by the Citizens United decision. Companies must be forced to staff up to handle the issues that their technology causes. Twitter and its moderation/banning/cancelation-of-accounts comes to mind as well. You can tell me that they have 10's of thousands of people working in this area, but it's clearly not enough. I'm sorry, but FAANG companies all LOVE to brag about how much money they make for their owners. They should be forced to spend some more of it on making sure they address flagrant mistakes in their automation systems.

Aaaaalllllllll of that aside, MOST of the time, with these kinds of stories, there's usually more to it than is being said.

This isn't surprising to me, and I don't think less of Stripe for doing this. It appears everybody is jumping to conclusions. Saying Stripe is "stealing" is laughable.

There is a tremendous amount of fraud abound. Payment service providers like Stripe sit in between businesses and credit card companies, who proxy banks, who proxy customers.

Banks are pretty solid, as are credit card companies, so the transitive nature of these transactions means Stripe proxies customers. A significant feature of modern payment processing is the ability to reconcile fraud for either party, but typically these measures are structured in a way to protect the customer.

For example, you buy a $3000 computer and the business goes under before they can ship it to you. It's likely you can get your money back by calling your credit card company but it's not like they're being generous. What happens is exactly what is happening here:

Money is held until it can be safely cleared without dispute; money is clawed back from merchant bank accounts and held until it can be cleared (there is practically no limit to what can be clawed back out of your merchant bank account).

If this makes you uncomfortable, don't deal with credit card companies, and only take cash. It doesn't matter who your payment processor is, this can and will happen with any of them.

I'm sympathetic to the OP here, but from a business perspective, the fact that this is such a significant event is a red flag. Shit happens -- your credit card could be stolen, you could be robbed, you could be defrauded -- it's prudent to have a safety net for when such things occur. And while realistically such safety can be unreasonable to secure, that just signals to me that so much of society is living at the edge of a knife. It's easy to be angry at Stripe here, but I believe that's misguided.

I don't think Stripe holding money is the problem here. The problem to me seems that there is no support to be reached at Stripe to dispute their decision or get a human to answer. I agree that OP's business doesn't seem that healthy if $3000 are such a big problem, however that doesn't make Stripe's non-existing support any better.

I've dealt with Stripe support and it's been... fine? Good even? I can only assume that if they've gone radio silent there's a reason. I'm not convinced Stripe is acting in bad faith, as shitty as this is. (Unlike, say, PayPal, who is notorious for shit like this).

At least one instance I'm aware of has to do with anti-money laundering regulations, where it can be disallowed to communicate regarding a pending investigation, but obviously I can't speak to if that's happening here.

I'd be very interested to know what your issue was that they helped with. I'm 0 for 3 (potentially 1 is fixed now, 1 fixed itself, and the last I gave up on). Unless your issue is trivial you will be thrown in limbo and go days/weeks without a reply.

> I can only assume that if they've gone radio silent there's a reason

This is the fundamental mistake made when dealing with these corporations. They do not deserve the benefit of the doubt, but beyond that, any customer service system that has a heavy bot presence and outright removes inconvenient (for them) points of contact should be assumed negligent and suspect by default.

Why do you assume they're holding the money for legimitate reasons? I count as much more likely they're just fucking up and have no idea or don't care enough.

Plenty of example of this, event amongst top tech companies: see the clusterfuck that is youtube copyright claims for instance.

Every time there are automated flaggings, there are fuckups. We can accept it if there's an efficient way to challenge, but that's not happening. Stripe/Google doesn't care and/or it would hurt the bottom line too much.

Also if credit cards company are much better at this, I don't see why Stripe gets a free pass for sucking.

All of the companies are needlessly inviting the wrath of regulation on themselves. Sooner or later (probably later) a political consensus could emerge to require detailed human review, subject to a regulator intervening on any/every case, whenever they keep more than $X for more than Y days.

I suggest that it might be smarter for all of these firms to do a better job, voluntarily, of providing human interaction and review - to forestall such regulation as long as possible.

What is frustrating for me and most of the folks here are the robot emails.

Give me a effin proper response. I am your customer!

Federal law requires that banks hold you harmless from certain perils. Your risk for the $3000 computer is limited to $50.

Money is not held until cleared. Credit cards are a cash flow business and settle very quickly, but contract terms allow the credit card to recover chargebacks or other losses by nabbing future cash flows.

My guess is the issue that triggered this is that a big transaction is a risk as a chargeback may not be recoverable as there is no baseline level of activity. Or… they suspect that the merchant is getting a cash advance outside of the terms of the contract.

Other than the lack of process to resolve the hold, I always reserve judgement on stuff like this as you never get the full story.

Stripe responded to a Twitter post about it, Reddit helped retweeting it.

https://twitter.com/GenosAtHonda/status/1552588035077726208

This type of canned response is so repulsive, I imagine the only reason why it might be a good idea to send things like this is because it's less offensive than nothing and just as expensive.

And they didn't help whatsoever

Wow, that's an insane way to treat customers. No explanation of any kind. I guess I won't be using Stripe anymore.

https://twitter.com/stripe/status/1552613789706567680

I'll wait with bated breath.

> You can only email. If you email, you get robots.

Their dev support on discord is S-tier, but every now and then some issue has to be moved to email support; where it dies. It always takes months for something to be resolved, if at all.

My only consolation is that every other provider is just as terrible.

> Their dev support on discord

This is also a red flag

Stripe is developer centric. Discord has a lot of developers in their community.

I don't really like Discord, but i must admit it is a smart choice.

Right, but what if my mother wants to start a business? She's not a developer. Should she avoid Stripe?

What kind of company builds itself as only being a product usable by developers? We're a small niche market at best.

I would hope your mother is hiring a developer to build her payment infrastructure if standard over the counter solutions like those iPhone swipe attachments don't work for her.

A normal forum would be better in most ways.

> Stripe is developer centric.

What kind of excuse is that? I've seen so many small businesses using Stripe. I doubt all their owners are developers who are comfortable with Discord.

>it is a smart choice

For the customer?

It could be worse. Sorbet is on free Slack, which means any discussions older than a month or two are deleted.

Incredibly amateur hour if true.

Serious question: what's the alternative?

I’ve seen Discourse work pretty well for public-facing support.

Paying for Slack so messages don't get lost?

Zulip is pretty good for this.

By default, you have a linear, IM-like UX, but it is trivial to fork conversations on specific topics.

There's these things called "forums" that we used to use...

Using Discord for support is a major red flag.

As opposed to IRC? Slack?

Discord has excellent moderation tools, is economical and relatively user friendly (compared to IRC). If you desire a public space for your community to engage with you in real time, I'm not aware of a better alternative.

What about good ol' forums? Indexable by search engines and proper moderation tools that have stood the test of time.

Like a GitHub issue tracker? The concept of forums is not lost on me, but I think the point of a chat service solves different problems.

Discord is not a public space. It's not indexed by search engines.

No, you're supposed to use the abysmal Discord search feature to find your question among a billion chat messages, or post it in one of the 150 channels we have for each topic under the sun. No sorry, wrong channel. Oops, your message got lost somewhere in the thousands of messages we receive per day.

Discord support is hell on Earth.

What’s wrong with using email or Intercom?

Nothing. It would be preferable to Discord, in fact.

My history might be a bit fuzzy, but that exists in lineage from when Stripe had an IRC channel for dev support.

This is Stripe opting to go to where a core customer segment (developers) live. Discord sucks but from a business perspective it’s smart. You wouldn’t use their Discord chat for just any issue.

> My only consolation is that every other provider is just as terrible.

My experience with Authorize.net support was really good. Their tech stack/api was absolutely archaic, but you could talk to real humans.

And the thing about their tech stack is its old..but absolutely workable. They have examples in pretty much every language, decent documentation, and support. And they are very slow to sunset things because their customers are slow moving traditional businesses. So code you write for a customer may work without tweaking for 4, 5, or even 10 years.

In my case, 20 years. No change in API calls in that time.

Very few errors, except in the early days. I hate them because of the complexity of the solution (I needed a relationship with a separate "payment processor" that has changed names/systems/owners five times in those 20 years) but I have had few problems with withholding etc.

But my monthly charges and individual charges are very consistent, and chargeback rate very low (but not zero).

At the time I championed switching to Stripe. If I’d known then what I know now I’d have never done so.

This looks really good. Apart from anything else, they have a fraud detection tool that you can configure to match your own requirements, and can control yourself what happens to payments when filters are triggered:

https://www.authorize.net/en-us/resources/our-features/advan...

I have always been able to get a service rep on live chat within 5 minutes... which is literally a "Live Chat" button on their contact page not even hidden.

Note this is different than the Discord dev chat which is for technical questions.

Once I get live chat it may take a day or two to resolve but if it takes longer I just hop on live chat again and pester them until it's escalated.

>Their support page on their website has Phone call and messaging grayed out. You can only email. If you email, you get robots.

According to the OP.

But as you can see in the Reddit comments, there are people posting screen shots showing that is absolutely not true. Which leaves 3 options:

1. The UX was confusing and the OP couldn't find those options.

2. Stripe somehow has some logic that disables it specifically for that person or that person's region.

3. The OP didn't actually try and is lying in their post.

1 and 3 are more negative reflections on the OP than Stripe. And for 2 I'd need more details.

I saw this in the replies to the comment:

> The "chat" and "have us call you" options get greyed out once they have frozen your account.

But from my own experience, that is wrong. Also OP didn't say their account was frozen just that the money from that particular transaction was being held.

There's someone else down thread here who says that they've had the call/email greyed out on their Stripe account as well.

>Stripe somehow has some logic that disables it specifically for that person

I'm not sure why you wrote this as if it'd be a grand technical challenge to implement. Locking-out specific features based on X criteria is pretty damn common.

I don't particularly care in any case, I just had the impression that you might of missed that specific line when you wrote your original comment regarding the short wait times you've had when calling support.

Edit: Seems like you saw the other post as well.

>But from my own experience, that is wrong.

Well, from my vantage point I see 2 people claiming it gets greyed out and 1 person (you) claiming it doesn't. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

> I'm not sure why you wrote this as if it'd be a grand technical challenge to implement.

No, I meant that as literally "somehow" as in "has some logic to"... no implication of difficulty. But I can see how that may sound that way.

> Well, from my vantage point I see 2 people claiming it gets greyed out and 1 person (you) claiming it doesn't. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

3 people is not a large sample size. I did notice an issue where it is grayed out until you select a topic. Which may be partially at play here (which is a UX issue).

My accounts got temp locked because they needed to verify some KYC information. Maybe there is another more severe level of lock that does gray it out. But then I'd need to know way more details about what Stripe thinks the OP did to get that lock before I start blaming Stripe or the OP.

>Maybe there is another more severe level of lock that does gray it out.

FWIW I asked upthread to a Stripe person, and they do apparently grey out the support/call buttons in certain situations.

As another Redditor commented:

> The "chat" and "have us call you" options get greyed out once they have frozen your account. They do not allow such users to have them call. You can only receive a call if they have not frozen your account.

I suppose you can create a second account and then contact support from there, but they'll probably flag you for ban evasion and make your situation worse.

> I have always been able to get a service rep on live chat within 5 minutes

That's neat and all but try to get them to actually fix anything. They will 100% move you to email once you explain your issue (assuming it's not "I can't find my password" or equally basic) and then you will be in limbo. I hope you enjoy no one responding to your ticket for days/weeks at a time even after you provide them with all the info they ask for.

You can try contacting Edwin ( edwin@stripe.com ) - he's often on HN and has unstuck quite a few Stripe issues for me and other HNers.

I appreciate your comment but this is a clear example their internal flow is fucked up.

You are correct, but the aim of the reddit post / this post is to get the problem solved. Billing is a complicated subject, and fraud is even more complicated.

A well placed, polite email to C-level staff often fixes the problem, but can draw attention to flaws in the support flow - or validate a customer-hostile standpoint, at which point you can make an informed decision about where to place your business.

Stripe is going the way of PayPal it seems. Many people learned this lesson the hard way with PayPal now they will learn it with Stripe I guess. You have no real recourse when these companies decide to steal your money and their incentives are very much to do so as they get to hang onto it for extended periods.

I don't think it's a coincidence that this happened as we go into economic downturn and layoffs. Too bad they're not a public company, if they were I would be shorting their stock right now.

First thing I thought. PayPal is known to pull this kind of moves, now it’s Stripe’s turn to steal some money “for security.”

Stripe like paypal is not to blame in this story. The problem is the credit card payment standard. Transactions can be charged back up to 180 days. This means that by giving the merchant the money right away, Stripe runs the risk that a transaction will be charged back and that the merchant wont have fund to cover it.

Stripe like any other processor runs an algo to determine the risk profile of each transaction to decide if you get the money immediately or not. If you have a sudden high ticket transaction, the odds this will be charged back are much higher. This is why they freeze that money up to 180 days.

It sucks, but it is how the credit card system works. Someone has to cover the chargeback risk.

the solution isn't to blackhole your customer for 180 days.

it's to provide a human being to talk to or ask for clarifying information

I guess the argument then becomes one of scalability.

If you can't scale customer support, you can't scale period.

Sounds like they also closed the account as well.

Temporarily freezing the funds is understandable, just long enough to ask for clarification or documentation from the merchant. Instead they decided to go the Google route of ignoring your customer because "algorithm said no".

A quote from Patrick Collison from one of the last "HN support threads":

"We actually have an ongoing project to reduce the occurrence of these mistaken rejections by 90% by the end of this year. I think we'll succeed at it. (They're already down 50% since earlier this year.)"

At this point it is obvious that he/his PR staff are lying.

The only question is: What are some good Stripe alternatives?

> At this point it is obvious that he/his PR staff are lying.

Without taking any stance on the problem at hand: How does an N=1 sample make it "obvious" that a 50% or 90% reduction has not taken place?

> What are some good Stripe alternatives?

Square is one. https://developer.squareup.com/reference/square/payments-api

Had a similar issue during lockdown where we had more orders than usual. Stripe kept the money for 3 months. Contacting them for support is a non-existent (robot replies). Hope a competitor is taking notes to all this.

>You cannot call Stripe. They do not have a phone number.

Not sure whether this person was specifically locked out or something, but I've had consistently good experience with Stripe's phone support. As they note email (and chat) are a joke, but phone reps are highly knowledgeable and have quickly resolved my issues.

According to the reddit thread, when your account is locked, the ‘Chat’ and ‘Give me a call’ options get grayed out.

But is that, you know, true? The HN front page gives a stunning amount of credulity to unverified stories from random people on social media.

I do not know. I only state what the original author posted.

Maybe someone is willing to create a Stripe account and trigger a block to test it.

Edit: another thread 3 years ago mentions the same: “I tried to contact support by chat or phone, but it seems that when they suspend an acct, they block your ability to contact support by any method except by email...” [0]

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21031665

Stripe folks have confirmed that they will only allow certain support channels when certain situations come up (I'd imagine certain types of assumed fraud would merit async channels only, etc.).

It's just a crazy coincidence that they also won't tell you the underlying truths to the situation that would let you understand why they aren't letting you call them. Surely they are reasonable and not just standard corpo tech negligent customer support. Surely.

I have no idea how companies like Stripe and to a great extent Revolut made it to forefront of banking. They are Uber of banking industry. And have done shady things. As the time passes and VC money runs out; these companies will implode

As someone who’s worked there: stripe won’t. Everyone in the company can see the business metrics. People wouldn’t be staying if that were true.

I have a close friend, working for Uber since 5-6 years now. I don't think he ever expected company to engage in anything shady. SWEs are higher up than service counter staff but in the game of business they are not far from being expensive pawns. Sorry

So he started 5-6 years ago, after Uber was already caught doing shady shit? Does not compute.

I don't think Uber was ever particularly transparent, whereas I believe the other poster was implying that all Stripe employees can see revenue, profit margin, etc. plainly, which seems very uncommon for a non-public corp.

I don't remember their exact date. It's been a long time. They joined before IPO. My point was it was fairly long

Stripe has an excellent developer experience which makes it easy to integrate it online.

I think people forget how much effort it took to accept credit cards at the time Stripe launched, too. Not just technical, but having to get a merchant account, which would be through a bank, who'd want to sell you a rented point-of-sale and a contract for a minimum amount of fees per month, and a rate hike for being a "risky online business".

Well, when it launched, but few years down the road Stripe was already in a class of his own on the topic of developer experience compared to their competitors.

Yeah, I tried to leave the Stripe platform for lower fees and... well I'd give just about anything to go back in time and stop myself from doing something so stupid. Also in the end the %/per-transaction fees were barely lower AND they had a TON of hidden fees/charges.

The processor lied about fees/rates, API/docs were absolute shit (and they were on the better end of what else I've seen but compared to Stripe they sucked), and I had to go through 3-5 video calls before they gave me API keys for even the dev environment. Then you get to enter the world of monthly charges on your account, minimum fees (if you don't pay enough in fees you have to pay the difference, for me it was $35 in fees minimum which doesn't work well for seasonal things or in-house test accounts), PCI compliance (fuck that form), even worse service, and slimy sales people.

Even with Stripe's absolutely terrible customer support (that I've experienced first-hand multiple times) I'll stick with them over dealing with the alternatives.

Have you tried Square? https://developer.squareup.com/reference/square/payments-api

Square holds payments, too. Same 120 day window, too, because that's how long Visa, Mastercard, and Amex give customers to initiate a chargeback.

https://www.eseller365.com/square-holding-funds-business-120...

> Like other payment processors, we periodically review your sales to assess the risk of payment disputes. In a recent review of your account, we determined that we have to hold a portion of your transfer in a reserve balance. Beginning <redacted>, 30% of each transaction on your Square account will be stored in your reserve balance, and will be released 120 days after the original transaction date.

I think an interesting meta take is the question why payment processors employ these draconic fraud protection mechanisms in the first place.

I think it boils down to the prevalence of using simple magnetic stripe credit card payments. While chip-and-PIN or Google/Apple pay are of course also subject to fraud, not having even a first factor (pin/password/fingerprint) makes card copying and theft viable in the first place.

I have no data, but I'd bet that you get substantially less fraud if you only process transactions with a first security factor, and you can probably still improve on that with a second factor (e.g. text message to authorize).

As a consumer, I have to deal with declined transaction frequently (I moved which creates a mess for ZIP based "auth", another cause is using cards outside my home country); I find the whole situation hugely frustrating.

You either die a promising startup, or live long enough to see yourself become just another Paypal.

One thing stripe still has going for it is that it has a great user experience, both for businesses and developers. PayPal can't say that

I have used Paypal almost daily as a user for more than a decade and it's never failed for me either.

Stripe originally was great because they had a simple API, developer-oriented focus, and IIRC cheaper than Paypal. And I bet better customer service because they were smaller.

Nowadays it's not cheaper, the customer service isn't any better, and my snarky comment isn't too far off from reality.

One way to get a response, and a better than 120 days response, from Stripe is to file a complaint with the attorneys general offices of your state and the state that Stripe is incorporated in.

I feel this. Today many people got this message from Apple (apparently wrongly): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32260733 which would've resulted in Apple holding a lot of money from me which is business critical.

For payment processing, something like this without a means to appeal quickly shouldn't be allowed. It endangers companies and the livelihood of many people.

In the EU most countries have a financial sector regulator. If this happens in the EU and a payment provider does not respond contact them as it will light a fire under their seats.

am I the only person here eagerly scrolling through the comments to see if "pc" chimes in??

Possibly. You can just check his comments to see that he hasn't as of this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=pc

http://web.archive.org/web/20220728124858/https://old.reddit...

For anyone who is looking for the original story, which has been removed

If I remember correctly this is actually normal for CC processing, because the transaction is so much higher then usual, they are holding aside the money in case it gets charged back. Not like PayPal where they silently ban the account and money disappears forever, could understand it being pain if your a small business.

This is not my experience of Stripe. I've found their support has always been responsive and awesome over email.

https://web.archive.org/web/20220728105345/reddit.com/r/tifu...

As someone who’s recently looking into using stripe for a small business, this makes me hesitant. And this isn’t the first time I have read this type of thing about them. Google also does this sort of stuff with canned robot responses for play store developers.

https://teddit.net/r/tifu/comments/wa230m/tifu_by_using_stri...

This is now on the front page of Reddit. Someone at Stripe PR is going to have a bad morning.

They'll soon be here saying sorry, CEO will be in touch with you and will sort this out immediately.

Count to three for someone from Stripe appearing here, apologizing and fixing the issue.

Well, fixing this specific case does not equal to fixing the issue in general.

The morale of the story is that you should not behave like Google if you aren't as big as Google...

> you should not behave like Google

I’d end it there.

Yup, how many times have we seen it here on HN alone where someone has posted “Google nuked us from the Play store and won’t talk to us about it” only to be returned after the post hit the front page?

People shouldn’t have to go viral on social media to get decent customer service just because “computer says no.”

It’s interesting that most are taking the Reddit post at face value, even though if the transaction were by a fraudster, the fraudster would probably have no compunction about lying on the internet.

I couldn't read the story, as it has been deleted from reddit and maybe I am missing something here, but why don't these companies offer reliable one-time human support for a suitable fee?

https://archive.ph/2022.07.28-123810/https://old.reddit.com/...

I’ve heard stories like this about PayPal, I have a friend who claimed Chase Bank bankrupted his business in the 90s …

I’m thinking all financial players sometimes do stuff like this?

I've definitely never encountered many automated responses to their e-mail support. Definitely I've hit support people who don't know much beyond basic troubleshooting, and it's pretty much impossible to get escalated to the point where you're talking directly to a dev through support@, but generally not canned responses.

(That might be based on our usage maybe, we're a OK sized Connect partner)

A lot of organizations route suspended accounts through an entirely different support team focused on fraud. That team is often not a management priority, either.

Maybe bunch of small claim court cases could straighten them out? If Stripe did something like that to me I would certainly pursue this. My own experience is - I have a web store that sells my software products (we use both PayPal and Stripe) for many years. Size of transaction ranges from $10 up to $7000 (as far as I remember) So far there were no any significand holds / delays.

FWIW it's totally possible to talk to someone at Stripe. We got someone on the line and successfully negotiated their fees.

We're now using a 2nd payment processor that handles a type of payment unavailable at Stripe and they're just garbage compared to Stripe's backend / control panel system, which is phenomenally.

Excellent company as far as I'm concerned.

I built the Stripe integration for a medium sized online retailer, and our experience wasn't quite as good as this. Our COO could get them on the line to negotiate our contract, but our engineers struggled to get useful answers out of them via email and our account manager often took weeks and multiple pings to respond to product questions.

I have had amazing success chatting with their engineers on IRC, but it's fairly unofficial, they're limited in what they can do when things concern user data, and I don't think most customers should need to get on IRC for support.

As for competitors though, I've heard from a customer "Stripe treat taking payments as a business, $competitor treats taking payments as a hobby". On balance, while not perfect, I'd probably choose Stripe again, but I'd get an account manager ASAP and try to build a good relationship with them rather than treating it as a black-box SaaS product that I don't need to interact with humans to use.

I believe that Stripe EOL'd IRC support when Freenode imploded. They've got a Discord, but I've heard that it's harder to engage with engineers there than IRC because of the volume of "general support" chatter.

It's called placing a reserve on the account and it is something any payment processor will do to a merchant account.

Sure, and OP understands that. But, there’s apparently no effective resolution process, especially one involving a human.

What would you suggest the OP do to resolve their issue?

There is no "resolution" to the situation. His account has a reserve on it and it may stay there for the entire lifetime of the account. He has to just deal with it.

Reserve isn’t much of a problem. Never getting your funds is different.

Yes banks regularly seize money from accounts for hundreds of days and refuse to discuss it with paying customers /s

Actually, they do. And they will hold reserves on accounts for many months to over a year if they suspect it may be fraud. The acquiring bank does this because the risk of a chargeback is high and their ability to recoup the funds may be diminished with a small account.

I've been in high risk merchant processing for almost a decade. The merchant may never get the money back until they close the account completely and wait half a year for a check in the mail.

A reserve is to make sure that the funds are there to cover the check in the event it may bounce. Checks do not take 120+ days to complete.

Credit card chargebacks can be initiated a half a year or more after a transaction has occured so yes, the reserve is in place to reduce the risk of losing money of the merchant bank from this event.

Fintech startup law: Every payment provider is becoming PayPal due to risk and regulatory pressure.

I recommend Square, it works great for my mom's business. https://developer.squareup.com/reference/square/payments-api

> used their twisted tos to steal three thousand

> you cannot call stripe ... the robots respond

solid problem statement on what next gen tos tools need to solve and also great alliteration in here

"You cannot call Stripe"

Ironic since Stripe requires a phone number to have an account and that phone number is required to be stated on the transaction receipt.

Does anyone have any suggestions of what to use instead? Lots of "don't use Stripe", but I'd love to know what the alternatives are!

For a hobby project of mine I use Gumroad.

The integration on my website is bad... But payments and payouts have been solid so far.

https://help.gumroad.com/article/260-your-payout-settings-pa...

Gumroad itself uses Stripe, it seems so if Stripe decides to hold funds it's likely Gumroad will just forward that experience to you.

Yeah but AFAIK it's only for payouts and not for charging to the end customer.

Square is one option. https://developer.squareup.com/reference/square/payments-api

More and more it feels like the legal department is the only reliable way to get in touch with a human being. This sounds like a job for small claims.

Post was removed, here is a snapshot

https://archive.ph/a3GWU

This is a case for the state attorney general (or equivalent legal authority wherever this person lives).

A solution could be to have a backup account for cases like this

How much does Stripe charge for this service?

Say you are a vendor who sells 1000 products a month for $100 each. So $100,000 in monthly revenue, split into 1000 payments.

How much would you pay to Stripe per month?

And how quickly can you move incoming payments away from Stripe?

Unless you have a bulk deal (which you won't even at 1.2M/annual, though you are close IIRC) you are paying 2.9% + $0.30 (also assuming you aren't using any extras).

> How much would you pay to Stripe per month?

So ($100,000 * 0.029) + (1000 * $0.30) = $3,200 / mo

> And how quickly can you move incoming payments away from Stripe?

Not an easy question. Depends a lot on your payment stack and how you implemented Stripe. I can say that for myself it took ~100 hours to fully move everything over (both online and in-person payment system) as a solo dev. I ended up moving back to Stripe because the alternatives suck even more, or at least the one I picked.

> I ended up moving back to Stripe because the alternatives suck even more, or at least the one I picked.

Did you try Square? https://developer.squareup.com/reference/square/payments-api

OP’s post was deleted, can anyone share what they wrote?

https://archive.ph/a3GWU

The post was removed. Anyone have a cached copy?

And they say Bitcoin has no use case

removed. anyone got a cached copy?

And Reddit mods removed it...

So this seems like a good time to tell my Stripe story. Let me preface this by saying I attempted to move to a different card processor late last year/early this year and despite 100+ hours of coding to fully integrate with them (and add features that were missing compared to our Stripe integration) I had to drop them due to what can only be described as lies about their rates (yes, I should have gotten this in writing instead of just over the phone but I was naive). All that said I had <1 week to switch back to Stripe before preorders started for the event and it was a breeze. Stripe has it's problems but I still think they are the best game in town.

Now for my Stripe issue. Around the time I dropped the other payment processor I bought some Stripe M2 readers (Part of "Stripe Terminal" for in-person payments). At the same time I purchased a "Stripe Terminal Test Card" to use in the test environment. They have a simulated reader but I always prefer to use the same hardware as production to get a better feel for how it all works.

The readers arrived and so did the card but for some reason I could not get the card to read, I kept getting back an error code of "6" [0] telling me that the card could not be read. If I scanned a real card it would scan and then fail when trying to auth the payment (understandable, I was in the "test" environment) but to me this proved the reader was working. I did some testing in "live" and all my cards were read/charged without issue. I opened a ticket with Stripe on May 6th.

I had a similar "new rep every message" as the person in this Reddit post and my ticket would often go days/weeks without response (other than me begging for help). I followed every single instruction they sent, I provided all the debug info they asked for, I shot 4+ videos of the issue, nothing. Around June 2nd (almost a month after starting this process) I complained on Twitter and Stripe Support reached out (this did nothing, it might have gotten me a useless reply on the ticket but no real help). A Stripe employee also reached out directly to me via DM and we started an email conversation resulting in them just sending me 5 Stripe Test Cards to see if maybe it was just my card that was broken. About the same time Stripe sent another M2 reader and another Test Card (Note: in the interim I bought 16 readers for my event and had tried multiple of them to no avail, I was pretty sure it wasn't a problem with the reader and told them as much).

I got all the new hardware and recorded a long video of me testing 3 M2 readers and 5 Stripe Test cards in every combination 3 (readers) x 5 (cards) x 2 (methods, dip/tap). I used their sample app and their sample backend (a ruby app running in a docker container) just to rule out any of my code. Same error every single time.

I reported my results to both the employee and my support ticket and got no help. Support didn't reply, the employee talked about sending me card they had on their desk that they knew worked but that conversation petered out and I didn't want to bug someone who was going out of their way to help me. 10+ days would go by and I'd beg and plead for help in my support ticket with no reply, this repeated multiple times.

Finally, on July 25th, 3 days ago, almost 3 months after starting this journey, Stripe replied to my ticket:

> We have figured out that some of our Terminal physical test card inventory did not work.

No. Fucking. Shit. This is something I suggested about a million times. All my cards had the same serial/batch/something number on the back and I had speculated it could be a bad batch and asked them to send me an opened/used card that they knew worked and/or check the number on a working card, they ignored all of this.

They sent me 3 replacement cards and they sit next to me right now on my desk, unopened. My event is in 2 days and I don't have the time/energy to test them right now. All my energy is on testing the full setup on production but I might lose my mind if these are broken as well. My curiosity just got the better of me and I opened a card and the numbers on the back are different so that gives me some hope (all 7 cards I got from Support/buying myself had the same number).

This is only 1 instance of shitty Stripe support, I have 2 others that I won't get into right now. I still love their docs/sdk/dashboard but I really wish their support was better.

[0] https://stripe.dev/stripe-terminal-ios/docs/Enums/SCPReaderD...

I work at Stripe and I'm terribly sorry for what happened here. I have a Terminal test card that I use and that I know works. I can overnight it to you so you have it before your event. Could you let me know your address at edwin@stripe.com (or DM me on twitter at @edwinwee)?

We're investigating right now what happened here. I'd also like to dig into your other instances of shitty support—could you forward those to me?

I'll forward all instances to you. I have 3 cards from support that I haven't tested yet but look like they have a different batch number so I'm hoping they will work. I won't need them now since all my testing is happening in live but I appreciate the offer.

Alternatively, I use Stripe as a payment processor for my small business and it works flawlessly.

Take them to attribution?

Did you mean arbitration?

The post was deleted by the subreddit moderators so I hope HN don't mind me reposting it here:

> I used Stripe for about a year to run a small cell phone store in Denver, CO area. In the case of my business, I never had an issue processing my small payments for cell phones, ranging from a couple hundred dollars up to $1000. All of a sudden, we run a charge for $3300 because our primary processor in my business was down, and we had a large transaction to fulfill. Stripe flagged the transaction and is now holding the money from me for "at least 120 days"

> It is one thing to say this is a red flag, fine... I hear you... no problem. a transaction multiple times the size... sure. I get it. However A normal payment processor would then query you for documents authorizing the charge, bank statements, financial statements, some sort of procedure to remedy the issue. Stripe provides NO SUCH METHOD TO RESOLVE these issues.

> I am concerned because there are reports of Stripe continuing to add "30 days" to the reserve hold past the initial 120 days, indefinitely. One article detailed a hold that was surpassing its 240th day. Stripe is taking advantage of a lack of regulation in this space to steal small merchant's large transactions. They see a big, outlier transaction and lick their chops, hiding behind KYC and "Fraud prevention" To hold your money indefinitely.

> You cannot call Stripe. They do not have a phone number. Their support page on their website has Phone call and messaging grayed out. You can only email. If you email, you get robots. Even in the same email thread, a different "agent" (with a different name and everything) answers each time with not prior knowledge of your history. There are no ticket numbers to your support request; nothing tracking it. The robots respond with what is quite obviously a template response.

> If you do a little bit of research about this topic, you immediately see this is a prevailing issue. Reports of Stripe taking up to $31,000 are all over the internet! Again, Stripe gives no manner to remedy this. There is NO ONE you can call. NO ONE you can talk to. More disconcerting, it seems that anyone who posts about this issue on reddit gets downvoted and teamed up against by established Reddit accounts, that I have to imagine are owned by Stripe. These account have some established reddit history on them, mainly talking about coding in PERL. It's a little sus. In my case, I sent my EIN letter, Sales Tax Receipt, Articles of Org, Statement of Trade Name, Certificate of Good Standing, Bank Statements, Website links, Signed transaction receipts, and anything I could think of to Stripe to review. I just received robot-responses; never got anything cleared up.

> I challenge reddit to connect me to a human being at Stripe that can tell me how to resolve the issue. I'm convinced It can't be done. This is a big problem and should be brought to the attention of small business owners, and regulators!

> TL;DR : I used Stripe to process my business transactions. They saw a large transaction come through and used their twisted TOS to steal $3,000 from my small business. They use gray area contract loopholes to be able to hold your money from you indefinitely. While you lose out on your working capital and ROI, they collect free interest on your money; potentially never returning it.

As Stripe keeps growing this seems to be a more recurring problem, as it seems to be with most companies that eventually get too big to care about the little guy.

Which leads to my question: is there a smaller alternative similar to the Stripe of five years ago which might appreciate our business more?

And hopefully stays small. And does processing for any country, not just 3 states in the US :/

„Too Big To Care“

PastePay is a great alt to Stripe. Check them out https://www.pastepay.com. I posted this elsewhere in this comment section. PastePay is a “smaller service”. It is more customer focused than Stripe.

I wrote an article on this last year and submitted it here and got down voted into the lower levels of Hacker News hell. Later, of course, someone else has a similar experience with Stripe, and now everybody is all about it. It gets a frustrating trying to talk to tech people sometimes. I never know if they are going to be a shill mafia or actually consider the evidence.

Hopefully making enough noise on HN and social media will help your case move quickly. That appears to be the only way to get a response these days.

Maybe one day non-custodial and permissionless payment rails will prevent this situation, for those services that choose to use it. Shame that HN is so polarized about blockchain that they refuse to entertain the idea.

AFAIK, there are no permissionless payment rail that do fiat-> crypto payment processing. They all require intermediaries and presumably would run into similar issues.

Crypto-> crypto would be a different story, but requires a more sophisticated buyer.

I play in this space, so would definitely like to hear what you've got in mind.

Imagining either crypto to crypto, or a permissioned rollup handling crypto to fiat that lets the sequencer block a users address for KYC purposes, but user can still trustlessly withdraw funds to mainnet.

But what about the people who don't have social clout? I think for every person like this, there are 100s if not thousands who's money and accounts get locked away.

That’s my point. A system where your funds are locked unless your complaint goes viral is a terrible system.

This is a *legal* issue,and not a shitcoin-solving issue.

Poor technical and legal frameworks for digital payment processors is how we have gotten to this point. Strict AML, KYC, copyright protection, and anti-adult requirements forces payment processors to err on the side of caution and deploy mass automated systems to flag and lock accounts that trigger the slightest internal alarm bells, even if this leads to some false positives and destroys a few small businesses along the way.

> Maybe one day non-custodial and permissionless payment rails will prevent this situation, for those services that choose to use it. Shame that HN is so polarized about blockchain that they refuse to entertain the idea.

It's a shame that we've only figured out "pay $200 to the guy using a derelict coal plant to run the world's fanciest space heater" and "pay $200 to the guy who hoards the most of your 'currency'" then and not "non-custodial and permissionless payment rails" then.

Lol this comment reveals a lot of ignorance. My last transaction fee on Eth was in the range of $1, most of that value is burned and not sent to a miner, and anyone who wants to participate in protocol rewards can do so through delegation.

PoS is not perfect but far better than current norm of “pay a billion dollar corporation a fixed fee and also give them total control of the world’s payment rails.”

Burning is identical to regressive redistribution. It takes value from those who transact and assigns it directly to those who hoard through deflation. If you have a money velocity of 5 and an average transaction of $100 and burn 1% every transaction, it is equivalent to a ~5% pa tax directly into the pockets of currency hoarders. No different to paying visa 1% or $1 per transaction.

It's not an improvement. Just a changing of the guard with less oversight.

"Pay $1 to a single private company" is not the same as "pay $1 toward every circulating token in the network." If you consider this a tax, it is a tax distributed to all current and future holders of the currency, including the user doing the transaction.

If "changing of the guard" means replacing VISA with thousands of VISAs in a decentralized network, where any non-VISA can become yet another VISA through permissionless software, that is far better in my opinion.

If you have another economic model than EIP 1559 that you feel is superior, you have the power to propose that as an EIP and start to develop consensus around it. EIP 1559 was first proposed in 2019 and it took some years for consensus to build around it.

> If you consider this a tax, it is a tax distributed to all current and future holders of the currency, including the user doing the transaction.

Yes. A tax on every transaction apportioned by wealth to current holders (not to future holders because they will receive fewer tokens from constant input). A regressive tax.

> If "changing of the guard" means replacing VISA with thousands of VISAs in a decentralized network, where any non-VISA can become yet another VISA through permissionless software, that is far better in my opinion.

It's not 'thousands of visas' though. It's "a big faceless entity taking a fee on every transaction with the rules being set and the takings being apportioned by wealth" being replaced by "a big faceless entity taking a fee on every transaction with the rules being set and the takings being apportioned by wealth" the ability to volunteer to provide infrastructure doesn't change that.

> If you have another economic model than EIP 1559 that you feel is superior, you have the power to propose that as an EIP and start to develop consensus around it. EIP 1559 was first proposed in 2019 and it took some years for consensus to build around it.

The entire 'a deflationary token on one global trustless network, buy now or miss out' model has fundamental unsolved and potentially unsolvable flaws. It is capitalism distilled and on fast forward without the grifters even having to make the pretense of being involved in real productive activity.

We don't need 'currency but on the internet' to solve 'how do we distribute stuff'. We needto think about the problem from scratch. Blockchains may even be a part of it, but so long as d(wealth)/dt ~ wealth, it's just another method of making the same people rich.

Ethereum, like USD but unlike Bitcoin, does not have a fixed supply cap. The protocol 'prints' new currency every minute. The EIP 1559 document even made this point clear: Ethereum no longer has a strictly deflationary or inflationary design - it depends on the current block space demand and issuance rate. At the moment there is more Eth being issued than burned, so it is inflationary[1].

> rules being set ... by wealth

I'm not sure where you got that. Depending on what you mean, in PoS some rules are set by node operators - software that can be run by anybody for free - and the hard rules of the protocol are set by social consensus.

I think this discussion also misses the forest for the trees: Eth tokens are not coupled to dollar wealth. Ethers are not "up-only" and they do not need to be for the network to function. A boom or bust in the price of Eth does not change the price of DAI or USDC, and pegged stablecoin tokens is what users would be transacting with if we are entertaining the idea of a crypto alternative to VISA.

[1] https://watchtheburn.com/insights

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