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Comment by edwinwee | Hacker News Reader

I work at Stripe. Could you email me at edwin@stripe.com and I can dig into this?

You’re a nice guy to try and solve OP’s problem. But OP’s problem isn’t really the problem. The problem is that OP’s problem is reposted here weekly by someone new and they have to pray that you or someone else use backchannels to solve their hellish issue. There’s a meta-problem. Can you just dig into that problem instead? Then you won’t have to dig into these sub-problems once a week.

I'm sure OP would prefer he dig into the specific problem first

What we really need is some sort of default arbitrator for cases like this. Support gives no answers because "reasons" too frequently for too many business critical applications and the courts are too slow to fix the problem and building in redundancy too costly to compete for most integrations.

In case this helps, this thread (and others like it) have convinced me never to use Stripe. There needs to be an official, public policy posted to Stripe's website that outlines transparency over deactivations and the process for resolution.

Your support process shouldn't be so fundamentally broken that it requires this to get a resolution. I'm sure this same situation has played out with thousands of devs/merchants that don't even know HN exists.

You should ask OP first for their email; right now anyone can email you claiming to be OP.

Does that really matter much? There will be additional account authentication after an email is sent, and half of hacker news at this point already knows “email patio11 or Edwin for stripe support”

They could verify by having OP change their "about" text, here on HN.

Or just anyone with an issue actually ...

.. and then it would become a bit unmanageable for 'edwin', and then they would have to create support@stripe.com or whatever (like literally every other company on earth) and set up an appropriate way of dealing with customer complaints.

Here it is! The raison d'etre of these posts to HN!

Bless Edwin for being here for us, always, time after time, but what a sad state of affairs.

Edwin has saved me before too. Love Edwin.

I'm proud to announce that Edwin officially pulled through for us today. All our accounts have been reactivated.

There are clearly problems at Stripe. But this kind human is not one of them.

You need to explain what happened, and what sector you operate in. Doing this support stuff on HN as a last resort & getting on the front page is crap in the first place, not feeding back is even worse.

Edwin broke it down here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32859520

I would still recommend you change your payment backend to direct your customer payments via one or more "backup" processors asap. Perhaps leave Stripe altogether if you prefer, once that's done, or keep Stripe around as the backup.

After all, they have a track record of screwing you over again, after fixing and checking your account. Whatever triggered that could do it again when you least expect it, despite Edwin's good work. Probably the triggers haven't changed as you are still running the same business.

(Like several other commenters, I was thinking of using Stripe as a main payment processor before seeing this article because of their great API, documentation, test mode and ease of setup. They seemed like a good choice, but I had wrongly assumed they were reasonable and reliable and if there were issues they could be resolved; that I didn't need to worry about Stripe being shady themselves. Now I've learned Stripe is like the Paypal of old when it comes to killing a business abruptly with no warning or recourse. That's so severe it cancels out every benefit and feature. With much disappointment I now feel it will be necessary to evaluate other services instead.)

Someone reaching out in this case is nice but what about folks who can't get their complaint to the top of the HN front page? I'm hopeful the OP gets everything sorted out but these no-warning, no-explanation, no-recourse suspensions need to be prohibited when the only thing a company says is "TOS violation."

Completely agreed. In the past, my employer has been in the same position with a different platform and to say it is an existential and Kafkesque nightmare is an understatement.

There's a variety of cases where the only legal messaging around the suspension is approximately that. Whether or not Stripe is doing wrong here, they do have to comply with US law and that type of law will result in that shape of suspension and therefore this type of story appearing on HN.

It is nice that people can get a quick fix by hitting the front page here, but for the rest of the community we have to realize that this is does nothing to fix the systemic issue (of course I'm just stating the obvious here, but might as well make it explicit).

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