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Comment by danpalmer | Hacker News Reader

Or rather, get a contract with your cloud provider and payment processor that clearly lays out the terms under which they will and won't suspend you.

My previous company had a business contract with GCP and so wouldn't be cut off for, for example, a dodgy employee account tied to the business in some way.

It's amazing how many people put their email and credit card in a form, pay sticker price for a service, and have their entire business depend on it. The terms of those contracts necessarily have to protect the service from all sorts of malicious users who just click sign-up. Talk to a person, get a contract, and the whole conversation changes (and yes GCP has account managers for this).

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This x 1000!

Do kids these days not realize you can negotiate anything and everything with your vendors/suppliers/partners?

Yes, most SaaS companies LOVE it when you sign up for one of their standard plans, using THEIR standard T&C's, and standard payments.

But, DID YOU KNOW, if something is critical to your business, you can negotiate directly with pretty much every business on the face of the planet, and if your spend is large enough, or you're willing to pay, you can negotiate anything????

It's nuts, I know :)))))

How much do you need to spend to negotiate with Google?

Short generic answer for all SaaS/cloud: remarkably little. If you're a legit business, who can make payments as a business (rather than on a personal card), and have any small amount of spend, you should have no problem getting a basic contract that provides you some reliability for your business.

Negotiating significant discounts needs a bit more work, commitment, or growth story. Discounts tend to scale with spend.

(Disclaimer, I now happen to work at Google, unrelated to cloud, but this was my experience at my previous employer)

I got decent support from actual human beings for Google Cloud even when spending ~£100/monthly.

Not sure if this has changed recently, but this was in about 2018/2019.

They might like you being on their basic contract and high sticker price, but you know what they love even more? Having a person they can do sales calls with. It's amazing how much you can get out of companies just by, you know, talking to them.

How do you make a SLA were the compliance guy doesn't randomly kick you off, because he found your dark theme scary or don't understand your business model?

How big would a business have to be for this to work with a company like Stripe?

Getting a better contract, probably not big at all. That's more about the company being more verified than someone just signing up a landing page. Negotiating a better rate? I really don't know. We did it at ~6 figures per year in the very early stages of Stripe, but we were a UK beta account for them. I believe we continued to renegotiate at 7 and 8 figures per year, but we already had that relationship.

By all means use another payment provider as leverage to negotiate better contracts and rates, but I think it's unnecessary from a business reliability standpoint until you're very big and Stripe's downtime level (very small) is a material business risk. Spoiler: almost no one is this big.

So how do you get Stripe to send you a signed contract?

Presumably, you'd have to start by talking to their sales people. There's a button near the bottom of their home page that leads to a sales contact form: https://stripe.com/contact/sales

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