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Comment by matrix_overload | Hacker News Reader

Not defending Stripe here, but DO NOT HAVE A SINGLE POINT OF FAILURE! Have 2-3 payment processors hooked to a common abstraction layer, split transactions between them. If one fails, switch to others while you try to sort it out. Unfortunately, "computer says no" has become the harsh reality when dealing with any kind of corporate entities, so you need to be ready. It sucks, but that's the world we live in.

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It's expensive to build 2-3 integrations for every service you rely on though. And losing 1/3 of your money can still be detrimental to your business.

Not necessarily: https://primer.io/

Isn't primer then the single point of failure?

I know nothing about the product, but I would be surprised if some federation service had the same financial liabilities (just offering software) as a payments processing company underwriting transactions.

Precisely. If it fails, it's possible to replace its integration by manually adding one or more of the payment processors directly; but it never holds your money itself, unlike PayPal or Stripe.

Losing 1/3 of your money is better than losing all of your money.

I think https://www.bits.bi also will offer this.

Yes indeed, every integration costs:

- kyc onboarding, getting and processing the docs and forms never goes smooth, can take 2 to 10 business days.

- integrating the gateway, 3k setup fee on average, plus dev cost for mapping the servers, doing the front end and the tests

- sometimes, due to being labeled a high risk sector industry, only trusted visa traffic, or an allocation thereof

And indeed, losing 30 percent would be the end, we operate with a 4 to 12 percent net margin, thanks goodness credit card payments are only 10 percent or so.

I am a total crypto sceptic, and the crypto psps are immature, but they are causing the least hassle.

We have 3 credit card processors and every freaking rule is always in their favor.

They have a downtime for visa, lasting 3 weeks? Nothing you can do, the gateway still charge you one quid per failed TX.

The worst was a single chargeback collapsed a MID and the processor refuses or claims they will not honor the settlement.Something like 20k usd for a months business.

All due to them miscoding and the chargeback exposing their miscoding practices.

Is there any recourse for this?

Any fintech news outlet where they can be named and shamed?

I agree with this. Last week out of a sudden we had an increase in rejected payments from Stripe so we simply switched to Verifone for which we already had an integration. The switch is manual however so we're currently automating it.

doesn't your common abstraction layer become your single point of failure in this situation? The only robust economical way to do that is too use a third party multiplatform abstraction service, especially given the complexity of maintaining functional billing across multiple payment processors, you're kinda screwed if you try to implement this in house for a small business (either losing revenue to bugs or losing money to in house implementation time/costs)

Not if it's an open source self-hosted abstraction layer, or built directly into the framework, like Laravel Cashier or Lago Billing.

Well, you can always fix your abstraction layer if it breaks. This is not true if you use a closed-source solution.

So, are there any open-source solutions available?

The abstraction layer has no vested interest in shutting you down for reasons related to your transaction flow, fraud, etc.

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