Honest Review of Stripe Support

Before I get into the story, I first want to say that as a dev, the overall experience working with Stripe is five stars. The discord dev-help channel is what every company should strive for when offering developer support. Along side the amazing documentation Stripe has put together, it is still by far one of the best and easiest integration I've worked with through out the years. I absolutely love the product and can't live without it as a online commerce founder.

Now to the story.

One of our user recently had a serious blocking bug happen to them and so far I have not been able to get a confirmation of the bug from the support team. All my attempts to get this issue resolved have been given the run-around.

To summarize the bug as best as I can:

- Stripe enables marketplaces to passthrough payment to something called “connected accounts"

- When onboarding a connected account, there is an option for the user to select a “currency” when connecting a external bank account (for deposit) for the first time.

- This currency selection overrides the actual currency of the deposit account. So for example, I can tell Stripe my CAD bank account is actually in USD.

- Any subsequent Update/Removal/Re-adding of the same bank account will not change the currency to the correct value. I believe this may be because the account is fingerprinted and it's meta data cached.

- Incorrect currency blocks deposits, the fund gets stuck in their Stripe account indefinitely.

I have been able to reproduce the problem on my end while helping the user debug the problem. I reached out to support via the normal channels and after a long explanation, they told me to ask the user to reach out to them directly.

It's been 1 week and the user have yet to hear back from support.

Our user has been understanding, but this fund has been stuck in their account for 3 month. Only recently have they informed us that they have not seen the payment deposited into their bank.

We have now reversed the transfer (thank god that's possible), and will pay the user off Stripe.

Here's my honest review:

- Non-developer facing support is seriously lacking. In a perfect world the user should not need to interact with Stripe at all (outside of onboarding). The fact that support wanted the user to reach out to them directly seems very strange to me.

- dev-help is great. I very quickly got someone that seems very knowledgable to at least attempt to reproduce the bug with me. However, maybe due to their geolocation or internal limitation, they hit a wall and redirected me to support.

Overall, lots of things are going right, and I believe Stripe is still upholding their "developer first" mission, but as their offering gets broader and more integrated with direct users, there're lots of improvement to be made.