Tell HN: Considering legal action against Stripe

Agreed it’s gotten crazy, we’re upgrading our infra to go back to white label

We’ll assume the risk of being the merchant of record, and just not use Stripe connect. It’s faaaaar less risk than having to co-brand with Stripe and be locked into a single gateway

We’ve also found significantly cheaper merchant fees elsewhere, it’s just win win win to ditch stripe at this point

Are there any specific white label solutions that you would recommend?

Looking at Airwallex but haven't deployed any changes yet. Really good rates and they seem organised

I upvoted you, because that's the only way someone from Stripe will respond to your complaint. In general I'd recommend you (and everyone else) move off the platform. There are plenty of competitors that offer APIs that are essentially a drop-in replacement.

Bless

There are plenty of alternatives to stripe. I understand your point, but i would move on with my product and write a blog post about it and mail that to the clients immediately and after solving to find an alternative clearing provider to create a better, more stable future.

View it this way: be happy that it happened now - what mess this would be if you have thousands of customers and a bigger saturation.

We understand your point, and honestly we feel that way as well. If you could recommend anything, it would be appreciated greatly. Thanks!

Your onboarding isn't great. First thing I see on your website is a "Get Started" button. Sounds good, I click it expecting examples and eventually a registration form. But it's direct to create an account. Okay fair enough, but I still don't know what your product even is by that point. So I go back and read further your home page. Still unclear what your product is.

So essentially you're providing some kind of linktree alternative with some social integration plus a touch of patreon? That's kind of cool, a live business card in a way.

I suppose I can see how that might be considered risky business (you might end up linking/hosting undesirable content).

Thank you for the feedback, we realize some of these problems. We’ll address is it as soon as possible. Best regards.

> Also, some part of us thought – "Clearly, these people must have done something wrong. Stripe wouldn't be this aggressive. They are terrific for entrepreneurs after all!" We were dead wrong.

Actually most of the time when I see these threads the people have indeed done something wrong, like 1-2 days ago when someone was complaining and said it was "unfair" and "ridiculous" but they were drop shipping, which actually does violate their terms

This is not the case for we were in their connect guidelines. But we understand your point.

Stripe terms disallow drop shipping? Ridiculous

Ah yes, HN, the official support forum for Stripe, because bad PR is worse than fixing broken processes.

    even though we've had less than 100 transactions this year

This doesn't help your case and may actually be hurting it:

* a lot of the risk calculations are about percentages, so low volume is a dangerous place because even ONE janky transaction can trigger alerts

* processors make money on a percentage of transactions, so low volume means you're not a valuable customer - especially if you're triggering risk alerts

   it's like they don't even want to find a solution

Very possible that they've decided that the projected revenue from your account isn't worth the risk, or even the customer-service effort required to double-check the risk.

    The only plausible move seems to take legal action to at least get some answers?

IANAL, but I'd guess that the "answer" is between 6.2h and 6.2i in the services agreement: https://stripe.com/legal/ssa#suspension

I would do a research, what others did in this situation and would ask chatgpt, bard, bing etc.

A quick google search brought me to this one: https://getpayment.com/what-to-do-if-your-company-is-one-of-...

I don'tt know anything about them, so look for all alternatives and then choose. you haven't been the first and the last that goes through this.

I'm sure other commenters will have more value, just wait for more responses.

There will be a solution, of course. I'm sorry that this happened, but put feelings aside - it doesn't help much now.

Thanks for the answer — appreciated. We are currently looking at alternatives.

If you're considering legal action, I would stop posting here because anything you've posted can be used in court.

Just get a lawyer and get a first consultation to see where you are.

We just moved on.

Hey — I work at Stripe. Sorry about this. Could you email me at edwin@stripe.com and we can dig into this more?

edwin my man!

@OP seriously please consider getting in touch with them, maybe this can be settled in a fair convenient way for both parties.

Already did the moment he wrote, thanks!

Did not hear back yet…

UPDATE: They thankfully resolved our issue. We are grateful for Edwin's help.

I will make another post detailing what I've learned during this time.

> The only plausible move seems to take legal action to at least get some answers?

That sounds like a great way to lose both money and time without achieving anything. Just use another provider and move on.

Any recommendations? Half of the codebase is based on Stripe’s features like Connect. It would be hard for us to migrate to another provider in such a short notice. And the brand tarnishing hasn’t been the most positive thing to get our clients back.

Thank you for the reply tho.

You’ve fallen for a 30 year old playbook. It’s described in detail in this book under vendor lock in. Check out the bios of the people who wrote it and where they work now.

https://www.amazon.com/Information-Rules-Strategic-Network-E...

I know it may sound not helpful but achieving vendor independence is a valid reason for adopting at least some software design patterns so you can swap the implementations without changing the interface. It’s becoming increasingly more important as the cloud service providers are getting more aggressive just because they can get away with it.

Interesting, this never made it to the front page, so the stripe PR team never bothered.

Pretty much

I am waiting for a response on this thread. Hope we can sort it out. (This was a disaster of a day)

> Tell HN: Considering legal action against Stripe

I'm getting tired seeing this.

Why are those people not able to do a web search before using services like Stripe or PayPal ?

This behaviour goes on since 20 years yet people continue blindly to trust those scammers.

We did, but we live overseas so we had to trust their word and we did took precautions by establishing with their partner Atlas.

Learn from that. You see, that it was bad to have that much code based on one provider. You need to have a learning, else you'll be doomed to repeat the failure.

What do you sell? Do you have a website?

Yes normally our clients sell their digital goods straight from their page.

Here’s my page; https://heyhey.to/l (My shop is purged)

Here’s the link; https://heyhey.to We made Pro free for everyone until this issue get solved.

By 'digital goods', do you mean cryptocurrency and NFTs?

Support for Solana and Ethereum NFTs are being added.

Sorry but this is a very lazy product.

You are providing almost nothing of value, but a thin layer on top of stripe and you are charging like 5 times more than stripe.

It reads a lot like it's in the patreon, onlyfans space. Which would obviously get blocked due to either being a reseller of their merchant services or by distributing porn.

If you really want to continue you need to build your own pci infra, and be clear about whether you allow high risk industries like work from home prostitutes, both in branding and through acceptable use policies

In general you need to provide a clear product and clear value instead of making a really small product and charging a huge cut of revenue.

Regards.

This is just the middle man product for a bigger projects. Heyhey is the medium for our platforms to come. I understand the lack of information in our landing page might give you the idea that we distribute unsolicited digital items, but we review each item for cleaner marketplace. We really didn’t have the time to fix certain stuff like the lp for we are both studying, working and trying to build a whole brand and a company. HEYHEY is a digital business card that you gather all your socials without any feeds to distract you. We kept it simple for creators to distribute from their socials and sell & get commission “without any cuts” packaged all in a clean design. So no, with all the backend security & encryption, precise design UI and UX , I don’t think you can call it a lazy product just bcs it’s simple. We’ll strive for better, thank you for the upvote!

Bro what do you mean security, UI, Ux. This is literally a page with links and a payment option.

It's as if you searched for a checklist of what a webpage needs, but you forgot to put actual content, and you slammed a paymeny option.

Your competition like linktree is free, and in my experience it's only used to circumvent domain based restrictions to post malicious, pornography, or gambling links.

Get real, be more ambitious. Build an actual product, not just a template.

It wasn’t just a webpage and nor a link page for the months we planned out. We are free too btw and the “competition” you mentioned charge you more and more as you upgrade for basic features we already provide. You have no clue what the product is or the agenda we have, this was a thread to let other people know not to trust Stripe. There is a whole structure and a framework for future implementations and connections with other projects that isn’t available on HEYHEY yet you are lacking the positive approach to even ask about it. Sad

I have to agree with Stripe, also I don't see a way to actually sell things which makes me question it

It’s because we disabled the feature after it was axed, so that there were no victims to some rouge bug. We are on the matter 24/7 for a better user experience. You can check our instagram/twitter or even blogposts for reviewing the working shop and tips in action. https://heyhey.to/heyhey

I know, it's an unpopular opinion on HN, but this can only be solved by money that isn't governed by the state. Or Cash.

I would go in the other direction. The US has 50 competing private services for transferring money and billing and any of them can simply ban you. In Europe small companies (unless you are a webstore) aren't really expected to accept credit cards and often just ask for a wire transfer. All that's needed is a bank account number because interoperability is between banks is legislated. You can usually encode the amount due and account number in a link or QR code too.

I realize stripe offers a lot more than just the actual payment but it's messed up that except for cash, exchanging money for services in the US basically requires you to use a private system from day one of your startup.

Indeed, thank you for the comment!

And this sentence is wrongful and might be legally not wise to put in the world: "They just killed our platform HEYHEY." They just stopped making their service available to you for whatever reason that is inside their terms or not. But they didn't "kill" anything.

It’s metaphorically and literally true for we have lost the credibility with our only paying customers. (We’ll change the text just in case, thank you)