Stripe is no longer a suitable payment processor | Hacker News Reader

Stripe is no longer a suitable payment processor

202 pointsRedhill137 comments

Yes, I said it, Stripe is no longer a suitable payment processor unless you're a medium to huge sized company to which you have some weight in what you say. small business owners who clearly have good standing to which stripe has held funds, blocked and shutdown accounts (including my own) are all complaining.. there is a clear pattern here -> https://uk.trustpilot.com/review/stripe.co.uk?stars=1 https://www.sitejabber.com/reviews/stripe.com

They might as well only accept huge companies only because they're surviving off their top 10, their support is terrible, the fraud detection is terrible and when you make a decent amount of sales they will shut down your account. I urge you to try it yourself on a newly made account, guarantee you run into some problems, stripe is 2023 is a joke

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Let me clarify some things for you people:

I run an AI technologies company, that does not fall under the prohibited company terms and conditions for stripe, it doesn't operate under any illegality, it is a genuine AI image generation service with other tools like text to audio, etc

Here is what I got after 6 days worth of sales: https://ibb.co/WyRGprh (this expires after 3 months but essentially says "Your business does not meet our terms" ... okay, why doesn't it meet our terms you ask? here is the reason they emailed me with: https://ibb.co/mynwqhD (basically them telling me they think a fraudulent payment happened to me and to be careful they're shutting me down)

excuse me, what? you have billions and billions of dollars are you tell me you "think" fraud has happened ? what is the radar that I'm being taxed more on for? as you can see here my settings for the radar is in full effect and I have 0 chargebacks or blocks -> https://ibb.co/3TCS5S6, https://ibb.co/D4FqLcS

Do you see my frustration???? as a small business owner you can't shut down companies based on "i think" with no actual evidence.. so I had to appeal about 5 times to actually get them to consider, had to even mention negative media attention for them to even consider reviewing me.. this isn't a fraud case or justified closure of account this is also not a mistake, I've seen issues like this dating back 2 years ago.. this is simply being ignorant to the issues at hand

Thanks for sharing detail about your business publicly—I'm sorry we can't support your business. Per our terms of service, adult content and services are prohibited (https://stripe.com/legal/restricted-businesses#:~:text=Adult...). This was already communicated to you.

From your Discord channel (https://discord.com/invite/cupidai): "CUPID AI is a smart AI-based NSFW and SFW subscription entertainment and content generation platform that provides AI generated content and realistic chatbots to consumers, entrepreneurs and companies for profit or non-profit use cases."

https://snipboard.io/Q0X3RK.jpg

That is very outdated text, — 09/05/2023 00:16, we changed directions 2 months ago and we already had a notice about this from stripe and this is the main reason we decided to pivot directions... but yes we do not do NSFW, that was just an outdated text since that was 3 months ago, since I've been busy I did forget about that but I will change it, but that isn't the issue I'm having with stripe, the issue is them closing my account for "fraudulent charges".. but yeah I'll be changing that ASAP since you brought it to my attention

and also to further explain, we offer AI tools that can be used on a wide array of use cases- that being said do you outlaw knives because they can be used for murder when in face they can be used to cut vegatables? stripe should base their prohibited business list off the content sold and distributed mainly by the service, not what the consumers do with the service.. and like I said i've been allowed to operate on stripe and I am passed that as they have already allowed me to operate selling AI tools but an example from this is that amazon (that uses stripe or has used stripe) has tons of media attention of people doing fraud, will they shut down amazon because the consumers do fraud? no, so why should they play with peoples money like that?

The knives argument holds no water. I think Stripe would be in the right regarding NSFW content as it relates to their TOS (maybe at fault for using outdated info and not communicating with you so you didn’t have to find out this reason on HN).

And yet, nsfw content is not fraudulent charges.

Knives argument was correct in the fact that stripe should decide to punish businesses for the production of user generated content that they cannot prevent. putting restrictions on it will not work, ask sam altman how restricting GPT4 is going, you cannot beat the people at censoring your technologies, so penalizing the business for something out of their control is stupid.. and as for the stripe being in the right, they have let popular NSFW content platform Onlyfans operate on their site before.. not sure if they do so now but they have allowed Onlyfans on stripe.. so ToS is out the window when the most popular NSFW selling content site is on stripe

Maybe they have, but Onlyfans would not be able to complain if Stripe decided to kick them out for that. It would be at their discretion. I think what you want is consistency, but companies, and even governments have shown us we cannot expect policies/laws to be applied the same for every one. A cop will stop only one of 3 speeding cars.

Have you found this out just now, is this the actual reason they were blocked and was this communicated to them clearly?

If this is not the root cause then pointing this out as part of this conversation is misleading. If it is, why was it necessary for OP to find this out on HN?

Yes, this was already communicated to the business two weeks before posting here—we don't support adult content per our restricted business list.

Thanks for clarifying

do you still process for onlyfans?

NSFW wasn't the reason I posted here.. I don't care enough to post here about something like that, I don't like posting and making noise about things.. the reason I posted her was due to the fraudulent charges claims.. they wanted to close my accounts based on no information, they didn't provide me with any proof or information to back what they claim up.. I, on the other hand had multiple screenshots proving that my chargeback rate was 0, I used the default radar settings and I had 0 blocks on stripe, so if anything it's stripe that has issues.. this has nothing to do with the NSFW thing, I had no NSFW block on my account as you see in the screenshots

I had messaged support 5 times before posting here, I had been declined the appeal once and I was not going to allow myself be bullied off the site for a mistake they made

> This is enshittification: Surpluses are first directed to users; then, once they're locked in, surpluses go to suppliers; then once they're locked in, the surplus is handed to shareholders and the platform becomes a useless pile of shit

Its getting a bit boring to hear the same one word dismissal for everything over the last year. When HN learns a new word you really have to be patient.

I don't know, the word was backed up by an explanation that made sense to me.

And its hardly a new word.

> When HN learns a new word you really have to be patient.

The "new word" has been coined because there's just not so much cheap money around, and there's been a whole lot of companies that have been pressured to monetize in ways that may not be good for everyone's long term.

The word's in the zeitgeist because the phenomenon it is describing is running rampant.

(I work at Stripe) I'd like Stripe to be available for as broad a set of users as possible. Just think about our high-level business model: we charge a fee per transaction for our services.

Closing an account without cause does not make financial sense, so we don't do it. If we were solely optimized for profit then we'd ideally want to accept as many businesses' transactions as we could, right?

So that leaves three reasons why we might not: regulatory compliance (money laundering or fraud), risk management (high rate of chargebacks or credit risk), or a violation of our restricted businesses agreement (get rich quick schemes, counterfeit goods, etc).

I have no idea what OP's business is or what they're selling, these things are typically left out of HN posts about Stripe for good reason. They're generally looking to overturn decisions we've made. We do of course make mistakes (and fix those rapidly) but you should consider why we would take action contrary to our business model—the answer is normally one of the three above.

If you had to choose where to put resources between high volume enterprise and low volume SMBs, you’d choose the former.

Why would we not want "low volume" SMBs? Many of the SMBs on our platform grow to be much larger businesses. Ignoring a massive sector of businesses who might one day be the next "big thing" would be foolish for one thing and an unwise financial decision for another.

That's why you can sign up as a small business on stripe.com today whereas on other platforms you need to talk to their sales team (and be generating serious revenue) before getting close.

> Why would we not want "low volume" SMBs?

Because your costs are inversely proportional to business size.

> Ignoring a massive sector of businesses who might one day be the next "big thing" would be foolish for one thing and an unwise financial decision for another.

So Stripe would sacrifice enterprise high volume customers because they hope/speculate that low volume SMBs will one day be big, if they'd need to choose where to direct resources? I highly doubt it.

This all sounds like a false dilemma. Why do they need to choose between either one?

From the OP: https://www.sitejabber.com/reviews/stripe.com. I don't think big orgs post comments.

It's not about speculating whether a given company would one day be big, it's accomodating for both for different reasons. Many of our "high volume customers" were one day not high volume, so saying we can't do both would be very short-sighted.

And we see that in our data too: 1,000 new businesses joined Stripe every day last year. We also had 100+ companies process 1B+ in yearly volume. That captures everything from mom and pop shops to startups, and large enterprises like Amazon or Salesforce. We listen to them all to make sure we're still solving their problems. (Stripe itself was born out of listening to startups grumble about payments: http://www.paulgraham.com/schlep.html#:~:text=The%20most%20s....)

It also helps reduce our dependency on any one sector of customers, similar to an index fund vs. stock picking. You don't get the same set of diverse businesses processing with e.g. Adyen—they just don't serve the long tail of the market in the way we do.

There’s some level of gaslighting going on here. It’s is possible for stripe to want to serve SMBs and also not have the resources to provide the necessary support an SMB needs when their account is in trouble in a timely manner. I’ve worked with larger startups that process on stripe, and stripe makes account execs available for most issues, and provides very good troubleshooting and advice that would be invaluable to SMBs like OP. Not claiming OPs business is in good standing, but to say that the issues mostly lie with the businesses is being a bit dishonest? I have seen many cases here on HN where after a post hits the front page, some C level or another well known stripe employee shows up and resolves the issue, proving that the customer was right in complaining. Do you believe they’d be able to get their issue resolved without hitting the front page, whether stripe wants their transaction fees or not? The issue most likely Stripe’s kyc/kyb requirements that only kick in once your account reaches a certain volume. You can view them via API (future requirements, due requirements, etc), and if the business does not provide or provide incorrect information, it may trigger deeper reviews that may or may not be documented. That’s likely when stripe takes a more careful look at the business model and numbers such as chargeback rates. The problem may lie in Stripe not providing enough info for why accounts are acted on. Corporate speak such as “violates our policies” will cause merchants to come to HN.

> It’s is possible for stripe to want to serve SMBs and also not have the resources to provide the necessary support an SMB needs when their account is in trouble in a timely manner.

Exactly this, seen here: https://www.sitejabber.com/reviews/stripe.com

> It's not about speculating whether a given company would one day be big

Indeed, I think a lot of people miss the fact that the point of most small businesses is not in fact to become a billion (or even multi-million) dollar company. gasp

Any company targeting small businesses needs to shed this delusion that small businesses across the board want to become huge or even larger. In fact I know of a few that already think they are too big and would downsize at the first opportunity.

I appreciate and relate to this comment. One of my favorite aspects of owning a small business is that I can realistically understand every part of the business that I’m responsible for, and I like that. I’m not wading into a conversation about hiring trustworthy employees here. I don’t want hyper-growth. I don’t want 1,000 employees. I like being incorporated in my actual state, and I don’t want external actors to have control of my business. I don’t want to go public.

There’s this sort of toxic assumption that every small business just isn’t a big business yet. I’ve seen it at work in relationships with vendors where a conversation goes something like:

Business: “Okay, the Business plan fits us nicely but we need one feature from the Enterprise Pro Plus Max plan. Could we negotiate a slight increase in the Business plan and get that one feature flag enabled for our account?”

Vendor: “We’d love to help! We’ll give you a discount on the Enterprise Pro Plus Max tier that makes it the cost of the Business tier for a three year commitment, so you don’t have to grow into it overnight.”

Which of course no one has to do for any (prospective) customer. But it’s exhausting to have to explain that you’re not trying to grow into a business that can spend $80,000/mo with every vendor just to get features you need. And it’s really frustrating when you’re servicing a customer in a regulated industry who wants to expand with you, but vendors think things like audit trails are only useful or appropriate (or “not confusing”) for capital-E-Enterprises.

In my business the result has been a reliance on self-hosted FOSS applications but that’s not practical for things like payment processing, at least for a small business. If I were large enough for it to make sense to do my own payment processing I wouldn’t need Stripe in the first place.

Why? My guess would be that like most companies you’re optimizing for short-term revenue, not long-term! Neglecting/firing low-volume customers who aren’t making you money this quarter so you can allocate those resources to your whales and not hire additional support staff improves this quarter’s numbers. Idk exactly what Stripe’s IPO plans are but as long as your exit is perceived to be a couple quarters in the future, there’s no incentive to worry about what companies might become the “next big thing.” That’s the next shareholder’s problem.

Then Stripe would just pull an Adyen and only allow such businesses. They don't and support millions of happy and legitimate SMBs. Yes, they won't get white glove treatment but don't write off the fact that Stripe is and wants to be supporting SMBs.

My guess is that they're skimping on support, like every other tech company. Having good customer support with human support workers costs money, so some companies have taken the calculation that losing some small accounts might be worth it if they don't have to pay to provide proper support.

Speaking from personal experience your company shut down my account because I didn't have a website. I was using it to bill friends and family for small hosting accounts and they shut me down for it. While it suited them during their build up phase they deemed that I who actually pay for accounting software and am now using their payment processing are too much of a risk for them. Your bias is a fallacy.

A working business website (or social media site) is required by Stripe’s terms of service, as well as the card networks (Visa and Mastercard). It ensures we know who is selling and what they're selling. If you don't have a working website you can get in touch with our support team to provide additional info/verification. https://support.stripe.com/questions/information-required-on...

Do you actuality have a particular issue to raise though? Why was your account shut down?

> when you make a decent amount of sales they will shut down your account

I mean they do give you some explanation, right? It might not be super clear (it sometimes can't due to laws) but it's not "you are now processing much volume, goodbye". That's just not in Stripe's interest at all and assuming that high volume alone is the reason is not helpful.

What happens is likely that only after a certain amount of volume review processes get kicked off. So it's perceived as some form of injustice when often the issue is fundamentally with the business or failure to comply with requirements, and other PSPs might not even let you use them in the first place.

Personally I think there should maybe be earlier vetting to avoid this (as it's bad UX for those users) but it does come at the cost of having bad initial get-started UX for the vast majority of users that can be supported.

Those won't go and complain anywhere. So really, just stating "Stripe shut down our account, bad Stripe" isn't helping anyone and it isn't helping you either because nobody will be able to give you advice.

Their support getting worse I understand. I do think there are cases that could be turned around without having to resort to social media.

> I mean they do give you some explanation, right?

What makes you think that?

Financial institutions are pretty notorious for refusing to explain or justify their 'fraud' detection and suchlike.

Not sure if it made into the final text. But some drafts of the GDPR have provisions for rights for explaination

Say your business is obviously identified as violating ToS, e.g. turns out to be a prohibited category, they can tell you and we've clearly seen cases on HN where explanations had been provided on account closure or asking support.

There are cases like money laundering suspicions where they cannot though.

Because what would they say? The weight #9534 in neural cell #12956 in layer #34 exceeded value of 0.62f?

> Because what would they say? The weight #9534 in neural cell #12956 in layer #34 exceeded value of 0.62f?

No, obviously they would present the results of manual review conducted by humans after some ML algorithm flagged it. They do manual human review before randomly banning their customers, right? RIGHT?!

A company could come up with a more understandable (and more actionable) explanation by running some what-if scenarios. Make small tweaks to the input to the neural net until the net stops rejecting the account, then tell the customer how those inputs differ from their actual data.

For example, if tweaking the input to remove 5% of the chargebacks and the account passes you tell the customer their account was suspended for having too high a chargeback rate.

To avoid the detection rules being circumvented by users, they won't give you any explanation, only a generalized reason. It's almost impossible for you to find out what the problem is.

Stripe also wrongfully banned my newly created account .I wrote on HN but it didn't resolve the issue https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35287256

but then I wrote to the CEO and they unblocked my account in a few days.

I would not want to deal with any company where the only working method of resolving problems is talking to the CEO.

Stripe is a nightmare and I found support to be awful and not know their own product.

We are a UK company but now have clients worldwide and worldwide bank accounts (thanks to Wise).

So many people in the US can't pay via ACH Transfer (we can't do debit without a US entity... looking in to options and setting up a LLC now), so, we need to be able to accept credit card.

I thought I had a nice workaround by having USD to my USD account and only paying standard (high) fees, but, they now charge me a surcharge for this despite no Forex fees needed, and worse, the fees always link to the wrong transactions so I can't even reconcile properly.

On top of this, they force convert my CAD to GBP despite having a CAD bank account, and charge me so many fees on top.

It's the only option I've found as of now, but, I'm far far from being a fan.

> I thought I had a nice workaround by having USD to my USD account and only paying standard (high) fees, but, they now charge me a surcharge for this despite no Forex fees needed, and worse, the fees always link to the wrong transactions so I can't even reconcile properly.

I assume you are talking about this, perhaps: https://stripe.com/docs/payouts/alternative-currencies

It's a bit confusing as it seems to say there are fees if the bank account isn't domiciled in the country of the merchant but it's left vague whether the fee also applies to any alternative currency payout. The pricing page seems to support the latter theory: https://stripe.com/en-gb-de/pricing

> they now charge me a surcharge for this despite no Forex fees needed, and worse, the fees always link to the wrong transactions so I can't even reconcile properly.

The forex fees may not cost anything but the underlying cost is surely not free. Foreign currency transfers even (or in fact in particularly) domestically usually need to go through different rails, which often have fees associated. For US domiciled bank accounts they could potentially pay out from funds Stripe holds in the US already, but the need for balancing accounts internally later this isn't going to be free.

All that ignores the system and banking interconnectivity operating cost and their desire to recoup the engineering effort investment.

Bottom line is that there's a fee for this (which is service that I don't believe existed a few years back and is clearly a value added service) and if you're not happy with a fee it's your right to try and find another provider that is cheaper.

I understand that fees aren't something making customers happy but come on, your admitted workaround not working out as you planned doesn't make Stripe a nightmare. Seriously try to look into other PSPs and whether they support what you want to do better. If they don't or if another workaround there would be more cumbersome, perhaps Stripe isn't such a "nightmare" anymore in comparison.

Stuff just doesn't always end up working the way you might want to, and that means a market or product is perhaps ripe for disruption but Stripe charging for a service seems to be what bugs you the most. And I feel like you are underestimating the value/convenience they provide.

> the fees always link to the wrong transactions so I can't even reconcile properly.

That one does seem like a bug or a shortcoming in how they present fees, yes.

> On top of this, they force convert my CAD to GBP despite having a CAD bank account, and charge me so many fees on top.

Why would this happen if you used alternative currency payouts for that?

On my last question: > Why would this happen if you used alternative currency payouts for that?

Is it possible you hadn't yet set up a CAD bank account on your Stripe account before starting to accept CAD payments?

On my last question: > Why would this happen if you used alternative currency payouts for that?

Is it possible you hadn't yet registered your CAD bank account on your Stripe account before starting to accept CAD payments?

This happened to me too, so I complained on HN and a friendly Stripe employee fixed my account. Since then it's been fine, luckily. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36403607

I feel like this is an issue in general. As soon as you rely on one company to do one thing, you're SOL as soon as something happens. As a small business, basically nobody cares about you. Be it AWS, YouTube, Stripe, PayPal, you name it. As soon as you are dependent on one platform, you need to at least have a backup plan in case things go south.

The big difference is that with a payment processor it's much harder to diversify than, let's say, AWS. If done well, I can quickly switch to another cloud provider without my users even noticing. For payment providers, this is not possible. The user has to at least re-enter their credit card information, which is going to be a big problem for a lot of companies.

But let's say you did it. You finally moved away from Stripe to $literallyDoesntMatter. Now, a few years down the line, $literallyDoesntMatter also bans you, because it turns out, you are still a small business and the new provider also doesn't care about you. Now what do you do?

Serious question: How would you, as a small business, try to diversify your payment provider? Would you go through the effort to support and implement two payment providers and use them roughly equally, so that if one goes down, only 50% of your customers need to migrate? But then you have essentially doubled your risk of getting banned, since you now have two providers that could potentially ban you. What other options are there?

> since you now have two providers that could potentially ban you

But less chances that they both ban you roughly at the same time. So if A bans you, you move to B and start integrating C. Once you have integration with C ready, you then support B&C in production.

If in the future B or C ban you, then do same as above with D.

BTW, what would be your first choice for a $StripeAlternative nowadays?

Good question. Probably PayPal, even though I would consider them to be even looser with the ban hammer than Stripe. But when speaking internationally, they probably support the most payment methods? Adyen and checkout.com also look quite comparable, but I don’t know how their APIs hold up.

Never was. But when you warn people on HN against using Stripe and PayPal, you get downvoted.

What is the alternative?

Square? Toast? Google pay?

Bitcoin?

There are loads and loads of alternatives

You get downvoted for warning of PayPal?

Amen. Been saying this for years!

Currently moving one large and one small business off Stripe for these exact reasons.

What are you using instead? My company is considering Stripe and I’m interested in alternatives.

I've been using Gravity Payments for 6 years because they are local to me (Seattle). I have 4 different reps within an hour drive, not that I'm going to drive to their house, but it saves so much useless back-and-forth via support channels, threads, emails, chats, etc when I can just call them individually instead. I know, I know, phones are old school, but it gets the job done in minutes, rather than days/weeks.

Good luck getting a hold of anyone at Stripe. Even when you do, you'll get a different support agent replying to each message, which means there is no continuity or context.

Also, they reach out to me if they notice any unusual activity on my client's gateways, rather than just block the entire account and wait for me to notice.

What's the best alternative? Currently working on an MVP and the horror stories have really put me off Stripe.

LemonSqueezy

I second LemonSqueezy. They're a bit new, but are going in the right direction.

Stripe isn't available in my country anyway.

PayPal's dev experience was quite bad, but trying to do business with them was virtually impossible. I wasted a lot of time from both the dev and business angles.

Depends where you are. In Switzerland I would recommend https://payrexx.com/

I would recommend Adyen. It‘s a bit like a European Stripe.

https://www.adyen.com/

It’s a shame that Adyens tech is so rough in comparison but can definitely be worth it when it comes to fees

I've integrated Adyen. It wasn't perfect but it wasn't as awful as Paypal.

Adyen didn't want to speak to us unless I could show ~£1M+ a year of transactions :(

It's way higher than 1M a year.

By "European" you mean it doesn't support American credit cards?

For Europeans, Mollie works also very good! Very easy to integrate and the fees are reasonable.

Sorry to hear you've been put off. OP shared more detail which explains why they're unfortunately not supported on Stripe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36969049.

Feel free to always reach out to me know if you run into any issues.

It isn’t this OP specifically who has put me off. It’s the large number of people over the past few years who have reported issues such as Stripe holding their funds hostage for extended lengths of time, and their inability to get meaningful support through the official channels. (I’ve seen Edwin step in to HN threads to fix some of these cases, but the thought of relying on my problem hitting page 1 of Hacker News is very disconcerting.)

I hear you! Things are often posted here to try and overturn decisions that were correctly made (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34274059). We still keep an eye out to make sure we aren't making mistakes (because they can of course happen). Also, your post doens't need to hit HN to get meaningful support—we have 24x7 support via chat/phone/email and via @stripesupport on Twitter.

If your business doesn't fall into these categories I mentioned up top: regulatory compliance (money laundering or fraud), risk management (high rate of chargebacks or credit risk), or a violation of our restricted businesses agreement (get rich quick schemes, counterfeit goods, etc), then there is no legitimate reason why we wouldn't want to support your business.

If the problem gets fixed, then by definition the decision was not correctly made.

The more you say in this thread the more you prove the critics points.

Not sure what you mean? OP's business isn't supported on Stripe. We communicated that to them two weeks ago, and reiterated that today.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36969195

Many times people do get the "decision overturned".

Pretending not to know this is yet more of what I mean by "the more you talk the worse Stripe looks"

OP has also told you in these threads that their business pivoted 2 months ago and no longer has adult content, so it is a valid business, yet was still banned.

I suspect it has something to do with their risk policy changes. A few months ago, my account was closed.

I've been using it for 2 years (small, France based businesses) and never had any issue – though I've also heard some horror stories.

One thing that surprised me the most and made Stripe unusable was that it doesn't handle VAT liabilities. This means you have to manage the VAT for multiple countries yourself (and individual US states).

Is there any payment processor that does handle VAT? How can they do that when they do not have information required?

Paddle does this, for example. In this case, it's not you selling the product/service to the customer directly. Instead, you sell it to Paddle and Paddle sells it to the customer on your behalf: https://www.paddle.com/resources/merchant-of-record-a-guide-...

I can't even imagine running a physical item delivery if for some reason Stripe decides to just refund the customer if they claim chargeback for something which hasn't even been delivered

That's not a Stripe thing, it a Credit Card law thing. All card processors are the same.

If someone pays with a card, then disputes that they did not receive the service or product, the burden is on the vendor to prove they did. It's not the card processor who makes the final call either, it's the customers card company - it's out of Stripes hands.

I believe the burden of proof under US law is on the credit card issuer, and they abuse their dominant market position.

This.

It is only going to get worse and it will be no better than PayPal. Just noticed a rise in complaints about Stripe on this site.

We’ll see how far this Stripe customer support and complaints center goes on HN.

Seems like the priority is clearly greed over its own users in Stripe.

As a side comment, it’s unfortunate to see the hatred on this site towards those building decentralized permissionless payment networks. I don’t think some company should be able to decide whether Americans can or cannot transact.

That hatred is obviously completely justified. The reasons are no longer deniable predictions or fear but many years of observed reality by now.

I agree there should be no single capricious arbiter, but "web3" and all it's scammer bros has turned out not to be a better answer.

Don't want to defend them, but it must be bloody hard to be a large payment processor these days. I guess they don't disable paying customers (which, en masse, must be still significant revenue) out of sheer lousiness.

No, that's pretty much what they do. The problem is that you're a small business that doesn't make a ton of money, and they only make <1% of that, which is almost nothing, so if they even vaguely suspect you of anything they burn down your house just to be sure.

The solution to this would be something like account number portability, similar to phone number portability. You have an account with a payment processor, you have a dispute with them, you port your account to a different payment processor and your customers never know the difference. Which you could also do if a competitor offered better rates, which is why they typically don't offer this.

But if they weren't dicks they would. In general, but especially if they expect to be able to drop you without being accused of malice.

A company shouldn't be able to lock you in and then shut you down. One or the other, never both. And, of course, they have to be able to do the second one, so they should never be able to do the first one.

Someone asked this recently. You can move your Stripe data to/from any PCI DSS level 1-compliant provider, so what you're saying isn't accurate.

To Stripe: https://stripe.com/docs/payments/account/data-migrations/pan...

From Stripe: https://stripe.com/docs/payments/account/data-migrations/pan...

That's actually useful.

Can you do that even when your account is locked? How many other companies can you transfer the data to and which are they?

How are recurring payments handled?

My recollection of the changes that Visa and MC made a few years ago when they tightened the rules on using stored cards was that for cards stored after those changes went into effect you had to include in the data when submitting a card not present transaction a copy of the transaction ID of the card present transaction that you did when you stored the card.

I've not used Stripe so have no idea how you handle it. The other payment processors I've used all return their own transaction ID when you charge a card, not the actual Visa or MC transaction ID from the card network. Internally they maintain a mapping from their IDs to the underlying Visa/MC IDs and when you later do a not present transaction and give the reference transaction ID they look up the underlying Visa/MC ID and use that.

My understanding then is that to move from processor X to processor Y I'd need not only all the stored card numbers at X (assuming I'm using their storage service and not handling card storage myself) and need a way to get for all those cards the underlying Visa/MC transaction ID for the transaction where the customer gave me the card.

Then at processor Y they would have to support importing that data, including a way to import the underlying Visa/MC transaction IDs and assign them Y transaction IDs to be used when using those cards for not present transactions.

Hey, OP, why don't you share name of your company? Anonymous complaint is just an anonymous complaint, and nothing more.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36969049

I have no idea about Stripe because it doesn't support Viet Nam. Paypal is very good payment gateway for my startup.

This is a valid viewpoint. Not sure why the downs. It seems HN is largely biased.

There are plenty of horror stories of Paypal holding funds. They've been doing it for far longer than most these other companies, since they've been around longer than most of them.

I have been using Paypal for 5 years for my startup and I don't have any major problems with Paypal. Sometimes, customers filed a case agaist us and Paypal decided that the case was closed in customer's favor although we did nothing wrong. However, it's very rare.

All it takes is a few quick searches from the search bar at the bottom of the page to see what I'm referring to. You can search just "paypal" or "paypal stole" or "paypal froze" for some of the more egregious examples submitted to HN, or "paypal banned" for some of the more common ones of paypal reclassifying businesses after years of working just fine.

Much of them are older, because honestly Paypal had quite a few years of being the vendor of choice before a lot of alternatives came around. I'm not sure if that means Paypal had enough competition that they had to deal with their behavior or they're just used less so you hear about the problems less, but for anyone that's been around for a while, hearing about Paypal screwing someone over is not going to sound like something extraordinary.

We've been using Adyen at work and are pretty happy. Their support helped us, even after some bot did a massive "attack" and we got a 25k bill, they pardoned most of it.

Anyone used Block (previously Square) as an alternative to Stripe?

I was curious about Square changing their name so I looked it up[0] and it turns out that they did change it to Block. Looking through the Block site (https://block.xyz) I see a lot of Blockchain stuff (I guess that's why the name change). Originally, I was pretty positive on Square but this change of direction makes me leary of using them in the future. Too bad.

[0] https://block.xyz/inside/press-release-block

Ok, maybe Clover is better? https://www.getapp.com/website-ecommerce-software/a/stripe/c... Although Square/Block has more stars than Clover... mmm https://www.getapp.com/website-ecommerce-software/a/stripe/c...

While we're discussing alternatives, does anyone know any for specifically Stripe Connect? E.g. for a marketplace app.

“do things that don’t scale” is just a pleasant way of describing enshittification.

ie that things that make ur product good won’t scale

thank you for putting it in such crips words

I'd argue that most things don't scale (globally) without being enshitted. Humans are inherently regional/local.

This post was on the frontpage. Now its not even in the first 3 pages. People really think post ranks are not controlled by someone ? I know there are formulae to calculate the post rankings. But I smell BS.

The HN algorithm heavily penalizes disagreement in the belief that topics which cause people to fight with each other are bad for the behavioral norms that enable HN to have better discussions than other similar sites (not perfect discussions, just better discussions).

If many individual comments receive lots of upvotes and lots of down votes, for example, that's a signal the topic is controversial. The algorithm automatically penalizes controversial discussions, regardless of what the topic is, because its goal is to maximize the number of "good behavior" discussions, not the number discussions.

Stripe, like US politics, is highly polarizing. You don't have to read hard into this page to see there are strong disagreements on whether Stripe is good or bad. The algorithm detects those disagreements generically (with no care for the company or topic involved) and penalizes the page.

Interesting was thinking to use stripe with some startup ideas, perhaps not then. Will certainly need to give this one more research.

I’m pretty certain Elon Musk will be releasing something with X that’s comparable to WeChats payment system. Of course it’s not an option now but if I’m not mistaken that’s what the goal was with PayPal/X from the onset.

Tell HN:

What is the alternative to these large corporations? I will try to say it again… Web3. Easy to integrate as an option, start accepting payments worldwid, and you can never get deplatformed and your funds won’t be frozen. Why not?

Over and over I see HN complain about enshittification of the latest large platform, but also somehow many people knee-jerk downvote anything about the decentralized alternatives because they don’t want them to catch on. So then… enjoy the enshittification I guess?

“Something something we have to vote for our government to do something”. I think we can just build open source decentralized alternatives to all this stuff.

I think the issue would be that you need to offer payment methods that your customers trust and will use. Does Web3 satisfy that need?

USDT, USDC, Ethereum, Bitcoin are trusted round the world. It’s not like the latest memecoin garbage

Most people outside of circles like this one have never heard of Ethereum, let alone USDT or USDC, and when they hear Bitcoin, they think "risky" or "scam". If your product or service is specifically aimed at tech enthusiasts and you take pains to make it easy, maybe you could get away with accepting payments only in crypto (though I doubt it), but otherwise there's no way.

So your answer is that they aren’t well-knowj enough, and the ecosystem isn’t consumer-friendly enough, kind of like decades of personal computers and tech enthusiasts like the Homebrew Club, which preceded the Personal Computer going mainstream, and then the corporate-produced Mobile Phone explosion based on software that was developed originally for personal computers? Yeah sure, these things take time.

None of these are actually trusted by the general population. The average person has never even heard of USDT and USDC and barely knows what the other 2 are.

So excluding crypto/web3 for the above reasons, does anyone have recommendations for non stripe mostly us friendly solutions?

There will be Crickets

Another downside of these alternatives is that they are not decentralized either. USDT and USDC are controlled by a single entity each. The top 0.01% of Bitcoin holders own 27% of all the Bitcoin [0], and even worse, the top 0.1% of Bitcoin miners control half of the miner capacity [1]. I am not sure about Ethereum, but as in any pure capitalistic system, the accumulation of wealth by a few is inevitable [2].

[0] https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/bitcoin-cryptocurrency-weal...

[1] https://fortune.com/2021/10/26/bitcoin-mining-capacity-owner...

[2] "capital has the tendency for concentration and centralization in the hands of richest capitalists. Marx explains" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_accumulation#:~:text=c...

“Controlled” is a strong word considering that there is no master key that can just misuse all the tokens secretly the way that FTX or Celsius did. Everyone gets their own key, to move their tokens.

Even if Ethereum comes to be controlled by a few people, their incentives are not to kill the value of their own ecosystem (unless they are a state actor, or if all Ethereum tokens are somehow bought out completely by Elon Musk lol). And the only way the blockchain can get screwed is by miners ALL agreeing to refuse to mint new blocks. Or miners could re-order transactions within a block, which they already do. That’s it.

Now you could say that the dollar reserves of USDC are controlled by one company, and I agree. Even though USDC is run by Circle which is a regulated company that can pay out with no slippage to your bank account, and receive dollars the same way. They are one step away from banks and may even get insurance and reinsurance similar to FDIC.

But you may still not want to see one company be the gateway. That’s why we started the Intercoin project, to make a truly decentralized ecosystem including decentralizing the gateways too (just like the Internet is).

But for today, it’s already no different than any bank in the Free Banking Era, which is how the United States did almost all of its money all the way before the greenback. As long as the music is on and the musical chairs are moving, your $500 in tokens that you use for your consumer purchases is safe.

Not really. I cannot use bitcoin with any stretch of imagination the same way I can use EUR.

It's pretty obvious that the average customer doesn't have any cryptocurrency to pay with, so the onboarding system they would use to begin with would be some company that charges their credit card or debits their bank account and then converts it to cryptocurrency to transfer to you.

Which they wouldn't have any reason to trust any less than they do PayPal or Stripe, in the sense of not debiting their account when they didn't authorize it.

So what you need is a federated system in which the customer can choose whichever of those providers they want to use and that doesn't matter to the seller who can receives transfers from any company that customer paid for some cryptocurrency. The customer can use whoever they trust.

Now, maybe that doesn't have a good UX yet, but it could.

They have to trust it once and then their money is under their control thereafter, whereas with these companies, they hold everyone’s money. Like FTX. Or Banks. They can freeze customer funds, too, btw, or rehypothecate them as we’ve seen. Crypto doesn’t. When it comes to trust, crypto wins. And as time goes on, the ecosystem of fiat on-ramps and off-ramps would only get better and more recognizable. There’s no reason the gateways can’t be regulated as money transmitters or broker-dealers. But what would you rather do, keep ALL your money with third party black boxes who may misuse it or cut you off from spending (if you live in China, Canada, Sweden etc) or put SOME of your money into wallets under your direct control?

My parents, which represent an average person nowadays, do know how to put card data into a site to pay something. What they don't know is how to pay with crypto, even more- for them cryptocoins= automatic scam. Web3 can be a nieche solution for some nieche ppl, but I don't see how it can become mainstream now, as a business you anyway need a classic payment processor bc too few ppl know what is crypto and how to use it

My parents, which represent an average person nowadays, do know how to ride a horse to get somewhere. What they don't know is how to drive a automobile, even more- for them gasoline=danger. Cars can be a nieche solution for some nieche ppl, but I don't see how it can become mainstream now, as a business you anyway need a classic horse barn bc too few ppl know what is a automobile and how to use it

lmao, cars now are ubiquitous, maybe care to provide a better example, or just ignore me, since you have your own beliefs

That was the point He was implying someone could ahve said this in the past

Feel free to provide examples of companies which a) are not 'in the crypto business' (ie they sell widgets, or software, not NFTs) b) obtain the majority of their revenue via crypto.

Crypto is closer to autogyro than automobile in adoption, and there is no guarantee that will ever change.

You don’t have to get the whole world, just people who have crypto — which is millions of people!

More like: ppl that are potential customers AND have crypto

> Why not?

- Transaction fees

- Transaction times

- KYC

- refunds

Just off the top of my head

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