> 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
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.
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.
Because your costs are inversely proportional to business size.
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.
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.
Exactly this, seen here: https://www.sitejabber.com/reviews/stripe.com
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.
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.
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.