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Comment by sivers | Hacker News Reader

PAYMENT TANGENT for my fellow entrepreneurs here that take Visa/Mastercard payments:

I tried to sign up to Lambda Labs just now to check out Hermes 3.

Created an account, verified my email address, entered my billing info...

... but then it says they only accept CREDIT cards, NOT DEBIT cards.

I had never heard of this, so I tried it anyway. I entered my business Mastercard (from mercury.com FWIW), that's never been rejected anywhere, and immediately got the response that they couldn't accept it because it's a debit card.

Anyone know why a business would choose to only accept credit not debit cards?

I don't have any credit cards, neither personal nor business, and never found a need for one.

So I deleted my account at Lambda Labs, which was kind of disappointing since I was looking forward to trying this.

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That seems completely backwards? Debit interchange fees are usually lower aren't they? and if you run it with a pin as a debit there's almost no charge for the vendor.

Definitely weird, as everything I know about the incentives for that go in the other direction for a vendor.

I think I read somewhere that forcing credit cards is a way for the merchant to completely avoid prepaid cards. Though obviously imperfect.

Privacy.com had to overhaul their card generation backend a few years ago specifically to handle merchants refusing their single-purpose card numbers due to them being detected as potentially prepaid cards. Though they did do it, so it might work for your case now.

I'm sure there's a fraud angle where someone signs up with a cheap prepaid card, runs up a huge bill, and then the business has no recourse. Though I'm not familiar with Lambda Labs or their billing.

> I'm sure there's a fraud angle where someone signs up with a cheap prepaid card, runs up a huge bill, and then the business has no recourse. Though I'm not familiar with Lambda Labs or their billing.

I work at Lambda Labs. This is basically the reason. Fraud has been a problem and these are attempts at us granting resources only to legitimate accounts. We have struggled with people spinning up resources and not paying for them, which is detrimental to our business.

> Anyone know why a business would choose to only accept credit not debit cards?

Maybe they want to place a temporary charge to verify the card's valid? I don't believe you can do so with a debit card.

I believe you can: my Visa Debit has temporary charges placed on it all the time.

I presume they want to preauthorize a decent amount just in case, but this tends to really upset debit card holders because it steals money from them for a week.

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