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Comment by levocardia | Hacker News Reader

I've gotten the sense that PayPal is circling the drain lately. Whenever I log on (which is rare) I'm bombarded by modals and banners offering payment plans, digital coupons, etc. When I receive money, there's lots of clever UI design that's trying to trick me into transferring it instantly (for a fee) or keeping it in PayPal, as opposed to withdrawing it to my bank account. I suppose this is just one more sign the company is in financial trouble.

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Lately? It's been that way for decades.

I'll add one more to your list: since many things are paid in USD, and most of us live outside the US, your payment goes through a currency conversion. Up until a few years ago it was possible to configure PayPal to let your bank convert using bank's own rates, although it was hidden behind dark UI patterns. Then they removed it and now force you to run conversion at PayPal rates, which are just terrible, much worse than any bank I've ever used. This was about the time I stopped using PayPal completely, so I can't say exactly how much of a price hike this caused, but it's probably around 10%.

I can still defer conversion to my bank.

>Then they removed it and now force you to run conversion at PayPal rates, which are just terrible, much worse than any bank I've ever used.

When was this? As of a few months ago it was working fine for me, although it required a bit of finagling to get it to work on new cards I added.

I have thought PayPal was circling the drain for so long that, honestly, it probably says more about me than PayPal. Still though, I don’t get it, as far as I can tell they are just… essentially doing the same thing as credit card companies, but with less regulatory protection for their customers.(?)

Like they made sense 20 years ago when banks didn’t know about the internet. But now they are befuddling.

Looking at their revenue charted tells a different story.

One in which they are thriving.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/382619/paypal-annual-rev...

PayPal ($29B) also does more revenue than Mastercard ($25B).

Revenue != Profit

Despite my bottomless hate for PayPal, I’ve been keeping my account active because there was always some worse option to give your credit card number to.

But with Privacy.com, I’m finally ready to let go.

Same here, I absolutely despise PayPal but end up using them often because I simply don't trust most retailers with my card information :(

(and it's often faster checkout if I don't have my CC details handy)

That being said, there's quite a bit of competition these days from BNPL vendors (klarna, afterpay etc.). I don't believe they are any more virtuous though...

Imagine shopping and not trusting the shop enough to pull out your wallet inside

Before chip cards were introduced in Europe (which was 20 years ago so most of my experience was as a child) this could happen.

My parents would avoid using a credit card in some restaurants and (less often) at remote petrol stations.

It's not that I do not trust the shop to scam/fraud me (well, sometimes I do), but I do not trust their IT processes.

There are a surprising number of online shops that rolled their own payment processing (or at least seem to be). So it's more akin to entrusting a shop with a photo of both sides of your credit card and hoping that this photo does not get into the wrong hands.

Here's an example of this happening where drivers licenses were exposed via an open AWS S3 bucket: https://www.itnews.com.au/news/over-54000-scanned-nsw-driver...

I'm also all in on privacy.com. I hope they stick around because it's such an awesome service.

Every time I bring this up, someone says "oh, they'll ruin your credit rating!"

No, actually they don't, unless you do something fraudulent. If you cancel your subscription legitimately and then kill the credit card, you've just made sure there aren't any "accidental" charges.

Most people want to use privacy.com so you don’t have to cancel the subscription because websites like to put up artificial barriers like having to call a phone number and wait on hold to cancel a subscription. So what happens in that situation where you technically never officially canceled the subscription and so the company continues to bill you and when the payments don’t succeed, they send it to collections?

Hypothetical.

In my experience, they say "your credit card is failing, please give us another one." Because credit cards fail all the time. It's not Red Alert.

You go to the page to change your credit card, and THEN you usually can find the "cancel my account" link. As long as you're not still using their service, you don't owe anything. They cancel you, and that's that. No collections agency.

If someone has an actual event, not a hypothetical, speak up.

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