Short version: You're a money transmitter, and hence a MSB, if they determine that you're providing payment processing services w/o there being an underlying good/service which is being paid for.
Shorter version: Pick a different weekend project, or your successful outcome is "Stripe disables your account due to fraud risk."
On top of that, the legal system has little to no understanding of technology and it appears from the cases I've seen (as a layman) that the courts take analogies as fact. Thus if someone testifies "it's like doing X with Y" even though X is very different because it's digital than the literal concrete X, they take it at face value.
This is why scraping data on a public website is treated as if it was breaking into a computer system, because "its like trying all the doors and finding one that's unlocked and then going in and taking the houses contents, your honor!!!1"
See Facebook versus Teachbook cough I mean Teachquest.
Or Microsoft versus Lindows cough I mean Linspire.
I've been sitting on this idea for almost three years, and with time it got so easy to build that I finally took a few weekends out. Here's a post from back when I'd have to build out the checkout experience and receipts myself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4507050
I'll have to look deeper into this trademark issue though. Anyone have any alternative name ideas?
This is the interpretation I'm hoping for. I am indeed using "the old connect way" (assuming you mean charging directly instead of through the platform). I wonder if taking a fee has an effect, though.
I pushed a question through to Stripe support. Will update here when I find out.
Put another way, your minimum viable product requires some legal infrastructure, otherwise you'll probably discover the hard way that it is not viable after all.