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Comment by RokStdy | Hacker News Reader

I had a mixed reaction to this blog post. On the one hand it is helpful to understand the risk involved with using Stripe for payment processing. I presume, because Stripe wants to onboard users as fast as possible they back-load some of the review process for new accounts. That's an obvious double-edged sword and clearly impacted these guys negatively.

But, on the other hand, I felt that the tone was a little bit strange. Stripe doesn't have to do business with you, or anybody else. It's not offensive to my sensibilities that Stripe has it's own processes and concerns as it relates to it's customers (not to mention regulatory requirements).

And this bit stuck in my craw "..So overnight without warning Stripe had decided to stop us from using their services after 5 days.."

That email was your warning. You did, in fact, get a warning. You got 5 days to change payment processors.

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If you think 5 days is "warning" in this situation you either have never written a line of payment processing code, are not a coder, or are horribly misinformed. 5 days is NOTHING, they got lucky b/c they had a paypal backup but if they hadn't they would have probably needed to stop taking payments for a period of time while they re-wrote their payment stack. In 5 days they were expected (note at least 1 of those days was a weekend) find a new processor, get approved (not all are as fast as Stripe), link their bank account (2-3 days min), write code to use it, write tests (this is handling money after all), manually test the different cases, and deploy it. Not to mention that every other project those developers were working on have to be put on hold (assuming none were more urgent). This is nothing to sneeze at and let's also remember that the OP was doing nothing wrong (so much so Stripe has reversed their decision). So just let that sink in, a company is given 5 days to rewrite a substantial piece of their platform code or be cut off all because of a false positive with no realistic way to communicate with Stripe (No, email tickets doesn't cut it).

Right, that bugs me too. "We are disrupting the payments industry! So we would like our customers to shoulder more of the risk in our market. We've decided you're too risky, so drop everything you're doing right now and spend the next few days finding a new payments provider. Thank you for choosing Stripe!"

Imagine if you build a platform around Stripe payments, and then having to rip it out and go with something else. If that's the case, five days is essentially overnight, if you have retask developers/hire contractors or do it yourself.

I have no idea what kind of transactions he was performing, and whether cutting him off is ultimately justified. What's concerning is a TOS agreement that provides no means of arbitration, with notice comes via an email (what happens if this goes in the spam filter?).

I believe the point made in the blog post is that 5 days warning for basically just kicking you out for no reason is not something you would expect of a business partner.

Stripe is a provider, yes. They can choose who to do business with, yes.

But the way to handle this is basically giving no recourse to the customer? I mean, like the post says, not even an email where you could at least argue your case for those times when there are misunderstandings at least?

I think it's not so much about kicking the off Stripe as much as the way they did it and how they left no alternative to these guys (except for public shaming, which apparently worked just as expected).

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