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Stripe's API was down again

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Stripe's API was down again

#51

Post by MuffinFlavored »

tibbon wrote: post #44

Stripe gets the front page because they are popular with developers, but I've dealt with so many other more-corporate payment processors that are absolutely awful for reliability. Rampant downtime, terrible support, terrible concurrency limits, failure to meet SLAs, terrible documentation (900 page specs that are impossible to read). They all think they are awesome, and yet can't go more than 48 hours without having…

Let’s build an alternative that helps people connect to Visa/MasterCard

Oh wait... we can’t!

Re: Stripe's API was down again

#52

Post by october_sky »

drspacemonkey wrote: post #48
tibbon wrote: post #44

Stripe gets the front page because they are popular with developers, but I've dealt with so many other more-corporate payment processors that are absolutely awful for reliability. Rampant downtime, terrible support, terrible concurrency limits, failure to meet SLAs, terrible documentation (900 page specs that are impossible to read). They all think they are awesome, and yet can't go more than 48 hours without having…

I dealt with one that seemed actively hostile. They would change their API without any advance warning at all. Data fields that we depended on would mysteriously vanish in the middle of the day, causing our entire system to grind to a halt until we put in a hotfix. Happened several times in the two years I worked on that project.

Wow?! An API should be treated as a contract.. I hope you dropped them

Re: Stripe's API was down again

#55

Post by jijji »

duxup wrote: post #54

Anyone have any good advice on storing a failed transaction and retrying later? Is that even feasible with Stripe? Obviously there would be security considerations.

have your script test for your own network possibly being down, then if it gets a bad response, put the transaction in a queue to be retried later

Re: Stripe's API was down again

#56

Post by ComputerGuru »

jammygit wrote: post #40
dmlittle wrote: post #23

It would be great if Stripe would offer an RSS feed for status updates in addition to twitter posts. A lot of other services have one and it's very convenient to subscribe to in Slack for updates. At my current company, for example, we have a #third-party-outages channel which we have all available third party services (GitHub, NPM, CircleCI, Slack [yes, it's meta], HackerOne, etc.) status page RSS feed notify in cas…

I didn’t realize you could use slack as an rss client

Via a bot.

Re: Stripe's API was down again

#57

Post by ComputerGuru »

duxup wrote: post #54

Anyone have any good advice on storing a failed transaction and retrying later? Is that even feasible with Stripe? Obviously there would be security considerations.

The real solution is to never rely on one party. We fall back to another payment processor after using a heuristic to see if the error isn’t one that makes sense. If it’s a problem with the payment card, it’ll fail again, no harm done. If it’s a problem with the provider, it’ll go through.

(We wrote a payments abstraction library easy enough to (partially or fully) fill for any payment provider’s core functionality, so it’s literally just a couple more lines of code at the call site. It took several rewrites to get the abstraction to cover all the oddities each time we added a new provider implementation, though!)

Re: Stripe's API was down again

#58

Post by maxgashkov »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #57
duxup wrote: post #54

Anyone have any good advice on storing a failed transaction and retrying later? Is that even feasible with Stripe? Obviously there would be security considerations.

The real solution is to never rely on one party. We fall back to another payment processor after using a heuristic to see if the error isn’t one that makes sense. If it’s a problem with the payment card, it’ll fail again, no harm done. If it’s a problem with the provider, it’ll go through. (We wrote a payments abstraction library easy enough to (partially or fully) fill for any payment provider’s core functionality,…

But for that you have to touch CC info directly with all the risks and compliance bullshit.

Re: Stripe's API was down again

#59

Post by dangrossman »

maxgashkov wrote: post #58
ComputerGuru wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real solution is to never rely on one party. We fall back to another payment processor after using a heuristic to see if the error isn’t one that makes sense. If it’s a problem with the payment card, it’ll fail again, no harm done. If it’s a problem with the provider, it’ll go through. (We wrote a payments abstraction library easy enough to (partially or fully) fill for any payment provider’s core functionality,…

But for that you have to touch CC info directly with all the risks and compliance bullshit.

You can use a third party vault to collect and store CC info without it touching your servers. I use Spreedly. I can then charge any of the stored cards with any of like 45 different payment gateways, including Stripe. Keeping your own billing systems online when one of your gateways is down is one of the use cases. This has worked great for the past 7 or so years I've been using them. It might become more difficult with PSD2 SCA however...

Re: Stripe's API was down again

#60

Post by athrun »

dangrossman wrote: post #59
maxgashkov wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But for that you have to touch CC info directly with all the risks and compliance bullshit.

You can use a third party vault to collect and store CC info without it touching your servers. I use Spreedly. I can then charge any of the stored cards with any of like 45 different payment gateways, including Stripe. Keeping your own billing systems online when one of your gateways is down is one of the use cases. This has worked great for the past 7 or so years I've been using them. It might become more difficult…

what happens when the vault goes down?
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