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Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#131

Post by brightball »

Stuff like this is why I think a business should have a system that abstracts away the payment processor.

I use Stripe for invoices, but I can easily send an invoice through another platform if needed.

For processing transactions on the web, I would always lean toward using a service like ChargeBee that allows me to setup multiple payment gateways.

Getting off the ground quickly is one thing, but the moment that you have reliable revenue is the moment that you need to put some serious emphasis on redundancy across your business to plan for disasters, outages, etc. It's worth it to pay the fees to maintain a 2nd (or 3rd) payment processor once you have that type of revenue coming in.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#132

Post by tannhaeuser »

tannerbrockwell wrote: post #16

Stories like this are why ultimately all payments will transition to crypto based and self custody. Having your livelihood at the whim of an algorithm is not only not cool. It is not sustainable. None of the legacy payment rails can be trusted to run without interruption. This includes Stripe, paypal and even the expected FedNOW service being introduced next year.

You'd think stories like this call for standardization of payment processors (using APIs such that changing providers is possible in an instant), as an extension of monetary sovereignty, mandated by law.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#133

Post by redeeman »

senko wrote: post #56

This is bad. There are more and more Stripe horror stories like this, and from an outsider perspective it looks awfully like PayPal behaved back in the day (probably still does but I'd never touch it again as a merchant). I have positive experiences with using Stripe in my last startup and we're currently building Stripe integration on another, which will process about 50% of our revenue (the other payment method bei…

I have personal knowledge of more than one instance where stripe totally screwed over small companies and simply decided to ignore any contact for more than half a year, withholding the money and putting everyone in limbo.

yeah, im sure its a minority of accounts at stripe, but seriously, do not take the chance!

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#134

Post by awinter-py »

Even if there's a legit reason for this, the lack of support bandwidth to resolve it is a key platform governance issue. Like if there's nobody on the other end of the fax machine, at scale, that's bad for everyone who touches the stripe ecosystem.

Inability to explain it is infuriating. Absent an explanation, everyone's default assumption should be that they did it randomly, by mistake, or maliciously, and that they're liable for damages. If S is being told by law enforcement to do this, fine, I get it, but at least do an EOY report like everyone else saying '90% of our unexplained holds were court orders, stop blaming us and help us reform this'.

'Governance through obscurity' isn't going to be any better than security through obscurity

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#135

Post by KennyBlanken »

TigeriusKirk wrote: post #98
ianhawes wrote: post #40

I will take the OP's story at face value, but I think a common theme in these sort of posts is the "Stripe not happy with my business model" angle which typically does not actually include any details about the business model. For example, a few weeks ago the founder of Tailwind tweeted [0] about how Stripe had shut down their account when they were set to launch the Tailwind Job Board, despite many other job boards…

There's actually a response from Patrick Collison in that thread that may shed some light on OP's case. https://twitter.com/patrickc/status/1550136569482252289 ""What is happening?" => basically, a major uptick in attempted fraud over the first half of this year that necessitated making our systems stricter. But have an idea for a structural fix here. More soon. (DM me if you've had problems on this front.)" The DM p…

Making your systems stricter will have the obvious side effect of increasing false negatives. Not scaling support, or fixing what is clearly a fundamentally broken support system, is incompetent.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#136

Post by [deleted] »

ianhawes wrote: post #40

I will take the OP's story at face value, but I think a common theme in these sort of posts is the "Stripe not happy with my business model" angle which typically does not actually include any details about the business model. For example, a few weeks ago the founder of Tailwind tweeted [0] about how Stripe had shut down their account when they were set to launch the Tailwind Job Board, despite many other job boards…

[deleted]

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#138

Post by iLoveOncall »

mikece wrote: post #125
iLoveOncall wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never. In 20+ years of using Internet I have never been banned unduly from any service. I have seen way to many stories about people claiming to have been banned for no reasons from services (online video games are a popular one) before it is revealed the ban was 100% legitimate, to take any new story like this at face value.

I was banned by PayPal once because I didn't sign up with an SSN or EIN and proceeded to make enough to trigger a review because they couldn't file a proper 1099-K on me. This was an oversight on my part and I offered to correct the situation by submitting any documentation they needed -- photo ID, SSN, prior year tax returns to PROVE that I was paying tax on the revenue coming from PayPal, the new LLC and EIN I had…

No, not legitimate at all.

PayPal had banned me because I was under 18 when I opened my account, they then allowed me to open a new one (right after this one got suspended) and it has been working fine without any issue since then (10 years+).

Stop doing shady stuff.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#139

Post by neonate »

imdsm wrote: post #128

Stripe CEO Patrick Collison: "What is happening?" => basically, a major uptick in attempted fraud over the first half of this year that necessitated making our systems stricter. But have an idea for a structural fix here. More soon. (DM me if you've had problems on this front.) https://twitter.com/patrickc/status/1550136569482252289

That tweet was posted in July about a different case. At least I assume it was different.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#140

Post by alphabettsy »

gfodor wrote: post #118
jollybean wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We should, but the problem is consumers want the protections offered by PayPal and VISA who do fraud analysis and can clawback money etc. etc.. There's definitely a space for 'digital cash', for sure, but consumers will prefer the former. When it comes to money, there are just deeply inherent issues of dealing with fraud, spam, goods not delivered etc. etc.. which adds significant overhead to the whole system. Most p…

Yes, of course this is a huge challenge. That’s the point tho, the high order bit is we should want to solve these problems and support good faith actors who are actually trying to.

What problems? There are organizations that are not Stripe where they have much better support.
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