Live data from Hacker News

Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

news.ycombinator.com

501–510 of 705 posts

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#501
post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I often wonder how the site survives without sticky autoplay videos popping up halfway down the page and covering 80% of the content...

Surely it's due to the mobile application that HN is always pushing. And the invasive tracking. And the paywall. And the ads, the ads go without saying.

The ads keep HN alive. But because each one only needs to sell "one product" (the job they're hiring for) nobody hardly notices them.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arbitration doesn't mean no-recourse or bias toward to the provider.

Arbitration does absolutely means a bias to the party that requires it. You can't have a long-term relationship with a company and not acquire some bias.

Even if the arbiter is pure and just the company will learn how to represent its side in the best light before the arbiter; it has many chances to learn.

The other side has one chance to learn.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#503
post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. What will be the provider you recommend? Any local banks?

I think the best solution here, is add a payments orchestration solution to your stack. There are others, I know of this spanish startup integrating with stripe. In this way,you can have both your bank TPV/ Payments and Stripe working alongside, if any fails just put the other, or the one giving better prices by default, etc https://monei.com/es/features/payments-orchestration/

This seems sound for one off transactions, but I'd be interested in how to make this work with subscriptions, assuming you don't want to take the PCI burden of holding the raw card details - is it a case of asking all your customers to resubmit their details to the new payment processor?

I guess in the case of the orchestrator you linked they retain the card details and can then charge using any of n processors, though I'd be interested in thoughts from the overall thread where people are advising to be ready to change payment processor

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#504
post #158
post #87

The worst part about these type of cases is not being able to get a straight answer. There is a whole subset of big tech that has taken the "you must be a fraudster therefore we can't unfuck the situation" approach to customer support. It's an arms race with fraudsters that eventually sucks in legitimate businesses.

IMO it is not the "you must be a fraudster" logic as much as "we have enough other customers that we can burn you without much worry of repercussions". As much as I hate government intervention in business, it really seems like there needs to be a way to force companies to actually be direct, accessible, and reactive in cases like this. I went through something similar with Venmo randomly locking my account after I r…

This could be a simple regulation - put a burden of proof on the company, and a prescribe escalation process with comment from the customer at each stage.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#505

Used to work for a “high risk” payment processor, we inherited tons of accounts that were terminated by Stripe, Square, and PayPal. Here’s one small bit of inside info that may help the newer businesses out there: Most real payment processors (e.g. banks, merchant services companies) “underwrite” a company BEFORE allowing them to process. Underwriting means they look over the business model, financials, etc and make…

FWIW, PayPal tells you that if you expect to run a large business with them you should call them and escalate yourself to underwriting BEFORE you massively scale something up that might cause them to flag your account; and so, unlike with Amazon Flexible Payments--which did screw me over soon after I started operating--I never had issues with PayPal, as I followed their process and thereby had an assigned sales agent who could negotiate with underwriting from the get-go.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#506
This is bad - but the worst part is that due to this trending on HN, I’m willing to put $50 down on that you’ve received some sort of personal or special message from Stripe support; for PR’s sake, so you can say someone reached out and resolved the issue.

Which is total bullshit. If you hadn’t, or didn’t really have the means to; create such a hubbub on social media about this - your issue would never have been resolved.

I actually think it’s worse when companies do this, rather than fix the clear, underlying support problem.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#507
post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Next time I build something with Stripe I'm going to test it in production before launching I'm genuinely curious why you wouldn't have done that anyway? I pretty much always do, precisely so I can experience a full end to end user experience.

The funny part is, I thought that if I did a bunch of real transactions and then reversed them all, that our account might get flagged! That's in addition to explaining to our investors that we ended our launch day at -$1,000 due to all the chargeback fees because some dumb developer doesn't know what a testing environment is. And in addition to the fact that Stripe recommends against you testing in that way. I did g…

Yes. When interfacing with a complex system, especially one you don't control, always do at least one live test.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#510

We are in the process of moving off of Stripe Connect (with 60+ accounts) for this very reason. It's one big black box. They are a liability, not a service. Very sorry to hear of your situation, but it's because of people sharing stories like this that we've been planning our migration away to a more responsible (and responsive) processor for awhile. It's a ton of work to build new integrations, migrate data, and dis…

Could you share the reasons you decided to move off it?
Post reply on HN