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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

#631

Post by GrumpyNl »

mgkimsal wrote: post #230
apeace wrote: post #198

I had a very similar experience, except it was on our launch day . We hadn't charged a single live customer yet, but we had done plenty of tests using the Stripe testing environment. So we go live with a huge launch event, and we have customers signing up in droves. When they get to the last step -- payment -- they get an error. Logging in to the dashboard I didn't see any indication that there was anything wrong wit…

> 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.

Always test your life platform, doenst matter if its payments or software, always test life, i can not emphasize that enough.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#632

Post by tuukkah »

apeace wrote: post #198

I had a very similar experience, except it was on our launch day . We hadn't charged a single live customer yet, but we had done plenty of tests using the Stripe testing environment. So we go live with a huge launch event, and we have customers signing up in droves. When they get to the last step -- payment -- they get an error. Logging in to the dashboard I didn't see any indication that there was anything wrong wit…

Same happened to me a year ago. My customer was on a tight schedule to run a trial, and postponing the launch on the launch day because of Stripe ruined their trial.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#633

Post by iuiz »

phendrenad2 wrote: post #245

According to previous posts* this company sells something related to cannibis. I'd love to know why certain categories are always flagged or silently banned. Cannibis, sex toys, porn, crypto, etc. Payment processors seem to always give these categories the worst service and whenever a company is nuked like this, it's usually one of these categories. Why is that? It almost feels like there's some secret government org…

Nice to see my post linked. Last time I was accused of being a shill account, however I just do not post often. :D

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#634

Post by cx42net »

canadiantim wrote: post #209
brightball wrote: post #131

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…

I'm just starting to use Lago (getlago.com) for this. I'm not affiliated with them, but it solves the need for me for an open-source payment-processor-agnostic billing system that can easily swap between processors while maintaining a single source of truth.

But what happens if getlago.com bans you? Haven't you just moved the single-point-of-failure at a different place?

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#635

Post by cx42net »

The discussion here is very interesting. Many mentions the idea to not put all your eggs in the same (Stripe) basket. I agree with it, but how?

You can not just store the credit card of your user (or have to go through a heavy compliance), and using services like Killbill.io or GetLago.com is just moving the single point of failure to another place.

How would you ensure that you are not 100% relying on a specific payment provider, without keeping all the credit card informations of your users?

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#637

Post by whiplash451 »

zht wrote: post #538
whiplash451 wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being direct, accessible and reactive at scale when you’re processing billions of dollars of transactions simply is not possible. Stripe and other companies are doing their best, but they are in an arms race with more and more elaborate fraudsters. At planet scale.

right a company that makes billions of dollars can't hire more people to staff up their risk/compliance/fraud teams

That does not scale with the fraudsters. To have zero situations like OP is describing, Stripe would need to linearly scale its support team with the number of fraudsters, which would make their business simply non-viable.

This would be the same as saying: I want zero car accidents on the road, so I'll scale the police headcount linearly with the number of reckless drivers.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#638

Post by cx42net »

Some mentions that Stripe is having more and more bad press like these, but I do wonder if that's true.

Granted, horror stories just like OP's are not great, for Stripe and for those who use Stripe, but we tend to keep in mind the bad press more than the good.

With Stripe growing and having more and more business, it's just basic math that the number of bad press will grow along. OP's doesn't mention (maybe intentionally) what business he offers so maybe the team has a good reason to put 35% of their user on hold (granted, the communication around it isn't great).

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#639

Post by pamonrails »

cx42net wrote: post #635

The discussion here is very interesting. Many mentions the idea to not put all your eggs in the same (Stripe) basket. I agree with it, but how? You can not just store the credit card of your user (or have to go through a heavy compliance), and using services like Killbill.io or GetLago.com is just moving the single point of failure to another place. How would you ensure that you are not 100% relying on a specific pay…

Kill Bill (note: I'm a co-founder) provides payment routing capabilities, so you can integrate with multiple providers (e.g. Stripe + Adyen) and shift payment traffic to go through one or the other dynamically. This is very common in large b2c companies.

That being said, to your point, this still requires either a vendor neutral vault for the cards or to tokenize them in all of the vendors. Possible, but still hard to do in practice.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#640

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

sudden_dystopia wrote: post #287
orionint wrote: post #121

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…

This is how an auto insurance company I used to work for wrote policies. They didn’t underwrite them until there was a claim and then they would rescind the policy and deny the claim when they found a “material misrepresentation”. They called it underwriting on the back end.

Huh? That sure seems like fraud, unless there are details I'm missing here.
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