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Tell HN: Stripe killed my music locker service, so I'm open sourcing it

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Re: Tell HN: Stripe killed my music locker service, so I'm open sourcing it

#151

Post by subhro »

grose wrote: post #70

UPDATE 2: My Stripe account is back! Thank you so much! inter.tube will remain online, but open source from now on! Update: I have reached out to the nice Stripe employee who volunteered their email, let's see what happens. It's been pointed out a few times that my marketing says the site won't die, and me killing it would be very ironic. This is 100% true, and I have decided to leave the site up even if Stripe decid…

One thing I would strongly recommend. GET OFF STRIPE. Talk to a proper bank like USBank or Chase. It is not hard to integrate with their payment processor. They WILL send you through proper underwriting and will have your back. At least they had and continues to have mine with a firearms business.

Let me be also very clear. When you are going through underwriting, you will feel at times that this was a colossally bad idea, but it pays off its trouble in gold.

Re: Tell HN: Stripe killed my music locker service, so I'm open sourcing it

#152

Post by rexreed »

subhro wrote: post #151
grose wrote: post #70

UPDATE 2: My Stripe account is back! Thank you so much! inter.tube will remain online, but open source from now on! Update: I have reached out to the nice Stripe employee who volunteered their email, let's see what happens. It's been pointed out a few times that my marketing says the site won't die, and me killing it would be very ironic. This is 100% true, and I have decided to leave the site up even if Stripe decid…

One thing I would strongly recommend. GET OFF STRIPE. Talk to a proper bank like USBank or Chase. It is not hard to integrate with their payment processor. They WILL send you through proper underwriting and will have your back. At least they had and continues to have mine with a firearms business. Let me be also very clear. When you are going through underwriting, you will feel at times that this was a colossally bad…

What tech do you use to integrate it with your apps? Especially ones that seem to greatly prefer Stripe? Chase has been a solid bank for us but I'd like to not mix my payment processor and bank in case things go south. What are your rates? Do you have to pay monthly gateway fees or minimums? How long did the underwriting process take and what were the major headaches?

Re: Tell HN: Stripe killed my music locker service, so I'm open sourcing it

#153

Post by blacklion »

I have tough question for you: how good your service in understanding convoluted metadata and non-traditional formats?

I have about 2.5Tb of Music, and I can not import it to any media management / streaming self-hosted service (including Subsonic and all other DLNA servers & Ko).

Problem is... Metadata. Messy metadata.

Typical solution imports 1/2 of my collection Ok, 1/4 with mangled metadata and 1/4 without metadata at all or can not import completely.

Typical pain points:

(1) Metadata contains "Unknown Artist - Track01", but filenames are Ok and all information can be extracted from file names.

(2) It is FLAC, one file per Album, internal CUE and additional CUE file which references (absent) WAV file in same folder. Typical software duplicate such albums and one copy works, and other is "Not found" - and you must try to play to distinguish two. Some software can not understand embedded CUE at all, and show this as one big track + not-working album (because it can not find WAV referenced by CUE).

(3) FLAC, file per track, with per-track metadata, and CUE which reference all these files to add proper between-track pauses. Typical result: two identical albums. Often such CUE is rejected as "invalid" (because such CUE are "non-standard" extension invented by Exact Audio Copy software), and then it is Ok, but - see next item.

(4) FLAC, flile per track, files doesn't contain any metadata, but there is CUE which reference all these files. It works Ok, if CUE is not rejected as invalid, and, again becomes "Unknown Author - Unknown Album - Track N" if CUE was rejected (often).

(5) Same as 2-4 with APE, WavePack or TTA (do you know this format?) instead of FLAC.

(6) Such monstrosity as ISO9660 image which contains WavePack file (one, whole album), CUE, LOG, some JPEGs. With extension ".iso.wv". Looks like only foobar2000 on Windows can show such container properly, as one album packed with WavePack.

(7) ID3v1 with some non-latin characters in some 8 bit codepage (typically Win-1251 Cyrillic, but not always).

(8) ID3v1 with UTF-8 characters.

(9) ID3v2 with non-UTF-8 national characters.

(10) CUE files in single-byte codepages and not UTF-8 / CUE files in UTF-8. Different variants cause problems for different software.

I'm really struggle to "publish" my collection to listen to it on-the-go...

Re: Tell HN: Stripe killed my music locker service, so I'm open sourcing it

#154

Post by poorman »

peterlk wrote: post #49
poorman wrote: post #40

What is stopping more people from using blockchain networks for payments on their SaaS? From what I've seen, the transactions are just as easy to craft as a Stripe API.

Because running a business on cryptocurrency adds a lot of other operational headaches. Like volatility and currency conversion. If I’m running a small business, I want to focus on that and not an additional forex business

USDC is stable, not to mention you can charge in cryptocurrency based on the value of it compared to your native dollar. Not to mention the fees of using Stripe are insane compared so some networks that have native USDC.

Re: Tell HN: Stripe killed my music locker service, so I'm open sourcing it

#156

Post by subhro »

rexreed wrote: post #152
subhro wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing I would strongly recommend. GET OFF STRIPE. Talk to a proper bank like USBank or Chase. It is not hard to integrate with their payment processor. They WILL send you through proper underwriting and will have your back. At least they had and continues to have mine with a firearms business. Let me be also very clear. When you are going through underwriting, you will feel at times that this was a colossally bad…

What tech do you use to integrate it with your apps? Especially ones that seem to greatly prefer Stripe? Chase has been a solid bank for us but I'd like to not mix my payment processor and bank in case things go south. What are your rates? Do you have to pay monthly gateway fees or minimums? How long did the underwriting process take and what were the major headaches?

My web store runs WooCommerce and there are multiple plugins maintained by the processor that makes the payment processing seamless. They also provide SDKs for many popular frameworks for the integration.

Rate wise, I pay about 2.8% + 0.15c. Obviously different mechanisms (dipped vs typed vs internet) have different rates. There are no monthly gateway fees. The underwriting took about 3 weeks, but again I was very prompt in answering followup questions. I did not feel any additional headaches that I already did not anticipate due to the underwriting process. They did ask for a lot of documentation (that I totally expected them to ask and in my opinion is very relevant), licensing and such but again I am operating in a VERY regulated industry. They did want some clarification of business processes since they were not 100% familiar with selling guns online and in person. But I will say, they were very interested in understanding my requirements and help me do things according to the published laws and guidelines. Feel free to write to me at my hn_username at 80386 dot org if you want to chat. I would love to help with this if you are interested.

You do not need to mix your bank and payment processor. For example, my credit/debit card stack is USBank + Elavon but I bank with Navy Federal. I don't even have a checking account with USBank.

Re: Tell HN: Stripe killed my music locker service, so I'm open sourcing it

#158

Post by xtracto »

subhro wrote: post #151
grose wrote: post #70

UPDATE 2: My Stripe account is back! Thank you so much! inter.tube will remain online, but open source from now on! Update: I have reached out to the nice Stripe employee who volunteered their email, let's see what happens. It's been pointed out a few times that my marketing says the site won't die, and me killing it would be very ironic. This is 100% true, and I have decided to leave the site up even if Stripe decid…

One thing I would strongly recommend. GET OFF STRIPE. Talk to a proper bank like USBank or Chase. It is not hard to integrate with their payment processor. They WILL send you through proper underwriting and will have your back. At least they had and continues to have mine with a firearms business. Let me be also very clear. When you are going through underwriting, you will feel at times that this was a colossally bad…

Right, to anyone looking for alternatives, check out FISGlobal/Worldplay. They have a payment product that is "closer" to the card network, so it can be cheaper than Stripe.

Re: Tell HN: Stripe killed my music locker service, so I'm open sourcing it

#159

Post by subhro »

xtracto wrote: post #158
subhro wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing I would strongly recommend. GET OFF STRIPE. Talk to a proper bank like USBank or Chase. It is not hard to integrate with their payment processor. They WILL send you through proper underwriting and will have your back. At least they had and continues to have mine with a firearms business. Let me be also very clear. When you are going through underwriting, you will feel at times that this was a colossally bad…

Right, to anyone looking for alternatives, check out FISGlobal/Worldplay. They have a payment product that is "closer" to the card network, so it can be cheaper than Stripe.

I would say, they are not Stripe, yet. Unless you go through underwriting, it means nothing.

Also, they just failed a basic sniff test. I called their 800 number to ask if they would work with a firearms business and reached a voicemail. They say department is available between 8AM and 8PM Eastern. It is just after 6PM eastern right now. That does not instill a lot of confidence.

Re: Tell HN: Stripe killed my music locker service, so I'm open sourcing it

#160

Post by AnthonyMouse »

evandale wrote: post #142
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not the problem. If you had cryptocurrency from a lawful business activity in a non-custodial wallet, there are any number of places you can convert it to US dollars, and if you had a dispute with any of them you could use any of the others. The problem is the easy way to accept cryptocurrency is with a custodial wallet, and then they can be the same kind of jerks as PayPal et al. The premise of cryptocurrency…

It is decentralized in a way, like cash, but it's not as safe as cash. Technically cash isn't decentralized but for all intents and purposes it may as well be. Especially USD because anyone in the world will accept it. It's a little harder to scam/dupe someone with cash (especially in the US with USD because of the centralization) and you have the government to help if you receive counterfeit money. That's the part t…

> It's a little harder to scam/dupe someone with cash (especially in the US with USD because of the centralization) and you have the government to help if you receive counterfeit money.

How is this any different?

If you give someone a stack of hundred dollar bills and they rip you off and disappear where you can't find them, you're out of luck.

If someone commits fraud and you do know who they are, that's still illegal even if you paid them in Bitcoin.

The primary difference is that you can send someone Bitcoin over the internet. And then if they're on another continent your local law enforcement isn't going to have much to say about it and their local law enforcement may not care.

But in many cases that doesn't really matter. How many times do you actually pay anything to disreputable nobodies over the internet? It's mostly established merchants with known reputations that they're not inclined to sully just to rip someone off for a couple bucks, regardless of whether the customer can do a charge back.

It's not the irreversibility that's the problem. It's the UX, or the regulatory overhead, or the network effect. It has to get to the point that Netflix says "hey, Mastercard is charging us 3% and we could avoid that with Bitcoin, why are we leaving money on the table"?

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