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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

#81

Post by JPws_Prntr_Fngr »

colesantiago wrote: post #56
evandale wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The actual questions you should ask in this situation are: How many people who use bitcoin would use this product? How many want to use this product and don't know how to use bitcoin? How many people CAN use bitcoin for THIS purchases? We're never going to switch to bitcoin for daily purchases but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be an option for people.

Because the answer is that nobody uses Bitcoin for anything legitimate other than speculation, paying off ransomware debts to criminals and just down right scams and fraud. I am yet to see any viable usecase of this bitcoin mania that is legitimate and doesn’t need tons of energy waste to accomplish its goal. For almost 15 years of bitcoin it has completely failed and we have no use for it. So yes, we should never sw…

"Bitcoin is only used for scams. Since this isn't a scam, Bitcoin can't solve the problem."

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

#82

Post by giancarlostoro »

jacquesm wrote: post #72
karlshea wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it so hard to fix your processes instead of relying on the HN Support Forum for the privileged few that know it’s an option?

Because at $5 MRR any time Stripe spends on this translates into a loss for them. But it's good PR so they should solve it anyway. Realize that operating a business like Stripe at scale is a lot harder than it may seem to be on the outside.

Today its $5 MRR... tomorrow it could turn into millions annually. They are shooting themselves in the foot. They live to give startups a leg up in terms of monetizing. I doubt this issue would take more than an hour for someone to look at it and realize someone goofed internally. Hell, someone internally goofed and wasted more money probably by not being thorough thereby forcing further time wasted.

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

#83

Post by freedomben »

londons_explore wrote: post #46
jabart wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who worked in the payment gateway industry, they go through underwriting. They provide all necessary documentation, a person reviews it and periodically re-reviews that information. Another item to note is that the Sponsor Bank sets most of these rules. For a product that is making <$100/mo, the risk is too great and not worth answering a ton of questions every month by the sponsor bank and/or visa/mc each…

This. It's a simple calculation of risk vs profit. Payment gateways are happy to put up with more risk, and put more effort into de-risking you as a client, if they are getting lots of profits from you. Whereas if you have a turnover of $10k/year, and they're earning only 0.5% of that in fees, then it isn't worth them taking much risk or putting much effort in to earn $50. It would be nice if people like stripe were…

> It would be nice if people like stripe were more upfront about this. They could easily say "We have determined that your business might be high risk for us. If you pay us $1000 (which will be credited towards transaction fees), then we will work with you to mitigate these risks".

Nowadays people are tip-toe-ing around egg shells constantly to avoid being the latest outrage that goes viral, but that would be wildly refreshing to see. Honesty from companies (even internally when you work for them!) is getting so rare that a blunt and honest message like that makes me happy just to think about.

It would be awesome to start a new cultural movement toward radical honesty. Just being able to acknowledge the realities around incentives would be a great start.

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

#84

Post by AnthonyMouse »

sgjohnson wrote: post #44
davidmurdoch wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not?

Because you'll still need to exchange it to real currency.

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 was that it should be decentralized and as yet, it's... not.

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

#85

Post by chimeracoder »

I'm very confused by the pricing here. $20/month ($240/year) gives you only 2TB of storage. But Backblaze's consumer product provides unlimited storage for $7/month (or $70/year). The offering closest in price is the $5/month one here, which only gives 250 GB - a very big difference for people with large music collections.

I get that this provides additional value on top of the Backblaze consumer offering, but at the same time, that seems like a massive markup for the underlying storage, for people who have large music collections (ie, the people most likely to want a service like this).

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

#86

Post by scrollaway »

tsuujin wrote: post #41
grose wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a shame that we have to complain on social media to get an actual human response to this kind of thing. If Stripe decides to reverse their decision, I'll leave it up, but it will remain open source.

When I was starting up a small business, Stripe decided that it needed to “verify my activity” or some such nonsense and withheld all of my payments for several weeks. Meaning that I could not pay my team. As far as I can tell, a client paid in a funky way that set off some automated system, and no real person was willing to work with me to get it resolved. I will never trust Stripe with my business again.

You have a choice when you partner with a payment gateway.

You can work with a laissez-faire gateway. It will not exist for long, because your company will be people who figured out they're not complying with various laws, so they will either disappear without a trace, or in the worst case scenario, take you down with them. You may end up having to explain to various authorities what you were doing.

Or, you can work with one that's serious about AML/KYC compliance. This means sometimes your account gets flagged for suspicious activity, and you have to play by their rules to get it back. Depending on the provider, they may actually have some ways for you to get your account back, or they won't be bothered.

Stripe is in the category of providers that will actually work with you to get your account back, but they're certainly not perfect. On the other hand, try something like Paypal and you're screwed. Or go with a different big player and find out how much nobody cares about you and the $40 a month of revenue you bring them.

Every time I hear some horror story about Stripe, either the account is back up and running very quickly, or the business was doing something egregiously bad. YMMV, this is just the professional opinion of someone who has been working in FinTech for a long time, and with Stripe for quite some time too.

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

#87

Post by retrocryptid »

I did something similar. I ripped my DVDs and music CDs to a NAS-box. Then later moved some of them to S3 so I could access them while on the road. I wrote a very simple service to look at the list of files in S3 and provide a list of video and audio files. Like you, I bought every CD and DVD in my collection. I did not make the service available to anyone else and I didn't share access to my files.

I think the only difference is I didn't put in the effort to make it look nice and didn't try to make a commercial service out of it.

But it did get me thinking about whether there's a market for people who have their own AWS account and are willing to run software in their own instances. But not corporate stuff, but things you might have had on your PC in the 90s: catalog of media, simple task list, etc.

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

#88

Post by b8 »

jacquesm wrote: post #72
karlshea wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it so hard to fix your processes instead of relying on the HN Support Forum for the privileged few that know it’s an option?

Because at $5 MRR any time Stripe spends on this translates into a loss for them. But it's good PR so they should solve it anyway. Realize that operating a business like Stripe at scale is a lot harder than it may seem to be on the outside.

HN Support = press prevention plan

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

#89

Post by retrocryptid »

m00dy wrote: post #78
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…

[flagged]

Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

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

#90

Post by freedomben »

lylejantzi3rd wrote: post #80
jacquesm wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because at $5 MRR any time Stripe spends on this translates into a loss for them. But it's good PR so they should solve it anyway. Realize that operating a business like Stripe at scale is a lot harder than it may seem to be on the outside.

The catch-22 here is that it doesn't become good PR for them until the customer posts a complaint on social media. If Stripe solved it privately and then released a press release, people would accuse them of either lying or being manipulative, and there goes their good PR.

Yes kind of, although if they fix it they could become the de-facto home for startups. That kind of market ubiquity is hugely valuable. Every time something like OP happens it pushes people (like me) away from using Stripe. I don't want to spend time integrating with a service that might pull the plug from me, and I don't have time to research all the various little ways that my business might be "too risky" to extreme regulation. I get that some stuff is too risky, but a service that lets me talk to a human before wiping me out would be real nice.
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