The "new word" has been coined because there's just not so much cheap money around, and there's been a whole lot of companies that have been pressured to monetize in ways that may not be good for everyone's long term.

The word's in the zeitgeist because the phenomenon it is describing is running rampant.

Closing an account without cause does not make financial sense, so we don't do it. If we were solely optimized for making money then we'd ideally want to accept as many businesses' transactions as we could, right?

So that leaves three reasons why we might not: regulatory compliance (money laundering or fraud), risk management (high rate of chargebacks or credit risk), or a violation of our restricted businesses agreement (get rich quick schemes, counterfeit goods, etc).

I have no what OP's business is or what they're selling, these things are typically left out of HN posts about Stripe for good reason. They're generally looking to overturn decisions we've made. We do of course make mistakes (and fix those rapidly) but you should consider why we would take action contrary to our business model—the answer is normally one of the three above.

That's why you can sign up as a small business on stripe.com today whereas on other platforms you need to talk to their sales team (and be generating serious revenue) before getting close.

Because your costs are inversely proportional to business size.

So Stripe would sacrifice enterprise high volume customers because they hope/speculate that low volume SMBs will one day be big, if they'd need to choose where to direct resources? I highly doubt it.

And we see that in our data too: 1,000 new businesses joined Stripe every day last year. We also had 100+ companies process 1B+ in yearly volume. That captures everything from mom and pop shops to startups, and large enterprises like Amazon or Salesforce. We listen to them all to make sure we're still solving their problems. (Stripe itself was born out of listening to startups grumble about payments: http://www.paulgraham.com/schlep.html#:~:text=The%20most%20s....)

It also helps reduce our dependency on any one sector of customers, similar to an index fund vs. stock picking. You don't get the same set of diverse businesses processing with e.g. Adyen—they just don't serve the long tail of the market in the way we do.

Do you believe they’d be able to get their issue resolved without hitting the front page, whether stripe wants their transaction fees or not?

Exactly this, seen here: https://www.sitejabber.com/reviews/stripe.com

Indeed, I think a lot of people miss the fact that the point of most small businesses is not in fact to become a billion (or even multi-million) dollar company. gasp

Any company targeting small businesses needs to shed this delusion that small businesses across the board want to become huge or even larger

There’s this sort of toxic assumption that every small business just isn’t a big business yet. I’ve seen it at work in relationships with vendors where a conversation goes something like:

Business: “Okay, the Business plan fits us nicely but we need one feature from the Enterprise Pro Plus Max plan. Could we negotiate a slight increase in the Business plan and get that one feature flag enabled for our account?”

Vendor: “We’d love to help! We’ll give you a discount on the Enterprise Pro Plus Max tier that makes it the cost of the Business tier for a three year commitment, so you don’t have to grow into it overnight.”

Which of course no one has to do for any (prospective) customer. But it’s exhausting to have to explain that you’re not trying to grow into a business that can spend $80,000/mo with every vendor just to get features you need. And it’s really frustrating when you’re servicing a customer in a regulated industry who wants to expand with you, but vendors think things like audit trails are only useful or appropriate (or “not confusing”) for capital-E-Enterprises.

In my business the result has been a reliance on self-hosted FOSS applications but that’s not practical for things like payment processing, at least for a small business. If I were large enough for it to make sense to do my own payment processing I wouldn’t need Stripe in the first place.

Stripe isn't available in my country anyway.

PayPal's dev experience was quite bad, but trying to do business with them was virtually impossible. I wasted a lot of time from both the dev and business angles.

https://www.adyen.com/

Feel free to always reach out to me know if you run into any issues.

If your business doesn't fall into these categories I mentioned up top: regulatory compliance (money laundering or fraud), risk management (high rate of chargebacks or credit risk), or a violation of our restricted businesses agreement (get rich quick schemes, counterfeit goods, etc), then there is no legitimate reason why we wouldn't want to support your business.

The more you say in this thread the more you prove the critics points.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36969195

Pretending not to know this is yet more of what I mean by "the more you talk the worse Stripe looks"

Currently moving one large and one small business off Stripe for these exact reasons.

Good luck getting a hold of anyone at Stripe. Even when you do, you'll get a different support agent replying to each message, which means there is no continuity or context.

Also, they reach out to me if they notice any unusual activity on my client's gateways, rather than just block the entire account and wait for me to notice.

It is only going to get worse and it will be no better than PayPal. Just noticed a rise in complaints about Stripe on this site.

We’ll see how far this Stripe customer support and complaints center goes on HN.

Seems like the priority is clearly greed over its own users in Stripe.

Over and over I see HN complain about enshittification of the latest large platform, but also somehow many people knee-jerk downvote anything about the decentralized alternatives because they don’t want them to catch on. So then… enjoy the enshittification I guess?

“Something something we have to vote for our government to do something”. I think we can just build open source decentralized alternatives to all this stuff.

Crypto is closer to autogyro than automobile in adoption, and there is no guarantee that will ever change.

[0] https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/bitcoin-cryptocurrency-weal...

[1] https://fortune.com/2021/10/26/bitcoin-mining-capacity-owner...

[2] "capital has the tendency for concentration and centralization in the hands of richest capitalists. Marx explains" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_accumulation#:~:text=c...

Even if Ethereum comes to be controlled by a few people, their incentives are not to kill the value of their own ecosystem (unless they are a state actor, or if all Ethereum tokens are somehow bought out completely by Elon Musk lol). And the only way the blockchain can get screwed is by miners ALL agreeing to refuse to mint new blocks. Or miners could re-order transactions within a block, which they already do. That’s it.

Now you could say that the dollar reserves of USDC are controlled by one company, and I agree. Even though USDC is run by Circle which is a regulated company that can pay out with no slippage to your bank account, and receive dollars the same way. They are one step away from banks and may even get insurance and reinsurance similar to FDIC.

But you may still not want to see one company be the gateway. That’s why we started the Intercoin project, to make a truly decentralized ecosystem including decentralizing the gateways too (just like the Internet is).

But for today, it’s already no different than any bank in the Free Banking Era, which is how the United States did almost all of its money all the way before the greenback. As long as the music is on and the musical chairs are moving, your $500 in tokens that you use for your consumer purchases is safe.

Which they wouldn't have any reason to trust any less than they do PayPal or Stripe, in the sense of not debiting their account when they didn't authorize it.

So what you need is a federated system in which the customer can choose whichever of those providers they want to use and that doesn't matter to the seller who can receives transfers from any company that customer paid for some cryptocurrency. The customer can use whoever they trust.

Now, maybe that doesn't have a good UX yet, but it could.

- Transaction fees

- Transaction times

- KYC

- refunds

Just off the top of my head

ie that things that make ur product good won’t scale

If someone pays with a card, then disputes that they did not receive the service or product, the burden is on the vendor to prove they did. It's not the card processor who makes the final call either, it's the customers card company - it's out of Stripes hands.

> when you make a decent amount of sales they will shut down your account

I mean they do give you some explanation, right? It might not be super clear (it sometimes can't due to laws) but it's not "you are now processing much volume, goodbye". That's just not in Stripe's interest at all and assuming that high volume alone is the reason is not helpful.

What happens is likely that only after a certain amount of volume review processes get kicked off. So it's perceived as some form of injustice when often the issue is fundamentally with the business or failure to comply with requirements, and other PSPs might not even let you use them in the first place.

Personally I think there should maybe be earlier vetting to avoid this (as it's bad UX for those users) but it does come at the cost of having bad initial get-started UX for the vast majority of users that can be supported.

Those won't go and complain anywhere. So really, just stating "Stripe shut down our account, bad Stripe" isn't helping anyone and it isn't helping you either because nobody will be able to give you advice.

Their support getting worse I understand. I do think there are cases that could be turned around without having to resort to social media.

What makes you think that?

Financial institutions are pretty notorious for refusing to explain or justify their 'fraud' detection and suchlike.

There are cases like money laundering suspicions where they cannot though.

No, obviously they would present the results of manual review conducted by humans after some ML algorithm flagged it. They do manual human review before randomly banning their customers, right? RIGHT?!

For example, if tweaking the input to remove 5% of the chargebacks and the account passes you tell the customer their account was suspended for having too high a chargeback rate.

but then I wrote to the CEO and they unblocked my account in a few days.

[0] https://block.xyz/inside/press-release-block

Much of them are older, because honestly Paypal had quite a few years of being the vendor of choice before a lot of alternatives came around. I'm not sure if that means Paypal had enough competition that they had to deal with their behavior or they're just used less so you hear about the problems less, but for anyone that's been around for a while, hearing about Paypal screwing someone over is not going to sound like something extraordinary.

I agree there should be no single capricious arbiter, but "web3" and all it's scammer bros has turned out not to be a better answer.

The big difference is that with a payment processor it's much harder to diversify than, let's say, AWS. If done well, I can quickly switch to another cloud provider without my users even noticing. For payment providers, this is not possible. The user has to at least re-enter their credit card information, which is going to be a big problem for a lot of companies.

But let's say you did it. You finally moved away from Stripe to $literallyDoesntMatter. Now, a few years down the line, $literallyDoesntMatter also bans you, because it turns out, you are still a small business and the new provider also doesn't care about you. Now what do you do?

Serious question: How would you, as a small business, try to diversify your payment provider? Would you go through the effort to support and implement two payment providers and use them roughly equally, so that if one goes down, only 50% of your customers need to migrate? But then you have essentially doubled your risk of getting banned, since you now have two providers that could potentially ban you. What other options are there?

But less chances that they both ban you roughly at the same time. So if A bans you, you move to B and start integrating C. Once you have integration with C ready, you then support B&C in production.

If in the future B or C ban you, then do same as above with D.

BTW, what would be your first choice for a $StripeAlternative nowadays?

The solution to this would be something like account number portability, similar to phone number portability. You have an account with a payment processor, you have a dispute with them, you port your account to a different payment processor and your customers never know the difference. Which you could also do if a competitor offered better rates, which is why they typically don't offer this.

But if they weren't dicks they would. In general, but especially if they expect to be able to drop you without being accused of malice.

A company shouldn't be able to lock you in and then shut you down. One or the other, never both. And, of course, they have to be able to do the second one, so they should never be able to do the first one.

To Stripe: https://stripe.com/docs/payments/account/data-migrations/pan...

From Stripe: https://stripe.com/docs/payments/account/data-migrations/pan...

Can you do that even when your account is locked? How many other companies can you transfer the data to and which are they?

My recollection of the changes that Visa and MC made a few years ago when they tightened the rules on using stored cards was that for cards stored after those changes went into effect you had to include in the data when submitting a card not present transaction a copy of the transaction ID of the card present transaction that you did when you stored the card.

I've not used Stripe so have no idea how you handle it. The other payment processors I've used all return their own transaction ID when you charge a card, not the actual Visa or MC transaction ID from the card network. Internally they maintain a mapping from their IDs to the underlying Visa/MC IDs and when you later do a not present transaction and give the reference transaction ID they look up the underlying Visa/MC ID and use that.

My understanding then is that to move from processor X to processor Y I'd need not only all the stored card numbers at X (assuming I'm using their storage service and not handling card storage myself) and need a way to get for all those cards the underlying Visa/MC transaction ID for the transaction where the customer gave me the card.

Then at processor Y they would have to support importing that data, including a way to import the underlying Visa/MC transaction IDs and assign them Y transaction IDs to be used when using those cards for not present transactions.

If many individual comments receive lots of upvotes and lots of down votes, for example, that's a signal the topic is controversial. The algorithm automatically penalizes controversial discussions, regardless of what the topic is, because its goal is to maximize the number of "good behavior" discussions, not the number discussions.

Stripe, like US politics, is highly polarizing. You don't have to read hard into this page to see there are strong disagreements on whether Stripe is good or bad. The algorithm detects those disagreements generically (with no care for the company or topic involved) and penalizes the page.

We are a UK company but now have clients worldwide and worldwide bank accounts (thanks to Wise).

So many people in the US can't pay via ACH Transfer (we can't do debit without a US entity... looking in to options and setting up a LLC now), so, we need to be able to accept credit card.

I thought I had a nice workaround by having USD to my USD account and only paying standard (high) fees, but, they now charge me a surcharge for this despite no Forex fees needed, and worse, the fees always link to the wrong transactions so I can't even reconcile properly.

On top of this, they force convert my CAD to GBP despite having a CAD bank account, and charge me so many fees on top.

It's the only option I've found as of now, but, I'm far far from being a fan.

I assume you are talking about this, perhaps: https://stripe.com/docs/payouts/alternative-currencies

It's a bit confusing as it seems to say there are fees if the bank account isn't domiciled in the country of the merchant but it's left vague whether the fee also applies to any alternative currency payout. The pricing page seems to support the latter theory: https://stripe.com/en-gb-de/pricing

> they now charge me a surcharge for this despite no Forex fees needed, and worse, the fees always link to the wrong transactions so I can't even reconcile properly.

The forex fees may not cost anything but the underlying cost is surely not free. Foreign currency transfers even (or in fact in particularly) domestically usually need to go through different rails, which often have fees associated. For US domiciled bank accounts they could potentially pay out from funds Stripe holds in the US already, but the need for balancing accounts internally later this isn't going to be free.

All that ignores the system and banking interconnectivity operating cost and their desire to recoup the engineering effort investment.

Bottom line is that there's a fee for this (which is service that I don't believe existed a few years back and is clearly a value added service) and if you're not happy with a fee it's your right to try and find another provider that is cheaper.

I understand that fees aren't something making customers happy but come on, your admitted workaround not working out as you planned doesn't make Stripe a nightmare. Seriously try to look into other PSPs and whether they support what you want to do better. If they don't or if another workaround there would be more cumbersome, perhaps Stripe isn't such a "nightmare" anymore in comparison.

Stuff just doesn't always end up working the way you might want to, and that means a market or product is perhaps ripe for disruption but Stripe charging for a service seems to be what bugs you the most. And I feel like you are underestimating the value/convenience they provide.

> the fees always link to the wrong transactions so I can't even reconcile properly.

That one does seem like a bug or a shortcoming in how they present fees, yes.

> On top of this, they force convert my CAD to GBP despite having a CAD bank account, and charge me so many fees on top.

Why would this happen if you used alternative currency payouts for that?

Is it possible you hadn't yet set up a CAD bank account on your Stripe account before starting to accept CAD payments?

Is it possible you hadn't yet registered your CAD bank account on your Stripe account before starting to accept CAD payments?

storys about horrible Stripe appears on HN quite regularly, in 92-95% times user do not want to mention company name because usually company a bit shady.

other 5-8% of issues are usually resolved by Stripe. which is also not good, because social media should not be used as support line, but looks like Stripe likes this way of doing things.

upd: user created a post and then leave it without any comments, which also do not look trustworthy.

I run an AI technologies company, that does not fall under the prohibited company terms and conditions for stripe, it doesn't operate under any illegality, it is a genuine AI image generation service with other tools like text to audio, etc

Here is what I got after 6 days worth of sales: https://ibb.co/WyRGprh (this expires after 3 months but essentially says "Your business does not meet our terms" ... okay, why doesn't it meet our terms you ask? here is the reason they emailed me with: https://ibb.co/mynwqhD (basically them telling me they think a fraudulent payment happened to me and to be careful they're shutting me down)

excuse me, what? you have billions and billions of dollars are you tell me you "think" fraud has happened ? what is the radar that I'm being taxed more on for? as you can see here my settings for the radar is in full effect and I have 0 chargebacks or blocks -> https://ibb.co/3TCS5S6, https://ibb.co/D4FqLcS

Do you see my frustration???? as a small business owner you can't shut down companies based on "i think" with no actual evidence.. so I had to appeal about 5 times to actually get them to consider, had to even mention negative media attention for them to even consider reviewing me.. this isn't a fraud case or justified closure of account this is also not a mistake, I've seen issues like this dating back 2 years ago.. this is simply being ignorant to the issues at hand

From your Discord channel (https://discord.com/invite/cupidai): "CUPID AI is a smart AI-based NSFW and SFW subscription entertainment and content generation platform that provides AI generated content and realistic chatbots to consumers, entrepreneurs and companies for profit or non-profit use cases."

https://snipboard.io/Q0X3RK.jpg

and also to further explain, we offer AI tools that can be used on a wide array of use cases- that being said do you outlaw knives because they can be used for murder when in face they can be used to cut vegatables? stripe should base their prohibited business list off the content sold and distributed mainly by the service, not what the consumers do with the service.. and like I said i've been allowed to operate on stripe and I am passed that as they have already allowed me to operate selling AI tools but an example from this is that amazon (that uses stripe or has used stripe) has tons of media attention of people doing fraud, will they shut down amazon because the consumers do fraud? no, so why should they play with peoples money like that?

If this is not the root cause then pointing this out as part of this conversation is misleading. If it is, why was it necessary for OP to find this out on HN?

I had messaged support 5 times before posting here, I had been declined the appeal once and I was not going to allow myself be bullied off the site for a mistake they made