Our overall support response times are actually substantially faster than, say, 3 months ago.

Part of it is, I think, because we're growing quickly -- even for the same problematic case percentage, there are going to be more in absolute number. (And, as Stripe becomes more prominent, the cases that happen will themselves get more attention.)

In addition, the cases that get public attention generally aren't clear-cut. For example, the other discussion on HN a few weeks ago was about a marijuana-related business that most likely violated our ToS.

We care a great deal about providing great support at scale. Each of these cases triggers a lot of internal discussion about how we might have been able to do things better.

For what it is worth, just my two-cents, but I think even having a customer-facing ticketing system (doesn't necessarily have to be public facing) would help quell some of the unrest. At least for myself, I don't mind a delay in support, but when a request is sent in and it seems to disappear into a black hole it can be frustrating. If there was a way to incorporate support into the dashboard so that users could open/edit/check status of tickets directly from there that would be a great step in my opinion.

This is a really good point. Having something where you can see that what you asked is at least in the system, and Nth in queue, helps a lot when dealing with the opacity of tech support.

This would require a meaningful and physical support presence, for certain. It would also enable users to really prove support times. These are costs and risks for Stripe respectively. I doubt they implement this.

Yes and no. Theoretically you could implement an online ticketing system and have one or two people going through the tickets with minimal support. Plus, they are already have the expense of having someone constantly monitoring IRC, Twitter, HN, and any other public forum so implementing a basic ticketing system within the dashboard should be minimal. As for proving support times I think that would actually benefit Stripe greatly. It is easy for me to send a support request to Stripe right now and get on HN in 5 minutes complaining I haven't received a response in hours or even days. Sadly, we live in a "now" society that when we don't get an answer in seconds we assume we are being ignored. I am not saying this is happening in every case, but IMO, proving support times can have a direct impact on reducing the negative PR around support such as posts like this one.

I get that this is super sensitive, but I really wish you were a bit more public about these things. Stribe is basically the best thing that happened to ordinary programmers since the internet - it is the missing (technical) part of making somehing people want and selling it online, in a way where you can provide almost all of the experience.

Unfortunately with the previous (and now this) it seemed like you guys had become paypal and thus dangerous to do business with.

As a developer, I've only had positive experiences with PayPal customer service. Prompt and helpful.