smca_
When you introduce elements of risk (fraudulent actors who might try to game our processes) or situations outside of the control of Stripe (high rate of chargebacks from your customers) it can change things. Those situations typically end up on HN or on Twitter. We respect that users can/will try all available channels to have a decision reversed and so we respond to or read every complaint.
This isn't just marketing speak. If you have a Stripe account, you can navigate to support.stripe.com/contact right now and speak to someone. Chat is near instantaneous (which has been an almighty task by the teams involved), email takes a little longer, and, if you request a call it takes three minutes (as of this moment in time). If you're a developer, we also staff a Discord channel for more technical questions.
It's an incredibly complex system to provide support at scale to all Stripe users 365 24x7. We support millions of businesses and all types of integrations.
As someone who ran a business on Stripe before I joined Stripe, I would feel much more comfortable trying to get through to someone here than at other larger orgs.
Publicly represented facts are not always reliable. As a rule, we won’t comment on specific user cases for privacy reasons. However, as a trend, we’ve seen an uptick in HN posts requesting we release funds held.
We review every case posted here and, since summer, have confirmed in almost every case that the activity was fraudulent.
We know that confirming we're looking into cases posted here provides more incentive for bad actors to post. We wish that weren’t the case, but we do pay attention to both internal case reviews and to public forums where users post about having a bad day (or, in some cases, profess to be having a bad day).
We do not hold any user funds for any reason other than fraud prevention.
We do not own Reddit (or other) accounts that are used to downvote users genuinely looking for help.
We do show up on Hacker News, on Twitter, on Reddit, or via email to help good users who need better help and post there as a means of last resort.
The above does not absolve us of any responsibility. We can make mistakes, and those can be acutely painful to legitimate users. But we do endeavour to help those that need help.
If you'd like to do it yourself, you can manually define rates at no cost: https://stripe.com/docs/billing/taxes/tax-rates.
For example:
• Cards pricing. The guide assumes a B2B SaaS business accepts 100% of payments via cards. B2B SaaS businesses on Stripe tend to encourage payments via bank transfers and other lower-cost payment method, especially for their biggest customers, and we try to make it as easy as possible for businesses to do this. Bank transfers are priced at 0.8% in the US. The guide states that “additional fees apply for bank transfers, additional payment methods”, which is not true. We encourage users to use alternative payment methods for this reason.
• Stripe Tax. The 0.5% per transaction cost is incurred only in jurisdictions where the business is obligated to collect taxes. For US-based businesses, this generally represents a very small fraction of total payment volume. (And, of course, the tax collection itself is mandatory, and so some tax provider or calculation engine presumably has to be paid for.)
• Stripe Data Pipeline. Including this as a default cost is misleading. It isn’t. While we think it’s a great product (especially if you have a sophisticated ETL pipeline), most Stripe users don’t find themselves needing it.
More broadly, I think it’s important for onlookers to know that OP is the founder of a business that runs on Stripe and positions itself as an alternative to Stripe Billing. They seem to be trying to write deliberately-provocative posts to go viral, as described in this tweet: https://twitter.com/byAnhtho/status/1601197512227885056. Competition is good, and anyone is of course very welcome to analyze Stripe’s pricing. But, in the spirit of transparency, we’d welcome a slightly more realistic analysis.
We don’t typically comment in detail on individual cases, but we do think it’s important for onlookers to know that we take every single case like this seriously. It looks like what happened here was an edge case involving SEPA payments that resulted in a dispute rate that’s far in excess of what’s generally permitted by financial partners. When we do this, our interventions are partly to protect financial partners/Stripe, partly to protect end customers, and in part to protect the businesses themselves. (For example, Visa will fine businesses that maintain high dispute rates.)
More broadly, we work hard to balance the rules of the financial ecosystem, ease of use, protection against fraudulent businesses, consumer protection, and continuity for businesses. We support millions of businesses across dozens of countries and payment methods, and we discover new scenarios every day. We plan to blog about our work here in more detail before too long (including some of our key metrics).
If any HNers have suggestions as to what we should include, feel free to reply here. We’ll try to share anything helpful that’s not too sensitive.
If you win the dispute, we credit you $15 because we feel it's the right thing to do.
—sam from stripe.