9 ms·

Stripe has been pretty bad for us lately. Downtime yes, but also slashed our corporate card limits with no explanation and refused to restore them despite our b

• GingerMidas 4y ago
  Are processors like Square any better?
  • icelancer 4y ago
    Possibly. I'm still angry at Square because I emailed them repeatedly 10+ years ago telling them to add gateway processing (which they didn't have), and they took forever. Stripe's business shouldn't even exist. Square had a head start and should have just made a payment gateway/API and eaten their lunch. They absolutely had an internal API, quite obviously, so not productizing it and letting a whole new business in Stripe come around and launch that product and crush them was absurd. I've used Square's on-premises processing for minor stuff like a side business of mine, but nothing too serious. Their fees aren't too good; they're comparable to Stripe but Stripe's ecosystem for developers is far better. If/when we switch, we'll probably just go to a bare bones payment processor that is much cheaper than Stripe with less support.
    • GingerMidas 4y ago
      That's pretty funny in hindsight. > If/when we switch, we'll probably just go to a bare bones payment processor that is much cheaper than Stripe with less support. Also what we're considering right about now
      • icelancer 4y ago
        Even I can see the humor in it. You are right! I hate to switch off Stripe, but the premium I'm paying is theoretically for better support and developer-friendly actions. I'm not getting that right now, so... why am I paying a premium? Years ago their customer service slashed our rates because of our increased volume and even pc himself reached out to me about a technical matter (and the company was not small). Over the last year the customer service has gone to complete shit in our experience and the rates are still uncompetitively high. Frustrating.
        • WillPostForFood 4y ago
          Who are you looking at switching to? I'm also starting to evaluate alternatives to Stripe.
          • icelancer 4y ago
            I don't want to drop any names here because we're in the exploratory phase, haven't even started negotiations with anyone yet. But there are alternatives that are quite a bit cheaper that offer fewer frills. Humorously enough we needed a sales tax solution, and Stripe Tax is vastly outgunned by its competitors, possibly leading to the layoffs in its department. It is a significantly inferior product to Avalara, which is the leading product in the space.
            • NickRead 4y ago
              you should definitely check out the merchant of record model. Funnily enough, I work in the payments space and this is a use case we see all the time - as businesses start scale and hit tax thresholds, they start implementing even more tools to handle this on top of their existing payment stack. Instead, perhaps consider a billing platform that handles payments, subscriptions and sales tax all in one. With the merchant of record model, you remove the need to worry about sales tax altogether, the payment provider does so on your behalf (including liability if there is a miscalculation). Shoot me an email if you want any more info nick.read @paddle.com, happy to provide more info
    • deepstack 4y ago
      Yeah that's tech for you! E4X was a ES standard, but Mozilla dropped it in 2014, then FB pick it and made JSX and now that is the defacto "Front-End" development.
  • ecommerceguy 4y ago
    Better in what way? I personally would never use a Square product (I feel the entire org has major ethical issues) however other players in this space include Braintree, Amazon Payments and a host of 3rd parties - although 3rd parties are discontinuing internet based direct gateway access such as CardConnect.
    • mtrpcic 4y ago
      I'm curious what ethical issues you have with Square, but are fine with Amazon Payments.
    • djbusby 4y ago
      PayPal owns BrainTree now
    • insane_dreamer 4y ago
      Square has more ethical issues than Amazon?
  • tomnipotent 4y ago
    You're better off with Adyen.
    • sneakymichael 4y ago
      Their offering perfectly fit the bill for what we needed, but they turned us away; citing a requirement of transacting €5M per year, despite us needing a payment handler /for launch/.
      • lawgimenez 4y ago
        That’s sad. We integrated Adyen like 5-6 years ago and this requirement was nowhere to be found. All I remember was their SDKs are difficult to integrate.
    • lovingCranberry 4y ago
      OT: I just went through Adyen's prohibited businesses. Why does every major payment processor prohibit vendors of adult toys from using their payment services? I mean, those aren't even high risk businesses. Credit card fraud usually happens when you offer high priced electronics. Chargebacks usually happen when you sell digital goods like templates, ebooks, videos etc.
      • cyral 4y ago
        You need a merchant account from a high-risk processor, combined with a generic gateway like Authorize.Net. (Don't use their built in processor) The all in one solutions like Stripe or Adyen are convenient but they aren't what high-risk industries need.
        • lovingCranberry 4y ago
          Yes, but how are adult toy sellers "high risk"?
          • bsder 4y ago
  • rkunde 4y ago
    No, neither for merchants nor for developers.
• edwinwee 4y ago
  Sorry for the issues here—could you email me at edwin@stripe.com?
  • artursapek 4y ago
    Why is complaining on HN necessary to get proper customer support?
    • xwdv 4y ago
      Because otherwise you have no leverage. If you go through proper channels your request for help will sit rotting in a queue until someone decides to pick up the ticket. If you complain loudly and publicly in a popular forum, everyone’s opinion of the company will degrade the longer your cries go visibly unanswered, so it requires immediate attention. Your request gets elevated to critical.
      • refulgentis 4y ago
        I understand this position but after going from support-intensive startup to FAANG, the difference is scale subtly tipping the balance in small ways. There's no equivalent for "overhearing a customer problem" at FAANG scale. It would be dramatically inefficient for software engineers / product managers / those implementing functionality to triage all support tickets. About 0.5% of support tickets are interesting enough to be a case study the way this user has offered. At both large and small scale.
        • lotsofpulp 4y ago
          > at FAANG scale and it would be dramatically inefficient for software engineers / product managers / those implementing functionality to triage all support tickets In other words, human labor would be too costly. It not a FAANG thing either, the government does it just as well as most other big entities that are betting they can let some problems slip through without too much loss.
          • 4y ago
• welder 4y ago
  At least you had a high limit for a while. I emailed support many times trying to get my low Stripe Corp Credit Card limit increased to no avail. After some time I had single bills larger than my limit, making the card useless. Ended up switching to another provider and now enjoying business points with a high limit. Sorry Stripe, I wanted to use you but you made it impossible.
  • 88913527 4y ago
    Is the fact that their cards tend to have lower limits a business "code smell" for lack of a better term? Does it say anything about Stripe's own financial standing, or perhaps they are just conservative compared to other creditors.
    • icelancer 4y ago
      Possibly they're just incompetent - here's my update: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32558191#32558635 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32558191#32558635
  • whatshisface 4y ago
    What's your new provider?
    • welder 4y ago
      Mercury and Capital One
  • icelancer 4y ago
    I wish we never had a high limit. We went through painstaking transfers over to their Corp Card infrastructure and now have to switch to something else. Because I have to switch to something else and they're completely incompetent / unwilling to work with us (not sure which one it is, but I think it's primarily the first one), we're gonna switch payment providers too. No reason to give them any business if they're going to make my dev team and managers do a shitload of work.
• richardw 4y ago
  Might not be a popular opinion, but I’d guess that they’ve just de-risked a lot across the board. Fair chance we hit a real recession and if we do, people will be hitting those cards. Unfortunately it catches the solid clients too. I’d guess Stripe has an exceptionally good view of what’s going on in the economy, worldwide.
  • icelancer 4y ago
    No doubt. Very possible. Makes sense given the fact their model docked us 66% credit limit despite nothing changing in our financial health model outside of an LOC/cash switchover (which is a normal setup for ecom businesses). Just wild that AMEX and other banks have zero issue giving us a limit 3-5x that (verified it today!) but Stripe can't. AMEX account rep is begging for us to come back. Just sucks since Stripe's invoicing integration is absolutely nails, and all third party ones I've used are horrible (special shout to SAP Concur for being the worst of all time).
    • joshmanders 4y ago
      > Just wild that AMEX and other banks have zero issue giving us a limit 3-5x that (verified it today!) but Stripe can't. Probably because Stripe is about 50-60B in valuation lower than AMEX and AMEX is a bank with long history with the government so bailouts are probably a high possibility for them to play loose like that. Stripe not so much.
    • phpisthebest 4y ago
      AMEX and other banks probably have the Fed on Speed dial to get that bailout money While Stripe is big, they have not been around long enough to have built up the "To big to fail" government crony status of larger, longer lived companies so stripe would likely be allowed to fail where other companies will never have to pay for their miscalculations
• rich_sasha 4y ago
  It seems like with a number of the high-growth startups, the client isn't really the client. The real client is the VC who writes cheques and provides validation in increasing valuations. The "regular clients" are a raw material, to be converted into the service provided to VC. Clearly, in the early days, you desperately need "regular clients" to prove yourself to the "VC clients". But eventually you earned your stripes and you can again care about valuation over revenue and profit, and consequently customer retention. Add to it the SV dream of inventing a niche and monopolising it, and you care about your customers less still.
  • bcgraham 4y ago
    Isn’t it right and proper for management to serve ownership?
    • mrjin 4y ago
      Yes and no. No customers and no owner to serve soon.
    • DoughnutHole 4y ago
      The issue isn't about what's "right and proper" - it's a risky decision to do business with a company with this business model. Even if it's not "wrong" it's better value for a business to work with other businesses that treat them as a valued customer and not as replaceable fodder to fund an unsustainable valuation. If Stripe want to sacrifice customer experience to chase a higher valuation that's their prerogative. But their current investors better hope they can cut and run before the core business substantially declines.
    • RHSeeger 4y ago
      In much the same way that the cashier at McDonalds does what the manager instructs them too, yes. But if the goal of the manager is to get what they want at the expense of the customer, then the restaurant should fail. The same holds true with other businesses; the management serves the ownership, but the ownership should want the business to make the customers happy.
    • 4y ago
• mrjin 4y ago
  How hard is it to switch payment provider? And in particular, how hard is it to get corporate cards from banks? No offending, just curious the reason behind all this.
  • dylan604 4y ago
    That totally depends on the new provider. One of the nice things about Stripe was their APIs and SDKs were so easy to use. As a solo dev, I was able to spin up a site in a very short amount of time. If the new provider has less features/ease-of-use, then you have to start from square one on integration. If you have a team, then maybe not as big of a burden as being a solo dev.