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Tell HN: Stripe closed my GPT-3 G.Sheet addon because they think I “sell essays”
Apparently Stripe is closing GPT-3 tools because they "are unable to accept payments for the sale of essays and other academic work". I tried to appeal but no luck. What can I do? The tool is EndType.com and I obviously don't sell academic work
- pocketarc 4y agoWhat do you mean when you say that they closed your add-on? Did they stop your add-on from working, or did they just close your Stripe account? If it's the latter, you should be able to sign up with another payment provider and leave them behind.
- motoxpro 4y agoAgree. There are dozens of payment providers you could use in this situation. This call for help rubs me the wrong way.
- benjaminwootton 4y agoIt still takes effort to switch and there may be an issue with the original payment provider retaining your funds. Payments are a critical part of your business and it's a disaster to be switched off at zero notice. Yes, the obvious mitigation is to support two providers, but that can be a big investment when you want to integrate with your book keeping, fulfilment systems etc. And if customer service was a bit more proactive then people wouldn't have to come to social media to flag when they have been treated unfairly. I'm happy that people have an escalation path through social media noise as I've had to rely on it myself many times.
- creshal 4y ago> It still takes effort to switch and there may be an issue with the original payment provider retaining your funds. I haven't seen a case where Stripe doesn't retain 1-2 weeks worth of revenue "to handle refunds". OP also is subscription based, and if he used Stripe's tooling to implement the subscription process, they're holding a lot of customer data hostage. (Which is why you shouldn't touch these "helpful" all in one solutions in the first place, but it's an easy enough mistake to make.)
- londons_explore 4y agoAre there any payment providers that let you migrate a customer subscription to a competitor?
- creshal 4y agoThis isn't solely a Stripe problem, yes.
- thunkshift1 4y agoAnd the random cancelling doesnt rub you the wrong way?
- dmak 4y agoAside from government regulatory requirements, am I the only one who thinks Stripe shouldn't have this kind of say? I know there are business categories that have more risk which may or may not be allowed to transact, but this particular instance seems like a huge power trip to me. Perhaps someone with better insight can educate me on this matter?
- daveoc64 4y agoIt's really all about risk. There are certain categories of transaction that see a lot of disputes. Payment processors, banks, and card schemes (like Visa/MasterCard) don't like disputes - they are costly to deal with.
- londons_explore 4y agoBut stripe already charges the customer for disputes, and presumably makes a little margin on top. I can understand if they're saying "we think you're about to get a lot of disputes, and you may not be able to pay for all of them, so we're going to hold some of your money for a few days just to see". But that isn't what they're saying.
- johngladtj 4y agoIt's really not. It's about regulatory requirements and political pressure (including the attempt to avoid said political pressure)
- its-summertime 4y agoAFAIK, the moralizing comes from higher up (Banks, Visa, Mastercard), instead of Stripe themselves. Alternatively, it could be a category of transactions that eventually almost always see high fraud (e.g. kids paying for essays using parent's money, parents reporting the transactions afterwards).
- curiousgal 4y agoDon't use them?
- 4y ago
- roddux 4y agoFind a new provider that won't randomly shaft you for spurious reasons.
- jcq3 4y agoTech industry let these actors have too much power, they can cut any business at their will. Web3 is the answer, I hope it is. Matter of time before they get replaced.
- heartbeats 4y agoIt's unlikely that web3 will solve it; cryptocurrency already exists, and its many serious issues are not going to be solved by a fresh coat of paint or "moar adoption". If you want an actual solution, look at FedNow. This would enable direct bank account payments, like in most of Europe, with a government-run intermediary in the place of MasterCard/VISA. This changes the censorship situation from "four out of four must accept" to "one out of thousands must accept".
- creshal 4y agoThe situation in Europe isn't quite as rosy. SEPA is a huge PITA, usability wise, and closer to US ACH transfers; and so most countries have their own special sauce online payment solution that serves as central point of failure for that country's customer base. Belgians use Bancontact, Austrians use EPS, Germans use giropay, Dutch use iDEAL, … or, more often, don't, and just use Paypal or credit cards anyway, since it's so much of a hassle. And even if you wanted to implement all these systems, it's so much effort that you're back to relying on payment providers like Stripe, realistically.
- heartbeats 4y agoSEPA isn't great, but there exist functioning country-wide systems as you mention. > And even if you wanted to implement all these systems, it's so much effort that you're back to relying on payment providers like Stripe, realistically. No. Payment providers like Stripe have to comply with the rules placed upon them by the card networks. If you only have to deal with European payment systems + FedNow, you don't have to worry about things like the MATCH list. This removes 95% of the censorship issues.
- 4y ago
- rvz 4y agoStripe might have detected that you are grifting with an AI chatbot and is clearly telling you not to do that on their payment gateway. Like I said before [0], perhaps it is better to go on multiple gateways. At least then you can continue your hustle / grift on another payment processor rather than complain here and use HN as Stripe customer support. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34747526 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34747526
- weird-eye-issue 4y agoThis is an awful take Also, they are likely using the OpenAI API which is not a "chatbot", and was built exactly for the purpose of building apps like this
- KyeRussell 4y agoGrift? What is this? Twitter? Stop using such loaded trendy vitriolic language and take this for what it actually is.
- rvz 4y ago> Grift? Yes. Selling AI snake oil is indeed a grift. It also doesn't surprise me that with the recent hype of AI all over the place, Stripe would be taking extra steps in cracking down on new so-called AI companies and scams selling their snake-oil re-packaged as 'AI' to ride the hype cycle. This one is just low hanging fruit. > Stop using such loaded trendy vitriolic language and take this for what it actually is. Exactly. It is actually a 'grift'. Just like the rest of the low effort so-called AI companies sitting on someone else's APIs. It is another plain old confidence trick which is as old as the hills.
- weird-eye-issue 4y agoThere are lots of great use cases for incorporating GPT3 in Google Sheets. It works quite well for cleaning messy data, transforming data, etc etc
- smca 4y agoCan you email me at smca@stripe.com? We support a bunch of AI businesses on Stripe and I'd like to take a closer look. (What you're describing doesn't sound unsupportable to me.)
- water-your-self 4y agoEmployee vigilantes browsing forums is not a viable method of customer support.
- Kelteseth 4y agoHave they ever responded to this criticism on HN? This is so weird, and it really shows that you should stay away as far as possible from Stripe.
- scrollaway 4y agoStripe is probably the tech company doing the most outreach ever in terms of help, support and documentation. They have people on HN and many subreddits, they officially use Discord, Reddit, Twitter as support channels, they provide phone support… Really there’s many tech companies guilty of the “so complaining on HN is the only way to fix it” but in my experience this is not the case with Stripe. Disclaimer: I work in fintech and sometimes partner with Stripe.
- figassis 4y agoParent comment is right. Whether they monitor social media or not, it is only needed because their official support channel failed and shut the door on their customers. So they're here to pick up the pieces for PR. If this forum was not full of entrepreneurs and potential entrepreneurs what might one day be a larger customer/partner to stripe, I'm not sure they'd show up here. It makes me very hesitant to use stripe at any considerable scale. Why is it that we don't see 1+ posts/month regarding AWS? Seems to me that there is an incentive to closing cases in companies like stripe, regardless of actual resolution.
- Applejinx 4y agoI had a look at your website. How is it obvious that you don't sell academic work and/or a paid tool to write essays for kids? It looked like 'have GPT-3 write stuff in Google Docs, but more so' to me. What are people going to be doing, journaling? The Stripe thing is a separate issue, I'm calling out your 'I obviously don't sell academic work'. Oh come on. Really? Who's gonna pay for this?
- febeling 4y agoGuilty until proven innocent?
- uoaei 4y agoWell, you kinda do? It doesn't really matter what you want your product to do. It's what people do with your product. Intentions are easy to fake, it's the outcomes that people care about.