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Stripe is no longer a suitable payment processor
Yes, I said it, Stripe is no longer a suitable payment processor unless you're a medium to huge sized company to which you have some weight in what you say. small business owners who clearly have good standing to which stripe has held funds, blocked and shutdown accounts (including my own) are all complaining.. there is a clear pattern here -> https://uk.trustpilot.com/review/stripe.co.uk?stars=1
https://www.sitejabber.com/reviews/stripe.com
They might as well only accept huge companies only because they're surviving off their top 10, their support is terrible, the fraud detection is terrible and when you make a decent amount of sales they will shut down your account. I urge you to try it yourself on a newly made account, guarantee you run into some problems, stripe is 2023 is a joke
- rvz 3y agoThis. 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.
- tobinfekkes 3y agoAmen. Been saying this for years! Currently moving one large and one small business off Stripe for these exact reasons.
- ARandomerDude 3y agoWhat are you using instead? My company is considering Stripe and I’m interested in alternatives.
- tobinfekkes 3y agoI've been using Gravity Payments for 6 years because they are local to me (Seattle). I have 4 different reps within an hour drive, not that I'm going to drive to their house, but it saves so much useless back-and-forth via support channels, threads, emails, chats, etc when I can just call them individually instead. I know, I know, phones are old school, but it gets the job done in minutes, rather than days/weeks. 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.
- EGreg 3y agoWhat is the alternative to these large corporations? I will try to say it again… Web3. Easy to integrate as an option, start accepting payments worldwid, and you can never get deplatformed and your funds won’t be frozen. Why not? 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.
- anon373839 3y agoI think the issue would be that you need to offer payment methods that your customers trust and will use. Does Web3 satisfy that need?
- EGreg 3y agoUSDT, USDC, Ethereum, Bitcoin are trusted round the world. It’s not like the latest memecoin garbage
- tempestn 3y agoMost people outside of circles like this one have never heard of Ethereum, let alone USDT or USDC, and when they hear Bitcoin, they think "risky" or "scam". If your product or service is specifically aimed at tech enthusiasts and you take pains to make it easy, maybe you could get away with accepting payments only in crypto (though I doubt it), but otherwise there's no way.
- EGreg 3y agoSo your answer is that they aren’t well-knowj enough, and the ecosystem isn’t consumer-friendly enough, kind of like decades of personal computers and tech enthusiasts like the Homebrew Club, which preceded the Personal Computer going mainstream, and then the corporate-produced Mobile Phone explosion based on software that was developed originally for personal computers? Yeah sure, these things take time.
- anon373839 3y agoWhat's the best alternative? Currently working on an MVP and the horror stories have really put me off Stripe.
- villgax 3y agoLemonSqueezy
- jasfi 3y agoI second LemonSqueezy. They're a bit new, but are going in the right direction. 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.
- sschueller 3y agoDepends where you are. In Switzerland I would recommend https://payrexx.com/ https://payrexx.com/
- mgw 3y agoI would recommend Adyen. It‘s a bit like a European Stripe. https://www.adyen.com/ https://www.adyen.com/
- tedtimbrell 3y agoIt’s a shame that Adyens tech is so rough in comparison but can definitely be worth it when it comes to fees
- deanc 3y agoI've integrated Adyen. It wasn't perfect but it wasn't as awful as Paypal.
- wilhil 3y agoAdyen didn't want to speak to us unless I could show ~£1M+ a year of transactions :(
- sturza 3y ago> This is enshittification: Surpluses are first directed to users; then, once they're locked in, surpluses go to suppliers; then once they're locked in, the surplus is handed to shareholders and the platform becomes a useless pile of shit
- memefrog 3y ago[flagged]
- vasco 3y agoIts getting a bit boring to hear the same one word dismissal for everything over the last year. When HN learns a new word you really have to be patient.
- m463 3y agoI don't know, the word was backed up by an explanation that made sense to me.
- 39 3y agoAnd its hardly a new word.
- mlyle 3y ago> When HN learns a new word you really have to be patient. 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.
- smca 3y ago(I work at Stripe) I'd like Stripe to be available for as broad a set of users as possible. Just think about our high-level business model: we charge a fee per transaction for our services. Closing an account without cause does not make financial sense, so we don't do it. If we were solely optimized for profit 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 idea 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.
- netapy 3y agoI've been using it for 2 years (small, France based businesses) and never had any issue – though I've also heard some horror stories.
- alkibiades 3y ago“do things that don’t scale” is just a pleasant way of describing enshittification. ie that things that make ur product good won’t scale
- Papirola 3y agothank you for putting it in such crips words
- poisonborz 3y agoI'd argue that most things don't scale (globally) without being enshitted. Humans are inherently regional/local.
- hulitu 3y agoNever was. But when you warn people on HN against using Stripe and PayPal, you get downvoted.
- DotaFan 3y agoWhat is the alternative?
- hughesjj 3y agoSquare? Toast? Google pay?
- sshine 3y agoBitcoin?
- dabeeeenster 3y agoThere are loads and loads of alternatives
- herbst 3y agoYou get downvoted for warning of PayPal?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- villgax 3y agoI can't even imagine running a physical item delivery if for some reason Stripe decides to just refund the customer if they claim chargeback for something which hasn't even been delivered
- samwillis 3y agoThat's not a Stripe thing, it a Credit Card law thing. All card processors are the same. 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.
- junofan 3y agoI believe the burden of proof under US law is on the credit card issuer, and they abuse their dominant market position.
- quelltext 3y agoDo you actuality have a particular issue to raise though? Why was your account shut down? > 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.
- michaelt 3y ago> I mean they do give you some explanation, right? What makes you think that? Financial institutions are pretty notorious for refusing to explain or justify their 'fraud' detection and suchlike.
- j16sdiz 3y agoNot sure if it made into the final text. But some drafts of the GDPR have provisions for rights for explaination
- quelltext 3y agoSay your business is obviously identified as violating ToS, e.g. turns out to be a prohibited category, they can tell you and we've clearly seen cases on HN where explanations had been provided on account closure or asking support. There are cases like money laundering suspicions where they cannot though.
- 3y ago
- grose 3y agoThis happened to me too, so I complained on HN and a friendly Stripe employee fixed my account. Since then it's been fine, luckily. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36403607 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36403607
- jerrygoyal 3y agoStripe also wrongfully banned my newly created account .I wrote on HN but it didn't resolve the issue https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35287256 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35287256 but then I wrote to the CEO and they unblocked my account in a few days.
- datadeft 3y agoI would not want to deal with any company where the only working method of resolving problems is talking to the CEO.
- orbit7 3y agoInteresting was thinking to use stripe with some startup ideas, perhaps not then. Will certainly need to give this one more research.
- siwatanejo 3y agoAnyone used Block (previously Square) as an alternative to Stripe?
- Corrado 3y agoI was curious about Square changing their name so I looked it up[0] and it turns out that they did change it to Block. Looking through the Block site (https://block.xyz https://block.xyz) I see a lot of Blockchain stuff (I guess that's why the name change). Originally, I was pretty positive on Square but this change of direction makes me leary of using them in the future. Too bad. [0] https://block.xyz/inside/press-release-block https://block.xyz/inside/press-release-block
- siwatanejo 3y agoOk, maybe Clover is better? https://www.getapp.com/website-ecommerce-software/a/stripe/compare/clover/ https://www.getapp.com/website-ecommerce-software/a/stripe/c... Although Square/Block has more stars than Clover... mmm https://www.getapp.com/website-ecommerce-software/a/stripe/compare/square-payments-processing/ https://www.getapp.com/website-ecommerce-software/a/stripe/c...
- michaelcao 3y agoI have no idea about Stripe because it doesn't support Viet Nam. Paypal is very good payment gateway for my startup.
- datadeft 3y agoThis is a valid viewpoint. Not sure why the downs. It seems HN is largely biased.
- kbenson 3y agoThere are plenty of horror stories of Paypal holding funds. They've been doing it for far longer than most these other companies, since they've been around longer than most of them.
- michaelcao 3y agoI have been using Paypal for 5 years for my startup and I don't have any major problems with Paypal. Sometimes, customers filed a case agaist us and Paypal decided that the case was closed in customer's favor although we did nothing wrong. However, it's very rare.
- kbenson 3y agoAll it takes is a few quick searches from the search bar at the bottom of the page to see what I'm referring to. You can search just "paypal" or "paypal stole" or "paypal froze" for some of the more egregious examples submitted to HN, or "paypal banned" for some of the more common ones of paypal reclassifying businesses after years of working just fine. 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.
- paraknight 3y agoWhile we're discussing alternatives, does anyone know any for specifically Stripe Connect? E.g. for a marketplace app.
- l5870uoo9y 3y agoOne thing that surprised me the most and made Stripe unusable was that it doesn't handle VAT liabilities. This means you have to manage the VAT for multiple countries yourself (and individual US states).
- friendzis 3y agoIs there any payment processor that does handle VAT? How can they do that when they do not have information required?
- AndroTux 3y agoPaddle does this, for example. In this case, it's not you selling the product/service to the customer directly. Instead, you sell it to Paddle and Paddle sells it to the customer on your behalf: https://www.paddle.com/resources/merchant-of-record-a-guide-for-cfos https://www.paddle.com/resources/merchant-of-record-a-guide-...
- junofan 3y agoAs a side comment, it’s unfortunate to see the hatred on this site towards those building decentralized permissionless payment networks. I don’t think some company should be able to decide whether Americans can or cannot transact.
- Brian_K_White 3y agoThat hatred is obviously completely justified. The reasons are no longer deniable predictions or fear but many years of observed reality by now. 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.
- AndroTux 3y agoI feel like this is an issue in general. As soon as you rely on one company to do one thing, you're SOL as soon as something happens. As a small business, basically nobody cares about you. Be it AWS, YouTube, Stripe, PayPal, you name it. As soon as you are dependent on one platform, you need to at least have a backup plan in case things go south. 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?
- siwatanejo 3y ago> since you now have two providers that could potentially ban you 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?
- AndroTux 3y agoGood question. Probably PayPal, even though I would consider them to be even looser with the ban hammer than Stripe. But when speaking internationally, they probably support the most payment methods? Adyen and checkout.com also look quite comparable, but I don’t know how their APIs hold up.
- poisonborz 3y agoDon't want to defend them, but it must be bloody hard to be a large payment processor these days. I guess they don't disable paying customers (which, en masse, must be still significant revenue) out of sheer lousiness.
- AnthonyMouse 3y agoNo, that's pretty much what they do. The problem is that you're a small business that doesn't make a ton of money, and they only make <1% of that, which is almost nothing, so if they even vaguely suspect you of anything they burn down your house just to be sure. 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.
- smca 3y agoSomeone asked this recently. You can move your Stripe data to/from any PCI DSS level 1-compliant provider, so what you're saying isn't accurate. To Stripe: https://stripe.com/docs/payments/account/data-migrations/pan-import https://stripe.com/docs/payments/account/data-migrations/pan... From Stripe: https://stripe.com/docs/payments/account/data-migrations/pan-export https://stripe.com/docs/payments/account/data-migrations/pan...
- AnthonyMouse 3y agoThat's actually useful. Can you do that even when your account is locked? How many other companies can you transfer the data to and which are they?
- 3y ago
- shmde 3y agoThis post was on the frontpage. Now its not even in the first 3 pages. People really think post ranks are not controlled by someone ? I know there are formulae to calculate the post rankings. But I smell BS.
- yodon 3y agoThe HN algorithm heavily penalizes disagreement in the belief that topics which cause people to fight with each other are bad for the behavioral norms that enable HN to have better discussions than other similar sites (not perfect discussions, just better discussions). 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.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- icar 3y agoWe've been using Adyen at work and are pretty happy. Their support helped us, even after some bot did a massive "attack" and we got a 25k bill, they pardoned most of it.
- deely3 3y agoHey, OP, why don't you share name of your company? Anonymous complaint is just an anonymous complaint, and nothing more.
- smca 3y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36969049 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36969049
- wilhil 3y agoStripe is a nightmare and I found support to be awful and not know their own product. 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.
- quelltext 3y ago> 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. I assume you are talking about this, perhaps: https://stripe.com/docs/payouts/alternative-currencies 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 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?
- scrapemenow 3y ago[flagged]
- deelly 3y agobecause OP did not mention company name. 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.
- davidguetta 3y ago[dead]
- ChrisArchitect 3y agoTell HN:
- Redhill 3y agoLet me clarify some things for you people: 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 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 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/3TCS5S6, https://ibb.co/D4FqLcS 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
- smca 3y agoThanks for sharing detail about your business publicly—I'm sorry we can't support your business. Per our terms of service, adult content and services are prohibited (https://stripe.com/legal/restricted-businesses#:~:text=Adult%20content%20and%20services https://stripe.com/legal/restricted-businesses#:~:text=Adult...). This was already communicated to you. From your Discord channel (https://discord.com/invite/cupidai 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 https://snipboard.io/Q0X3RK.jpg
- Redhill 3y agoThat is very outdated text, — 09/05/2023 00:16, we changed directions 2 months ago and we already had a notice about this from stripe and this is the main reason we decided to pivot directions... but yes we do not do NSFW, that was just an outdated text since that was 3 months ago, since I've been busy I did forget about that but I will change it, but that isn't the issue I'm having with stripe, the issue is them closing my account for "fraudulent charges".. but yeah I'll be changing that ASAP since you brought it to my attention 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?
- dikaio 3y agoI’m pretty certain Elon Musk will be releasing something with X that’s comparable to WeChats payment system. Of course it’s not an option now but if I’m not mistaken that’s what the goal was with PayPal/X from the onset.
- Elizabethruth55 3y ago[dead]
- stunncal 3y agoI suspect it has something to do with their risk policy changes. A few months ago, my account was closed.