JanSt parent
We get to hear this again and again. Makes you really think whether to use Stripe and I am tipping to no. Too big business risk at this point.
What alternatives are there to Stripe that don't suck? I've personally had nightmare experiences with Paypal, and there is no way in hell I'll be using crypto
Standard merchant gateway that has a relationship with your business bank. Ensure you procure that relationship through your bank with someone you actually speak to, ideally face to face but atleast on the phone. You pay slightly more than Stripe and the APIs generally suck but you don't end up with these sorts of impossible situations.
Rates on standard merchant accounts are generally lower or significantly lower than Stripe if your processing a bit of volume ($10k+ a month).
Yeah this is true but it's heavily reliant on volume, on low volume Stripe came out on top last time I looked. I still went for a merchant account though, much less business risk and I can walk down the street and ask my small business account rep what is going on if something strange happens to it.
Read the other recent HN threads about Stripe customer mistreatment disasters, using the HN search box ("Stripe", sort by date). Each one has a similar question about alternatives, and in some of them people have posted recommendations for other providers they've had good experiences with. I don't recall which ones but there were more than I expected. A couple of people recommended Mollie this time around. I've never heard of Mollie before.
Next time I need a payment provider, I'll probably do that, collate the provider names, check out the recommendations, and of course like you avoid the ones I've had bad experiences with before, which are too many :/