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mamidon parent
This is the Nth horror story I've seen about stripe. It's the new Google.

Good docs and a sane technical API make my life as a dev easier.

But I'd rather use a payments vendor that I can trust not to deep 6 my company a year later.

Any recommendations? Ideally they still have good docs and a sane API.

iLoveOncall
This is heavy confirmation bias.

You look at the 2-3 bad stories posted on HN every month but ignore the hundreds of thousands of companies using Stripe that don't have any issue.

mamidon OP
The issue isn't that stripe occasionally messes up. It's that apparently you can't get a human on the phone empowered to fix things.

Having your company destroyed because an automated system flagged it is an unacceptable risk.

With AWS, I can pay for a support contact and be confident my company won't blow up.

Stripe? Google? Not so sure

iLoveOncall
This is the exact same case of confirmation bias.

You've read 5 stories saying it's hard to contact support at Stripe, and chose to ignore the fact that hundreds of thousands have NOT raised this problem.

On top of that, if you follow the development of those stories, it usually becomes apparent that the account was restricted for a very good reason.

dismantlethesun
In fraud and account closure cases, pretty much all businesses are hard to contact.

Its frustrating. While I understand, businesses do not want to give hints to scammers, there should be some way for a person to get details. For small businesses, being given the silent treatment while their livelihoods are at stake feels like bullying.

wolongong942
When the bad story is somebody losing an amount equal to your life savings the 100s of success stories don't seem as important.
iLoveOncall
150K is only 0.00003% of the 350 billions that Stripe processed in 2020 (it's probably a lot more for 2022, like a trillion).

Those stories are always one-sided. It's very easy to believe that those 150K are indeed fraudulent, especially when the OP is so elusive.

blackethylene
We have been using Braintree since 2017, and no complaints so far.

As the business grew, they have contacted us a few times for risk related reviews and asked us to submit supporting documents. But they don't hold the funds first (unless you don't comply I guess) which I find a better approach on how to treat your customers and establish trust.

bushbaba
As with all enterprise software buying, a key criteria is can I get a human on the phone to resolve the issue quickly-ish.

Microsoft and Amazon get this, with differing strategies. Google and Stripe seem to not get it.

Sure it doesn’t scale for the long tail, but it’s a necessity for any large enterprise account. Heck call it “stripe premium support” and charge an additional fee.

smca
(I work at Stripe) If you have a Stripe account, you can navigate to support.stripe.com/contact right now and speak to someone. Chat is near instantaneous, email takes a little longer, and if you request a call it takes three minutes. If you're a developer, we also staff a Discord channel for more technical questions. This is available 365 24/7.

We also offer premium support if you need a dedicated support team for your business (https://stripe.com/support-plans).

When you introduce elements of risk (where fraudulent actors try to game our processes) it can affect how we speak about things.

I ran a business on Stripe before I joined Stripe and feel much more comfortable trying to get support here than at other larger orgs.

matiasfernandez
Instant response != Instant resolution. Getting support at Stripe is easy for easy things, but hard when it actually counts. Based on what we've seen here (and what I've personally experienced) getting your payouts paused while not being a fraudulent actor is not that uncommon. Any other provider would not be like "Your case will be reviewed by our specialized team at some point this week, or maybe the next, nobody knowns. In the mean time, please tell all those employees you need to pay next week to take a chill pill." Can you see how this can be frustrating? We process >$10M/YR with other providers and ~$2.5M/YR with Stripe. Our other providers show a lot more urgency when something serious goes wrong, while Stripe feels like they're too big to care if we leave.
talolard
I used this channel and it was so frustrating it might not as well have existed . While the stripe team is always nice and the tech support is great, when I had a much less sever case of “stripe wants to destroy my business” I could get no straight answer or help from the support team

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