Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by thraway2016 3495 days ago
Throwaway for obvious reasons. We do approx $5MM of annual business through Stripe.

#1 reason is lock-in and momentum. Stripe has, bar none, the WORST support of any company in existence. And they don't care to ever change that, having made noise about it for years, but expending precisely zero effort on that front. We would love to move.

But we stay, because we utilize Stripe's card tokenization in order to "store" repeat customers' payment information without having to deal with PCI-DSS compliance processes. If we moved, all existing customers "stored" payment information would, by necessity, go away.

6 comments

> If we moved, all existing customers "stored" payment information would, by necessity, go away.

Not necessarily. You should be able transfer the stored card data to another provider. Many (although not all) payment processors seem to allow this.

  https://support.stripe.com/questions/what-if-i-decide-to-leave-stripe-can-i-export-card-data
I've moved a few businesses off of Stripe and never had any problem. They do it with PGP keys and go directly to the new provider so I never touch any info. Worked great.
You moved them from Stripe to where and why? I'm about to launch a product in a few months and trying to decide which company to go with. So far Stripe seems to be most favorable for the development team. But maybe there are some business things that make Stripe less desirable. Thanks for any insight.
Oh wow, thank you so much for this.
Fascinating. I found a bug in Stripe's python client a while back. They acknowledged and fixed it in less than a week. From a technical perspective Stripe 'just works' in a way that all SaaS vendors could learn from.
Support has been a mixed bag in my experience. 95% of the time they can quickly resolve problems. The other 5% are 20+ email threads where support is accurate but not helpful, and it takes over two weeks to reach a resolution.

That said, #stripe on Freenode has been very helpful.

You’re right. Flexibility on your payment infra is key here and no merchant should be that dependent on a payment provider. I'm working on a possible solution at ProcessOut with a platform that allows merchants to easily connect any payment provider and optimize their payment flow. Would definitely be happy to have your feedback on the solution. Email is my in profile.
I have personally found stripe's support to be very responsive. Have only asked a few questions about limits and APIs, so maybe my qs were easy, but haven't had any issues with the support they've provided, and we dont do anywhere near the volume you cite.
I know you are replying to the Stripe vs BrainTree question but a question of my own for clarity/certainty. If you were to move your business where would you go? To BrainTree or some other provider and why?