| I love Stripe and am an early and long time customer. Everything about them is beautiful, simplified and easy - except Radar. For all the blogs and good intentions of the team, Radar to me means an email 3 days after I've processed and shipped an order telling me it may be fraudulent, followed a month later by a reminder "I'm sorry, you lost your credit dispute for $X" email, followed by a $15 charge by Stripe for no error or bad faith on the part of my company. When Radar isn't busy sending me reminders that we're having money stolen from us, they are hard at work denying legit charges and sending customers down a Kafka-esque rabbit hole, hell bent on seeing exactly how much friction can be introduced into our website's buying process by a single third party service. Stripe didn't create the fraud and they are taking on a difficult and emotional part of their business, which is commendable, but it must be said: 1. The false positive rate of Radar is so bad that it renders the product worse than useless - worse because it initially provides a false hope. 2. You can't disable some parts of Radar. Better to throw the whole thing into the sea and use a plugin then be forced into some parts of this. I know there are good people trying hard to build this product well. Some of the people on it serviced our account in the early days. They had a vision of a better way and they made it real. My hats off to them. Now, people I respect, I have hard words and a hard truth to impart to you: You are not delivering the value you claim to provide. Do not continue iterating. Discontinue the product. Allow others who focus on this to do it well. You are great at what you do but you are frustratingly, annoyingly, arrogantly bad at this. It pisses us all off to be forced to use it and to be told again and again how great it is going to be or how fixed it is this time. I don't want to engage with Stripe on Radar or "learn more about it", I don't want to be interviewed by you so you can better understand the voice of customer, there is no email or back channel thing you can send to make this better. The beauty of Stripe is that it "just works" but Radar does not just work - and it never will. |
For the benefit of other HNers: if you ever have a concern about this sort of issue, we’d love to hear from you (my email is eeke@stripe.com). This is all I do every day; you can never waste my time.