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by intothev01d 2633 days ago
Couldn't agree more. Reading over it's tied to Stripe and their implementation, not even any sort of abstracted interfaces. Vendor lock-in isn't a good plan and to your point, make it easier to add another payment system when needed. Good choice
1 comments

> Vendor lock-in isn't a good plan

I'll take vendor lockin over being locked into a bunch of homebrew garbage that some former developer managed to sucker the entire company into creating because of "vendor lockin". So many times engineers come up with fears about "vendor lockin" and forget how easy it is to lock the company into an unsupported, half-baked homebuilt product that has nothing to do with the company's core business.

I've seen it with reporting and analytics, I've seen it with frameworks, I've seen it with deployment systems, build systems and configuration management systems. I've seen it with payment systems, crappy half-baked hybrid cloud implementations, database provisioning systems and more. All in the name of "avoid vendor lock-in".

Being locked into your own garbage-tier product that has nothing to do with your business sucks. If stripe kicks the bucket, you won't be the only person in that boat and there will be a path forward. Know what is worse? How about when the only developer who can support your crappy half-baked payment system leaves the company? Which stack overflow article will show how to get out of that mess? Talk about vendor lockin! You locked yourself into your own mess!

Spoken like someone who hasn't had a vendor disappear and have your entire implementation on their platform vanish.
Considering how Stripe caused an abrupt vendor disappearance when buying Index, resulting in a tidalwave of broken integrations (as Stripe closed Index with no notice, and stopped responding to clients), I wouldn't trust them to support a platform for any period of time to ensure a smooth transition.

Stripe might leave the servers online in a half broken state for a few weeks, but they will not answer tickets or phone calls about critical issues if they've decided to can a product.

https://www.pymnts.com/news/partnerships-acquisitions/2018/s...

I think it really depends on the situation. Low level functionality (eg payments api) is more generic than high level functionality (billing cycles, dashboards, handling failed payments, etc) and therefore more likely to have a solution which will completely solve your problem.