[brass_cannon]

Samurai doesn't solve this problem. A merchant processing through them still needs to obtain a traditional merchant account, and therefore exposes their business to the same risk of having a reserve assessed on their account. If Feefighters is acting as an ISO (merchant account servicer / reseller), they can perhaps cushion the blow delivered to merchants in these cases, but likely not by much.

Stripe allows businesses to process on their merchant account, similar to how PayPal works. This removes the direct impact of a reserve, but if Stripe observes behavior that could increase their exposure to risk, I'm sure they will take action. It seems likely to me that Stripe will be more reasonable than PayPal in these instances, but that remains to be seen.

[wnight]

As you say, they've all got limitations.

The difference will be if they're straight-forward with their customers and let them know of policies long enough before they're implemented so that they could plausibly leave the service if they disagreed. The problems with Paypal in the linked article were their refusal to discuss, especially beforehand.

Paypal, like EBay, (go figure) is an early entrant whose ubiquity has made them think they're successful on merit, and whose sheer size has kept competition away to re-enforce that image to themselves. As soon as a capable competitor steps up customers will flee these user-hostile companies.

[brass_cannon]

You're missing my point regarding Samurai. It's main value prop is a gateway with developer friendly docs. This has nothing to do with risk.

Feefighters tells their customers to go with the absolute lowest priced merchant account provider because they are all the same otherwise. As this post points out, that's horrendously inaccurate.