[icelancer]

Even I can see the humor in it. You are right!

I hate to switch off Stripe, but the premium I'm paying is theoretically for better support and developer-friendly actions. I'm not getting that right now, so... why am I paying a premium?

Years ago their customer service slashed our rates because of our increased volume and even pc himself reached out to me about a technical matter (and the company was not small). Over the last year the customer service has gone to complete shit in our experience and the rates are still uncompetitively high. Frustrating.

[sneakymichael]

Anecdotally: I've been looking to get answers from Stripe, about fees-related questions that either make my proposed use viable or unviable, and I've received nothing but copied & pasted email replies, a week+ later (or not at all), which essentially ignore what I've asked. Incredibly frustrating.

When I mention the experience to friends, they joke that I have Stockholm Syndrome; to want to continue pursuing them, despite their complete disregard.

[icelancer]

Yeah that's sad. I asked for a fee reduction 2 years into our relationship, and they said no because of XYZ but if we hit revenue targets ABC that they'd re-evaluate.

About a year later, we hit revenue targets ABC, I waited a month (just for systems to catch up) and emailed them. We had a good discussion about a rate cut and they knocked their fees down as they promised.

I emailed in 3-4 years after that and asked for a rate cut as our revenues had gone up by about 10x, and they said they could not, but provided explanations on why because of high international processing, high AMEX/Discover processing, etc. Totally cool, I understood that and appreciated the detailed email. Wasn't disappointed at all.

I tried back a year or so later when our revenues shot up but got the same message more or less, but still personalized. Again, I had to try, but also, not unhappy.

And since all of those excellent customer service responses - many of which did not go my way, which is not how I rate interactions - it's been awful. The corporate card team refuses to answer questions or even apologize for their insane limit cuts. They presumably are hiding behind bullshit KYC/AML justifications for their actions or protecting their algorithmic decisions in order to provide us zero actionable customer support with no personalization. It's embarrassing.

[WillPostForFood]

Who are you looking at switching to? I'm also starting to evaluate alternatives to Stripe.

[icelancer]

I don't want to drop any names here because we're in the exploratory phase, haven't even started negotiations with anyone yet. But there are alternatives that are quite a bit cheaper that offer fewer frills.

Humorously enough we needed a sales tax solution, and Stripe Tax is vastly outgunned by its competitors, possibly leading to the layoffs in its department. It is a significantly inferior product to Avalara, which is the leading product in the space.

[NickRead]

you should definitely check out the merchant of record model. Funnily enough, I work in the payments space and this is a use case we see all the time - as businesses start scale and hit tax thresholds, they start implementing even more tools to handle this on top of their existing payment stack.

Instead, perhaps consider a billing platform that handles payments, subscriptions and sales tax all in one. With the merchant of record model, you remove the need to worry about sales tax altogether, the payment provider does so on your behalf (including liability if there is a miscalculation). Shoot me an email if you want any more info nick.read @paddle.com, happy to provide more info

[PRLDRS]

There are a lot of alternatives: Checkout.com, Adyen, are the most tech forward I’ve found.