Ask HN: Why do people still use Stripe?

[psyfi]

Hi HN,

This is not ranting, it's a genuine question, I'm seeing too many people complaining about stripe effectively stealing their business money or holding it hostage for unresonable excuses, it seems to me like using stripe now is like gambling with your business.

As far as I know, Stripe services is not unique and dozens of alternatives exist out there, so I wonder what makes it a valid option with all the risk it brings to businesses, it would make more sense to me if Stripe is bankrupt by now.

I know there is probably a good answer to my question but I can't really find it.

[smca]

(I work at Stripe) I've posted about this before but leaving here again for posterity.

Many complaints posted about Stripe on HN, Twitter, and Reddit are from fraudulent users looking to overturn decisions we've correctly made. They look to turn outrage into action in an attempt to defraud customers of money. We have to take action to protect Stripe, Stripe users, and Stripe users' customers. We don't and won’t comment on specific cases for privacy reasons.

It's important to know that almost every case posted here since summer has ended with confirmation that the activity was fraudulent.

We can make mistakes and those can be acutely painful to legitimate users. But those are few and far between.

[throwawaaarrgh]

Even if that were true, nobody's going to believe you if they keep hearing these stories, and the only response they hear from you is "liar liar pants on fire". Your brand will keep suffering the way PayPal's has. And maybe that doesn't affect your bottom line, but it does effect hiring and morale, and makes it that much easier to launch a scrappy competitor.

[22289d]

Thanks for that. As a new Stripe user I've been worried about this. Waking up one day to find my account locked and money frozen. Sounds like if I simply run a clean business, I don't have much to worry about. Logically that makes sense, it's in your interest for me to keep swiping cards.

Coinbase also has a lot of this type of stuff and I've long suspected the same. It's people doing shady stuff and trying anything they can think of to get their shady money, which Coinbase has frozen.

As for part of the OP's question: Stripe absolutely has one unique thing. Amazing developer infrastructure. And even a lot of stuff built on top of their infrastructure by others. For example: I'm using Laravel Cashier. It saves me so much time building and I can do all sorts of cool stuff with it. Setting up a merchant account with Chase or whatever, you're not going to get all of that.

[smca]

I'm glad to hear that (and that you're a new Stripe user!). If you do ever have an issue and you're not getting the support you need, you can reach me at my HN username @stripe.com.

[22289d]

Hopefully it's never needed but I appreciate that, saved it. Thanks!

[TheChaplain]

> We don't and won’t comment on specific cases for privacy reasons.

That there is your problem, you essentially say "they are wrong, but we won't tell you why so just trust us".

You need to be more transparent or accept the fact that your public image will continue to wither and lose people trust.

[rexreed]

Thanks for the response. I understand that fraud is a very real thing and that crooks will do anything to work the system, but the crooks have very little to lose and the merchants have so much to lose, and Stripe wields a lot of power in both instances, so the power imbalance is very real.

Imagine for example that your personal bank account was closed and the moneys held by the bank and you had no recourse other than emailing a general inbox or talking to customer support who can't do anything other than sympathize. Without that bank account you can lose your house, car, and assets. It's a very scary and very real thing. The bank can say that 99% of the time, the accounts are closed due to fraud, but you're that poor 1% (according to the bank) and therefore you're just a casualty of the process. There are harms from crooks and fraudsters, but there are harms to the individuals too.

The main issue is not that Stripe is working hard to protect itself and its customers, but the merchants feel very powerless in these situations. When it takes a massive effort to get attention, especially if you're small and powerless, you feel that you have no control, and that your issues (which might not be fraudulent) will go unanswered. What can the average, powerless merchant who doesn't have the weight of social media, HN, @dang, or others on their side do when their hard-earned money is being held, locked, or otherwise prevented, and when the cause is not fraudulent, or if the merchant is unaware of that activity? The problem is that accounts are just shut down, moneys are held, and there's no quick or clear communication, with customer support simply saying it's not in their control. It's this feeling of powerlessness that's the issue, regardless of whether or not Stripe is in its rights or doing what it feels is in its and its customers best interests.

What can you do to help empower the powerless merchants when their livelihoods are at stake? Can you provide some way to not instantly assume fraud or malicious intent on behalf of the merchant and provide some quick and direct way for the merchant to feel empowered?

If someone is ramping up a new business, say a subscription business that will go from $0 in January to over $1M in just a few months, that would easily trigger a fraud system, but it's not fraudulent, it's just a business that's seeing success. How can the merchant work with Stripe in advance to provide signals that there's something legit happening?

[smca]

The power imbalance is tricky, I agree. We have to safeguard good users and restrict bad actors, all at the same time.

To your specific point around not assuming malicious intent/empowering users to take action, we're revamping the ways that we ask users for more information about their businesses. And we’ve set a higher bar for the speed to resolve these issues. In the majority of cases, we want to allow users to continue operating during this time. In the specific example of a fast growing subscription business, they would continue to operate without issue, while providing documentation to Stripe to support their growth (if they had triggered any of our fraud detection systems).

In the last three months, we’ve also reduced the rate that users contact support with Risk-related questions by 45%. So, we're encouraged by our progress but there is still lots of work to do.

[thunky]

I can't find a charitable reading of your response that makes the core issue you're replying to any less of a concern:

The problem is that accounts are just shut down, moneys are held, and there's no quick or clear communication, with customer support simply saying it's not in their control

[easytiger]

> from fraudulent users looking to overturn decisions we've correctly made.

Can you give examples to support this bold assertion?

E.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32854528

[TillE]

I'm sure there are occasional real mistakes, but people will absolutely lie about this kind of thing. That's nothing new.

[greenthrow]

> We don't and won’t comment on specific cases for privacy reasons.

Read the whole comment before responding, please.

[grumple]

Ah how convenient, that means they don't have to take accountability for the rest of their post being misinformation.

[throwmeup123]

He answered your question in the next two sentences.......

[throwaway2056]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34233011

> Overall this review process was pretty bad. Very little communication and nothing I could really do directly to move things along or get any real information. It took a random Stripe employee to get an email from @dang and post on HN in order to get this issue resolved. I’m lucky because I know about HN and know that Stripe employees frequent the site, but I don’t think HN wants to become the Stripe support forum.

It may be that the errors from Stripe side are low. But communication is very vital. It did take some luck to get this resolved.

[smca]

The random Stripe employee is me. John and I left comments with details on what we're doing to fix our failings in that particular case: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34234079

[throwaway2056]

Thank you for the response and your efforts to make things better.

My only gripe is that a friend had a similar issue with Stripe and the replies usually were just copy and paste. Like that other poster, they asked him to upload every other document but the replies were uninformative. It was all 'copy paste' legalese and not conveying information. Eventually it did get resolved.

[taink]

Here's a direct link for convenience's sake: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34234079

[easytiger]

> But those are few and far between.

Apparently not

[Anon4Now]

> almost every case

> We can make mistakes and those can be acutely painful to legitimate users.

Any lessons that can be learned and shared here? What things can legitimate users avoid doing, so they don't wind up as false positives for fraud?

[smca]

We're working on a post about some of the specific work we're doing here. We'll be sure to share it here when it's ready.

[psyfi]

> Any lessons that can be learned and shared here? Don't consider stripe reliable

[lloydatkinson]

Wow. This comment is tone deaf and a PR incident waiting to happen.

[rippercushions]

It is, however, reality. I used to work in escalations at $MEGACORP and the difference between the viral sob story posted on Twitter etc and the reality of what happened is often jarring. "Boohoo my account was locked for no reason whatsoever!" except, y'know, distributing graphic child abuse material (and I don't mean splashing around in a bathtub), mining Bitcoin with stolen credit cards, etc etc.

[rpadovani]

Hear, hear. Unfortunately, social outrage is a good way to have attention from big companies. So, of course, it has become a fraud in itself.

[jonahbenton]

I have been Stripe user/customer almost from the beginning- personally I believe the tone and content is exactly right. So much tricky fraud in the space on the user side and on the vendor side most of them- like Square and Paypal, not to mention plain old banks- struggle, and make incorrect decisions that take a long time to resolve. Stripe (in my network experience) has always been on top of all of that. The business strikes me as singularly well operated, in addition to be strategically visionary. Cheers.

[Archipelagia]

I am very grateful that the OP posted that "tone deaf comment".

I'd much rather live in a world where I can read blunt comments by developers, versus a watered-down statements written by PR firms to absolutely avoid rubbing anyone the wrong way.

[thatwasunusual]

> I'm seeing too many people complaining [...]

How many is "too many"?

You probably only see a few people/companies complaining, not the thousands (millions?) of users that are entirely happy with Stripe. Look up "minority influence," "outlier influence," and "vocal minority effect."

Also, as @eerikkivistik points out; it's just easier to get something up and running with Stripe and similar "out of the box" solutions. If your product is profitable after some time, and you are still unsure about using Stripe, spend money on switching to something that is more comfortable for you.

As you yourself point out:

> As far as I know, Stripe services is not unique [...]

Feel free to use others instead. No one is forcing to use Stripe, I hope?

[eerikkivistik]

Sure thing. Stripe is in some sense feature complete. You can get almost anything you need out of the box, including taxation related features. They have good documentation for development, simple setup for testing locally. I am not really aware of any other provider that offers that many features out of the box, with good documentation and customer support. The risks are there, but when starting a new business, its a smaller risk than going with an alternative and building out these features yourself.

[dinkblam]

not sure i can agree about being feature-complete. they have "some help with taxation calculation" but won't help you with filing and remitting VAT for all those weird countries that require you to collect, file and remit VAT even if you just sell a single license for 4 USD to their country (^). a small company can't register with 40 VAT offices all around the world. Paddle solves the issue by collecting VAT, but using Paddle is the best way to bankruptcy. We now use FastSpring for all countries that require VAT collection.

[^] concerns at least these countries as well as all EU countries. possibly a lot more if you breach the minimum-thresholds: AE, AL, AO, BH, BY, CL, CO, CR, DZ, EC, IN, KE, KR, MD, MX, RS, RU, SA, UG, VN, CH, TJ, GE

[eerikkivistik]

Yeah, so from what I can tell, with the addition of Stripe App Marketplace, we have some addons that can handle the VAT issue. But I have not tested them yet. As for filing the taxes, you still mostly have to do that with your local government tax agency, but any sales below 40k€/year should not require having any branches in other EU countries

[dinkblam]

you cannot file VAT for foreign countries with your "your local government tax agency". you need to talk to foreign governments in weird languages. even registering with them can be a year-long nightmare. thats why i said its "impossible" for small companies.

[eerikkivistik]

Maybe we are talking about different things. Up to an amount you can do this: https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/taxation/vat/vat-digit...

[Waterluvian]

I think the answer is that you’re falling victim to some biases in how you perceive the problem.

You’re not hearing from all the happy customers and you’re possibly getting info from sites that heavily bias towards high tech and strong, loud opinions.

[grumple]

Usually, when there's smoke there's fire. For example, until now I haven't complained about Twilio or AirBnB despite having major issues with both recently. Most of us stay quiet and just switch vendors. People complaining on the internet are a tiny minority of people having issues. This is a well known problem when it comes to bugs with your software too - you'll get one report and find out it happened thousands of times.

And in many cases, you might not have an issue now. But you learn how the company could treat you when there's a problem, and that's something worth learning.

[Waterluvian]

Hmm. This all sounds reasonable. I’m going to have to mull this over and possibly re-reconcile my perspective on the topic.

[psyfi]

Adding to that, Stripe can suspend service for a user without holding money for months with no communication.

Bad communication + holding all money for long time, is not fraud prevention, it is a horrible service, and this has been mentioned by dozens of business owners so far and is not a specific case.

[samwillis]

I think it has become known that HN is a place you can get attention from senior execs, so we are seeing a spike in posts. Stripe are no worse than any of the the others, they just are larger and have a higher profile.

[arnon]

Truth is Stripe billing works fine for us.

We've built around some of the limitations and expanded it to be super powerful (e.g., we built a cashback system based around Stripe's excellent webhooks https://arnon.dk/how-we-built-a-cashback-system-with-stripe/)

I don't need it for the stuff that "would keep money hostage" as others say so I haven't experienced it at all.

[paulcole]

> Truth is Stripe billing works fine for us.

I think the people whose money was kept hostage would say the same. That is until their money got held hostage.

[judge2020]

The alternatives for payment processing are few and far between, often with their own issues like needing to talk to sales and draw up big contracts before they will underwrite you for CC processing.

[dinkblam]

> Why do people still use Stripe?

because Paddle is even worse, they nearly killed our business out of ill-will, stupidity and incompetence.

so far Stripe works a lot better.

one thing that seems essential is having (at least) two payment providers working, so if one is trying to wipe you out, you can just flip a switch and have a working backup. we use FastSpring for all countries that require VAT being remitted, and could extend this to all other countries to prevent any service disruption.

[NetOpWibby]

Interesting. Paddle took a long time getting back to me about verifying my sites and their support people didn't seem to understand basic (to me, I guess) technical things. Glad my sites weren't approved.

[sgent]

The only reason I can think of is that Stripe (and Paypal) have much lower credit standards for merchant, making it easier to sign up for. In addition, they have more marketing in the consumer space, and have done a lot of work to make it easy to integrate with online tools.

Most credible merchants would do better with a bank or similar processor, assuming they have some experience in programming interfaces (or at least troubleshooting them).

[ajeet_dhaliwal]

We originally used it at Tesults.com (the test automation reporting dashboard) because it's got a great API, documentation and to some degree due to the reputation of the company. Overtime, we've had no issues with it and so currently see no reason to change. It's possible we don't run into problems because Tesults is a b2b service and customers don't typically do things like charge backs and we deal with any requests for cancelations/refunds etc. promptly but that's just speculation.

[Kaibeezy]

Never had an issue. So much better than PayPal on disputes.

[soylentcola]

So...you can actually file disputes? My last interaction with PayPal was when I deposited a few hundred bucks in my account, only to have it immediately terminated for unspecified reasons.

I imagine it was because I hadn't used it in several years, but I will never know because part of the termination notice stated that there would be no way to reinstate it, dispute the account closure, or talk to anyone about it.

That money was essentially stolen by PayPal and I'll never see it again.

[Kaibeezy]

Oh, I meant as a seller when a purchaser disputes the charge. We used to eat a couple dozen of those every year, despite our dispositive responses. With Stripe it’s been less than one a year and we’ve prevailed on all of them.

[neximo64]

I think you might want to know its not usually Stripe doing that but their bankers & its likely to happen with any alternatives too.

[sourcecodeplz]

Exactly. Someone steals a card and uses it to buy from your store. If your store is selling high-ticket physical items, you will for sure be a target.

Fraud is fraud. It affects everybody, not just the person whos card was stolen.

[psyfi]

How does this justify holding the whole business balance for months and provide no explaination or support to account owner?

[KomoD]

> Stripe services is not unique and dozens of alternatives exist out there

Feel free to list them.

[bellgrove]

Square, Adyen, Braintree, Authorize.net

I’m not saying any of these have 1:1 offerings or are necessarily better or worse, but I think most people first look to Stripe for card payment processing and those are other options you might consider.

[netman21]

From our own experience Stripe has excellent customer support. I use Stripe for SaaS subscriptions and Square for integrating with my Woocommerce site.

[rvz]

The truth is, it is the HN darling. Even moderators here have contacts to the Stripe employees and use HN as a customer service desk.

Unlike what the HN echo chamber will tell you, the answer is to use multiple payment gateways rather than go all in on one. It makes zero sense to be stuck on to one payment gateway.

[robertlagrant]

A product that does nothing but that would be useful. But then ideally you'd use more than one!

[psyfi]

downvoting this comment was a good way to prove it

[nicoburns]

I think that the alternative servives aren't really any better in this regard. They are often cheaper than Stripe, but that comes at the cost of less good APIs and developer support.

[chrismcb]

Because stripe doesn't a decent job. You'll probably find similar stories with any stripe alternative.

[djitz]

Perhaps a good place to start would be your recommended, and superior, alternative?

[xtiansimon]

Strategic partnership with other vendors locking people into Stripe processing?

[nprateem]

Because those people don't live in the HN echo chamber

[andrewfromx]

Yeah this sounds like a rant for web3 to go mainstream but then I'm sure there will be _other_ problems with "stealing their business money or holding it hostage" but at least it will be decentralized!

[paulcole]

All the comments here standing up for Stripe (by those with little actual first-hand knowledge on the subject) really show the value of HN. Great marketing project by YC.

[kittyn]

“…bankrupt by now”

or

“why do things not scale how i want them to”

sounds like a skill issue

[throwmeup123]

Because for every thread you read there are millions of sellers using it without a single problem.

[paulcole]

Would be funny if people started sharing “Tell HN: Stripe released my funds on time.” posts.