[danielmarkbruce]

These types of companies are often frauds (anything involving large amounts charged for travel, or housing of some sort). A bunch of big charges comes in, and then months later there are massive chargebacks and the company in question no longer exists. Stripe is left holding the bag. Their only option with these large charges for services to be delivered in the future is to not release funds until they are quite certain there won't be a charge back.

For every instance of what appears to be bad behavior by a payments company, consider the angle of the fraudster. They are really screwing things up for everybody.

[matthewdgreen]

In a working payment system, the scenario where someone initiates a valid dispute nine months after the fact would be extremely rare: it would be limited to a few types of physical card theft where the card owner is unable to report the card missing for some relatively unusual reason. We just don’t have a working payment system, so unfortunately this stuff is incredibly common and everyone has to suffer because of it.

[danielmarkbruce]

There are genuine cases (travel and lodging are the obvious ones) where people tend to pay for things months in advance. I don't see it going away. If you can come up with a cheap, effective, convenient payment method to cover these things, you are on a winner. I don't think it's possible because the time horizon creates risk, there is no avoiding it.