I heard a lot of shaky news over the past year from Stripe's customers: [0], [1], [2]<p>Now there's news about the whole Stripe raising more money [3], [4], [5], eyeing an exit within 12 months.<p>What does this mean for Stripe customers now and 12 months from now?<p>I would like my payment infra to be stable, boring, and profitable/sustainable.
But the news is giving me mixed impressions...<p>[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32261868<p>[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32854528<p>[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34233011<p>[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/30/technology/stripe-thrive-funding.html<p>[4] https://techcrunch.com/2023/01/27/fintech-stripe-tried-to-raise-more-capital-at-a-55b-60b-valuation/<p>[5] https://techcrunch.com/2023/01/26/fintech-stripe-eyes-an-exit/
I use to love working with Stripe, but it turned from being an asset to a liability. Far too risky to have my payments infra stuck behind a company that will arbitrarily cut you off with no support, or worse, actively use "terms" and "our policy" to not support you<p>I moved all my clients off Stripe as a precautionary measure, and now in the process of moving our last Stripe account with 100+ Stripe Connect accounts away. It eventually just got to be comical how infuriating their ability to dodge responsibility became, or even just simply being helpful; i.e. "we can't unblock those payments or that account, it's just our policy because x,y, and z", or "we can't tell you what your transaction threshold is, or where you are at in it, and we can't increase it, or let you check via the API". IF YOU CAN'T DO ANY OF THAT FOR ME, WHY AM I PAYING YOU AND WHO DID YOU BUILD YOUR SYSTEM FOR? Answer: not you or me.<p>Stripe is a great way to get something quick and dirty off the ground, but you better have a plan or timeline from day one for replacing it.<p>Treat it like eating McDonalds. It's fine as a one-off to get you through a hard time, but as soon as you depend on it, you'll be in a world of hurt with no one else to blame.
I’m a one man dev shop but in an app I’m developing I decided to implement payments with two (or more!) processors with the ability to set a weight for each. It hasn’t launched yet but the current plan is to have about 90% or so of transactions flow through Stripe with the other 10% being a “hot backup”, more or less. If anything happens, I can just flip over to the other processor. I decided to actually have the second processor take a small amount of payments so there is less of a risk of it not working seamlessly in the event of a crisis with Stripe. It’s going to cost slightly more in transaction fees but I think it’s worth it.
> What does this mean for Stripe customers now and 12 months from now?<p>It means that it will become just like PayPal. I would not sit on one payment gateway in the long run.
Just onboarded an app and had to go trough a fairly arbitrary verification process for weeks. Does not feel safe at all specially if you use their subscription. Are there good alternatives for SaaS payments?