Don’t use Stripe. I am trying to save you from my mistake

<p><pre><code> &gt; I used Stripe for about a year to run a small cell phone store in Denver &gt; [...] All of a sudden, we run a charge for $3300 because our primary &gt; processor in my business was down, </code></pre> This is the same story as <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=32261868" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=32261868</a>, even with identical wording. Interesting that it&#x27;s posted by a different Reddit and HN account.<p>During the discussion it came out that this cell phone store used their Stripe account to sell a used vehicle[0], which is the sort of unusual activity that makes every regulated financial services company sit up and pay attention. A common risk mitigation is for the payment processor to hold the money in escrow until after the dispute period.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=32264886" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=32264886</a>

Reddit rants are by their nature difficult to believe. Also, the identical rant was posted previously under a different username so it&#x27;s difficult to take seriously.<p>Though it wouldn&#x27;t be surprising that small accounts are simply not worth offering phone support service in a low margin industry.<p>I think the number is around $100 to $150&#x2F;hour in terms of fully loaded costs for even the most junior dev. So a half hour on the phone would cost $50 to $75.<p>The cost to get someone on the line with actual authority to reverse anti-fraud systems would likely be an order of magnitude more expensive.<p>Though it would be surprising if their email ticketing system didn&#x27;t have a way to track cases. I wonder how true that really is.

Disclosure: I spent years on Stripe&#x27;s IRC channel and most recently on Discord, so definitely biased.<p>People like to shit on Stripe due to bad customer support, but to be honest you could say the same about any other company.<p>There&#x27;s always a better way to handle customer support, and the best way is to decentralize it.<p>When most of your customer support is locked in a geo-area, it&#x27;s tough to get great customer support.<p>It&#x27;s actually pretty simple to change this, you just need to be willing to change.<p>However as someone who is on Stripe&#x27;s discord channel (for dev purposes), the # 1 issue is that people DO NOT know how to ask for help.<p>The amount of times folk comes into discord to ask about how to reset their password or block a credit card...in a channel called #dev-help... are you serious?<p>There&#x27;s a whole customer support site with a LIVE-CHAT and yet you somehow make it to dev-help on Discord? You can&#x27;t make this shit up.

The linked reddit post is a word for word copy of an earlier reddit post by another user: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;stripe&#x2F;comments&#x2F;wa1zd6&#x2F;run_from_stripe&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;stripe&#x2F;comments&#x2F;wa1zd6&#x2F;run_from_str...</a>

The core complaint about Stripe getting back to you is patently false -- it&#x27;s simple enough to request a callback and a human from Stripe will call you. Typically within minutes.

I&#x27;ve got a killer startup idea. &quot;Post your problem with &lt;tech company&gt; to HN as a service.&quot;

I feel like we saw this exact story before. IIRC the guy sold a company truck or van.

This is the same issue with content moderation.<p>Something gets picked up that shouldn’t be picked up by the automated detection systems.<p>For the average user this is uncommon so even if the offending communication is dealt with in a clumsy and slow fashion it doesn’t happen often enough to visibly impact the bottom line of the company.<p>Eventually over time users hear stories of this and as time goes by the more stories are heard until it reaches a point where the average user regards it as a fixed property of the system.

The ease and availability of card processing has created an wealth of people who use it without understanding the agreements, risks and requirements of using it.<p>The processors focus on ease of use and friction-free on-boarding isn&#x27;t helping matters.

Yikes. Time to diversify processors

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