Flurly has been shut down by Stripe

It seems a little unfair to blame Stripe here. Per their communication, the site has been assessed as selling illegal merchandise and is subject to a $425k fine by the payment card issuers, despite Stripe's efforts to dispute the issue on behalf of their client. It's not clear to me whether this is the first that Flurly has heard about the issue or represents the last stage of an ongoing story, which Flurly's users were unaware of until now.

From the original Show HN[1] a commenter wrote:<p>&quot;&quot;&quot; As an intermediary in 2020, you&#x27;re likely to see a lot of people target you in various ways because they don&#x27;t like things that people are using your platform for. They may threaten you with lawsuits, complaints to law enforcement, boycotts, DDoS, trying to get your payment relationships cut off, trying to get your other platform providers to cut you off, etc. If your platform has a high profile or is used to sell something high-profile, journalists and politicians may publicly second-guess your content decisions (both things that you did remove and things that you didn&#x27;t remove).<p>I don&#x27;t want to alarm you about this, but it would be nice if you could figure out any content and moderation policies ahead of time, explain them clearly to prospective sellers, and then see if you can stick to them when other people disagree with them. &quot;&quot;&quot;<p>Seems a bit prophetic - at least for the need for content moderation policies (and maybe not so much grandfathering)<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=25482168" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=25482168</a>

Isnt stripe doing a good thing. It just seems like what flurly is selling is dodgy. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;flurly.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;paymencreditcard" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;flurly.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;paymencreditcard</a>

It is <i>so weird</i> to see multiple typos in form emails sent to Stripe customers.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;flurly.com&#x2F;images&#x2F;stripe-email-1.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;flurly.com&#x2F;images&#x2F;stripe-email-1.png</a><p>Seriously, does anyone proof read this stuff?

Those clients weren’t “grandfathered”. You were processing payments for sketchy businesses that couldn’t possibly pass Stripe’s onboarding process through Connect under your merchant id. This payment aggregation is, of course, against card network rules so you got fined and placed on MATCH.

This makes me consider using cryptocurrency for payments on my SaaS. The one I am most familiar with is not popular (instant downvote on HN) so I won&#x27;t mention it.<p>But anyway with a cryptocurrency, at least I know that no one is going to &quot;shut down my account&quot; or some nonsense like that.

The weirdest thing to me is that this is happening though emails. Are there also account reps or something that call and discuss with customers? Business is business and I understand from the post that this appears to be out of Stripe&#x27;s hands and consistent with agreed upon terms. It&#x27;s still pretty weird to me to communicate it in a form looking email message though. I would personally not want to trust large amounts of money with a company that sends me existentially bad news this way.

Flurly’s selling point was dramatically lower fees compared to Gumroad. Unfortunately the take rate isn’t sustainable to run a marketplace that does things like vet sellers - the products sold on Flurly all seemed like spam&#x2F;scams -wasn’t surprising to see Stripe shut it down.<p>If I remember correctly Flurly did $500kish in sales over maybe 6months? Sounds great but the take was only 1%. That’s $5000usd over 6 months. Not a sustainable model.

Should’ve just forced everyone into Stripe Connect

There&#x27;s a spelling error in the mail from stripe: &#x27;some information abotu&#x27;

Sorry to hear this, Flurly was a really well-built product.<p>Crazy mix of wholesome and hustler products. Something a lot of people used: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;search?q=site%3Aflurly.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;search?q=site%3Aflurly.com</a>

I don&#x27;t understand. Didn&#x27;t he use Stripe Connect? All the accounts are then siloed out and have to pass KYC. Is it just because he let them keep selling knowing full well that they are doing something sketch?

Does Stripe really have so many spelling errors in their e-mail comms?

TLDR: Use Stripe Connect if you build a marketplace.

sounds like money laundering to me or allowing some &#x27;customers&#x27; to move money from a stolen cc to another <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;flurly.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;paymencreditcard" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;flurly.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;paymencreditcard</a>

Stripe strikes back and shuts down yet another startup.<p>Let this be a lesson to all about why you should not rely on one payment gateway. Stripe is certainly not your friend and never has been and this should be a wake up call to use more than one gateway.<p>This won&#x27;t be the last and no-one should be surprised to see Stripe do this. As usual, we now wait for Stripe support to respond here on Hacker News.

Let this be another lesson of relying on third party software completely.