Ask HN: Alternatives to Google, PayPal, Amazon, etc.

Amazon (retail): Target, Walmart, and BestBuy. Prices are the same as Amazon, selection is just as good, and it's much easier to return products. Infiltration by rotating throw-away Chinese brands is minimal, and the "in-stores" products are a good indicator of quality.

AWS: Unfortunately haven't found an alternative for this. Most people I work with demand a major cloud. Mostly we use Azure these days because the UI and DevOps integration is much better.

Google Search: They're all terrible, including Google. Google is the least-bad for me. I find the others unusable. I wish we had something better for this.

Gmail: You use Yandex? If leaving the US for mail, I would never go to a more authoritarian country... Fastmail is good in the sense that it works well and isn't ad-supported, but being headquartered in Australia is a problem a lot of people have.

Google Docs: Unfortunately, there are no great options here. The combination of best features and least-bad company seems to be Microsoft.

Their English is often limited and their training on their products is often limited, so you can't really get answers on chat without 30 mins of incorrect random guesses (yes, I do know what a color picker is, but that's not the source of my question, Stripe agent), or spend a couple days on back-and-forth emails.

There's a Stripe person here on HN who's absolutely amazing and a major asset for the company. But as effective & professional as he is, relying on catching his attention on HN is not a viable long-term strategy for interacting with Stripe.

If Stripe were to raise the quality of their L1 support back to what it was even a year or two ago, I'd have no qualms about recommending them again.