We've been with them for 10 years and their customer service is atrocious on this position, which is unfortunate since historically it's been quite good.
We went through the arduous process of switching our corporate credit card structure to Stripe away from another vendor, and we probably have to go back to the other vendor now. Starting to understand the anti-Stripe comments that pop up from various people on HN.
The real client is the VC who writes cheques and provides validation in increasing valuations. The "regular clients" are a raw material, to be converted into the service provided to VC.
Clearly, in the early days, you desperately need "regular clients" to prove yourself to the "VC clients". But eventually you earned your stripes and you can again care about valuation over revenue and profit, and consequently customer retention.
Add to it the SV dream of inventing a niche and monopolising it, and you care about your customers less still.
Because I have to switch to something else and they're completely incompetent / unwilling to work with us (not sure which one it is, but I think it's primarily the first one), we're gonna switch payment providers too. No reason to give them any business if they're going to make my dev team and managers do a shitload of work.
I’d guess Stripe has an exceptionally good view of what’s going on in the economy, worldwide.
Just wild that AMEX and other banks have zero issue giving us a limit 3-5x that (verified it today!) but Stripe can't. AMEX account rep is begging for us to come back. Just sucks since Stripe's invoicing integration is absolutely nails, and all third party ones I've used are horrible (special shout to SAP Concur for being the worst of all time).
For every person who gets an HN post/comment with traction, there's a thousand people with no voice or platform just as fucked over or more.
I've used Square's on-premises processing for minor stuff like a side business of mine, but nothing too serious. Their fees aren't too good; they're comparable to Stripe but Stripe's ecosystem for developers is far better.
If/when we switch, we'll probably just go to a bare bones payment processor that is much cheaper than Stripe with less support.
If the new provider has less features/ease-of-use, then you have to start from square one on integration. If you have a team, then maybe not as big of a burden as being a solo dev.
https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/19/stripe-layoffs-taxjar-tech...
At that point I nope'd out of there and moved to Stripe.
https://developer.paddle.com/getting-started/c052e9e8d265f-w...
But elsewhere they also still seem to recommend doing things involving your production site for testing purposes. That seems like it's probably a bad idea that could be risky if anything goes wrong and possibly mess up things like reporting and compliance even if everything "works".
https://developer.paddle.com/api-reference/7695d655c158b-get...
For one thing Paddle is a merchant of record so it's more like "outsource your entire payment system including all the processing of different payment methods and the global tax admin". For a lot of businesses, particularly smaller ones with international sales, that is going to be an attractive option compared to services like Stripe even at this price point.
For another thing Stripe has introduced so many extras that bump up their cut now that some types of business will end up paying quite a bit more than the analogous headline rate. So even if it were an apples to apples comparison the difference on the bottom line still wouldn't be as wide as it might first appear for those merchants.
I have contemplated Stripe vs Paddle couple of months ago. But ultimately chose to stay with Stripe and deal with tax complexities when there is sizable revenue.
For those CTOs in the back: YOU NEED TO PAY REAL MONEY TO GET REAL SERVICE.
They also randomly removed domain approval for some days without even sending any notification
They will also take you VAT if user inputs his VAT number but you have “VAT included in price” option enabled
https://stripe.com/docs/api/checkout/sessions/create#create_...
session = stripe.checkout.Session.create(
automatic_tax={'enabled': False},
payment_method_types=['card'],
mode='subscription',
line_items=[{
'price': price,
'quantity': quantity
}],
)Five hours later I finally made the change. UGH.
And yet when my website's card payments were abruptly disabled because some opaque ML algorithm decided one of my transactions was fraudulent (in spite of the customer's own insistence that it was genuine), you wouldn't even respond to my emails.
If you want a no-bullshit payment processor that actually gives a fuck about their customers, try pinpayments.com.
I’m surprised only a small fraction of Stripe customers collect sales taxes.
Sorry, but true class isn't just elegant rectangles decorated by various subtle shades of gray sans serif.
if their status is a percentage of requests, then a relatively small number of 500s compared to a big total volume will be tiny, even if ongoing.
Tax calculation software handles all the different tax rates for product categories your business sells, changes in city/district/federal tax rates, brackets and min/max caps, sales tax holidays, etc. It costs money to maintain those databases.
Saying it can be done by any developer in a day is absurd.
By the way, Stripe responses to BBB complaints are hilarious [1]. Most of the ones I read close with an identical snippet of text dismissing the claim as "baseless", even when they admit they made a mistake. It's astonishingly inept and says a lot about the attitude toward the customer.
[1] https://www.bbb.org/us/ca/san-francisco/profile/payment-proc...
I think what really did it was that it took somebody a while back to post on HN about issues with Stripe regarding tax that jepordized his business to get the situation fixed.
I don't know but lately it seems like so much of YC's production is just pure garbage. From coinbase to ponzi metaverses to now Stripe screwing up like this.
If anybody has alternative to Stripe please reply here, been with Stripe for almost 7 years and looking to bounce.
I still use what everyone used before Stripe: a "merchant account" from an ISO/MSP of a bank. Google "interchange plus merchant account" to find a hundred options. You pay some fixed markup over interchange rates set by the card networks, as low as 0.05% + $0.21 to charge a debit or check card for example. Quite a bit of savings over Stripe for most card mixes...
I used to recommend Spreedly to go with that, a payment gateway agnostic credit card vault so you can take your customers with you if you switch merchant accounts or payment gateways in the future, but they turned toxic over the years. Seemingly only care about enterprise customers, their sales/support team I've interacted with are useless, and they raised my subscription rate by over 30x without an ounce of empathy. I'm still trying to find time to replace them.
I know that some Western states have better privacy laws, but those are designed for setting up tax shelters, not corporations you hope to scale.
But their record on de-platforming people for dubious reasons is not great.