Ask HN: Stripe/Google/Apple squeezing the little guy?

2 points by the_black_hand ↗ HN
Hi folks,

I started a small website as fun project. My goal was to create the fastest p2p content transfer site. It's a free site that allows anyone to send files p2p files. No signups needed. User can send a file anywhere in not more that 3 clicks.

It was a project that grew and gained some traction. I got feedback from customers who loved the simplicity.

Naturally, as it grew I needed to pay the bills for hosting and my DNS (about $20/month). This is where my difficulty began. Initially, I was able to accept stripe payments but then that got abruptly canceled. Stripe will not allow me accept payments, Google will not allow me to host ads, And apple will not allow me to distribute my app in the app store. I get vague reasons ranging from violation of TOS , hidden features in app, poor performance. I'm a solo developer and my app is far from perfect but it's very frustrating that I'll will be unable to generate any income to keep the service going even though it used by thousands of users. I'm old enough to remember a time when you could host ads on a self hosted blog without so much bureaucracy. It's troubling how centralized the internet has become over the years.

Are there any alternative tools for monetization that early stage founders can use? Essentially, in my business model, the site is free to use, but users can purchases namespace that they can own to transfer content. I'd would like a simple payment provider that can facilitate this.

6 comments

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Have you considered accepting payment in the form of cryptocurrency? Circumventing payment processors is one of its most touted use-cases.
yeah. im looking into crypto now. I just cant find an easy way to accept all the coins in one go.
Stripe has been known to lock user funds for little to no reason other than vague TOS reasons and you just end up contacting the CEO of Stripe or some Stripe employees here on HN just to unlock your account and release your funds. It's very bizarre but such a immediate cancellation for vague reasons in the TOS is unacceptable and it continues to happen.

The simple solution is to use multiple payment gateways. It makes zero sense to go all in on one payment gateway even if it is the HN darling. Some were even more unlucky and waited many months for Stripe to unlock their money in their account which over that time it almost killed their business.

If that fails, your absolute last resort is to accept payment using cryptocurrencies.

I'll look into crypto. It's frustrating that there is no painless way to do this. My app is in a weird place where it doesn't generate much income/traffic for me to invest significant amounts of my time coding up payment apis, but at the same time I'd like to keep it self sustaining and payments or ads are the only real ways to go. I'm more interested in payments cause I'd like to do rapid AB testing and see what customers find valuable and what they are willing to pay for. Ads are a passive stream and don't really help me learn about the business.
Can you email me at aly@stripe.com? I'm looking into this.