Tell HN: Beware Stripe's “Minimum Fee Commitment”

Long version: The company I work for processes tens of millions annually, and Stripe was able to offer a better rate than our current processor, so we entered into what would become a months-long sales process.

The salesperson pushed hard to get us to sign up for a Minimum Fee Commitment: if we agreed to run at least $X million in processing fees over five years, they could give us a really good rate. If there was a shortfall, we'd have to make up the difference.

We almost agreed as we could easily meet the amount, but in the end we declined since the contract didn't let us off the hook if Stripe decided to stop doing business with us.

Shortly after we started collecting payments through Stripe, we got a notice that they had frozen our payouts because of a "surge in processing volume". Weird! Must be a mistake, right? They obviously know who we are and what volume we process; after all, we've been working with them for the past X months to get this thing off the ground, submitted financial statements, processing history, all sorts of documentation about our business.

What we discovered pretty quickly, however, is that the Stripe risk teams (apparently) don't communicate with the rest of the organization, and they also don't communicate with customers, which is to say they ask but don't answer questions. They wanted things like "Invoices for the past 7-14 days" or "copies of one or two contracts with vendors", but wouldn't respond to requests for clarification or acknowledge our emails to them in any way. They'd say, "Send us X," and I would reply, "What do you mean exactly by X?" and they'd reply with, "Send us Y". A black box.

Our rep figured out that our account hadn't been flagged properly: even though we had gone through a sales process and signed a contract, our account had been configured as "self serve", which puts us in a higher risk category with a different risk team than we should have had. So... payouts frozen for a week, a bit scary but resolved now, no big deal.

Less than 24 hours later, however, our payouts were frozen again, this time by a different Stripe risk team with even weirder demands: among other things, they wanted a "working website" (our website works?) and "contact information to appear on the website" (it's on every page?) It was as if Stripe had never heard of or talked to us before, and just like the other risk team, they asked questions but didn't respond to our emails.

We've been able to make some progress, but due-diligence is ongoing and feels arbitrary, with new and different teams taking an interest in our account every so often, which leads to new questions, documents we need to produce, etc., and as of yesterday our payouts are frozen once again.

I'm hopeful we'll resolve our issues, but I feel pretty strongly that we would be in deep trouble had we agreed to the Minimum Fee Commitment. Our ability to walk away has been the one piece of leverage we have had in order to achieve any resolution whatsoever.

To sum up: Stripe has a lot going for them, and I definitely not saying you shouldn't use them to process payments, but: beware the Minimum Fee Commitment. No matter how warm and fuzzy the salesperson makes you feel, Stripe proper doesn't do any due diligence until after you sign the contract and start collecting money, and their policy is "freeze payouts first, ask questions later", so you'll want the ability to roll back to another processor (which is what ...