Tell HN: Considering legal action against Stripe
Despite seeing these kinds of posts on HN every week, we mistakingly thought taking extra care of our account and forming our company under Stripe Atlas would at least help us survive until we got big enough. Also, some part of us thought – "Clearly, these people must have done something wrong. Stripe wouldn't be this aggressive. They are terrific for entrepreneurs after all!" We were dead wrong.
The truly insane part about it is that we had no issues with *anyone*: no complaints, no chargebacks, no anything. We went further by regularly checking purchases and manually refunding suspicious sales, which happened once when someone started card testing and we stopped it immediately — we also kept Stripe updated at every step, and they told us that they were impressed with how we handled it and that someone would contact us about the matter. With all that said, these shouldn't even matter because we are so new and small as a company that nearly all our paying customers are our friends & family.
What's even better is how they permanently damaged our brand by sending the same email about our account's closure due to "unauthorized charges" to our Connect users/sellers.
I just cannot help but feel like they are simply doing a summer cleanup, removing low revenue companies that might be making them lose a few bucks.
We contacted support 3 times, yet the answer is always the same automated "We still think your account is high risk" nonsense — even though we've had less than 100 transactions this year, all cleared up by the IRS & Cleer Tax.
Honestly, it's like they don't even want to find a solution since when we offered to axe a whole part of our service, just to be "low risk" and comply with their demands (that we were guessing as they just won't tell us), they again replied with the automated message.
We were baffled by how we were cut off without a single warning and without reason. The only plausible move seems to take legal action to at least get some answers?
48 comments
[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 118 ms ] threadThat sounds like a great way to lose both money and time without achieving anything. Just use another provider and move on.
Thank you for the reply tho.
https://www.amazon.com/Information-Rules-Strategic-Network-E...
I know it may sound not helpful but achieving vendor independence is a valid reason for adopting at least some software design patterns so you can swap the implementations without changing the interface. It’s becoming increasingly more important as the cloud service providers are getting more aggressive just because they can get away with it.
View it this way: be happy that it happened now - what mess this would be if you have thousands of customers and a bigger saturation.
Here’s my page; https://heyhey.to/l (My shop is purged)
Here’s the link; https://heyhey.to We made Pro free for everyone until this issue get solved.
You are providing almost nothing of value, but a thin layer on top of stripe and you are charging like 5 times more than stripe.
It reads a lot like it's in the patreon, onlyfans space. Which would obviously get blocked due to either being a reseller of their merchant services or by distributing porn.
If you really want to continue you need to build your own pci infra, and be clear about whether you allow high risk industries like work from home prostitutes, both in branding and through acceptable use policies
In general you need to provide a clear product and clear value instead of making a really small product and charging a huge cut of revenue.
Regards.
It's as if you searched for a checklist of what a webpage needs, but you forgot to put actual content, and you slammed a paymeny option.
Your competition like linktree is free, and in my experience it's only used to circumvent domain based restrictions to post malicious, pornography, or gambling links.
Get real, be more ambitious. Build an actual product, not just a template.
A quick google search brought me to this one: https://getpayment.com/what-to-do-if-your-company-is-one-of-...
I don'tt know anything about them, so look for all alternatives and then choose. you haven't been the first and the last that goes through this.
I'm sure other commenters will have more value, just wait for more responses.
There will be a solution, of course. I'm sorry that this happened, but put feelings aside - it doesn't help much now.
@OP seriously please consider getting in touch with them, maybe this can be settled in a fair convenient way for both parties.
We’ll assume the risk of being the merchant of record, and just not use Stripe connect. It’s faaaaar less risk than having to co-brand with Stripe and be locked into a single gateway
We’ve also found significantly cheaper merchant fees elsewhere, it’s just win win win to ditch stripe at this point
So essentially you're providing some kind of linktree alternative with some social integration plus a touch of patreon? That's kind of cool, a live business card in a way.
I suppose I can see how that might be considered risky business (you might end up linking/hosting undesirable content).
I realize stripe offers a lot more than just the actual payment but it's messed up that except for cash, exchanging money for services in the US basically requires you to use a private system from day one of your startup.
* a lot of the risk calculations are about percentages, so low volume is a dangerous place because even ONE janky transaction can trigger alerts
* processors make money on a percentage of transactions, so low volume means you're not a valuable customer - especially if you're triggering risk alerts
Very possible that they've decided that the projected revenue from your account isn't worth the risk, or even the customer-service effort required to double-check the risk. IANAL, but I'd guess that the "answer" is between 6.2h and 6.2i in the services agreement: https://stripe.com/legal/ssa#suspensionActually most of the time when I see these threads the people have indeed done something wrong, like 1-2 days ago when someone was complaining and said it was "unfair" and "ridiculous" but they were drop shipping, which actually does violate their terms
I'm getting tired seeing this.
Why are those people not able to do a web search before using services like Stripe or PayPal ?
This behaviour goes on since 20 years yet people continue blindly to trust those scammers.
Just get a lawyer and get a first consultation to see where you are.
I will make another post detailing what I've learned during this time.