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Ask HN: Why do people still use Stripe?

by psyfi on 1/6/23, 11:13 AM with 67 comments

• by smca on 1/6/23, 12:46 PM

  (I work at Stripe) I've posted about this before but leaving here again for posterity.

  Many complaints posted about Stripe on HN, Twitter, and Reddit are from fraudulent users looking to overturn decisions we've correctly made. They look to turn outrage into action in an attempt to defraud customers of money. We have to take action to protect Stripe, Stripe users, and Stripe users' customers. We don't and won’t comment on specific cases for privacy reasons.

  It's important to know that almost every case posted here since summer has ended with confirmation that the activity was fraudulent.

  We can make mistakes and those can be acutely painful to legitimate users. But those are few and far between.

• by thatwasunusual on 1/6/23, 12:30 PM

  > I'm seeing too many people complaining [...]

  How many is "too many"?

  You probably only see a few people/companies complaining, not the thousands (millions?) of users that are entirely happy with Stripe. Look up "minority influence," "outlier influence," and "vocal minority effect."

  Also, as @eerikkivistik points out; it's just easier to get something up and running with Stripe and similar "out of the box" solutions. If your product is profitable after some time, and you are still unsure about using Stripe, spend money on switching to something that is more comfortable for you.

  As you yourself point out:

  > As far as I know, Stripe services is not unique [...]

  Feel free to use others instead. No one is forcing to use Stripe, I hope?

• by eerikkivistik on 1/6/23, 12:16 PM

  Sure thing. Stripe is in some sense feature complete. You can get almost anything you need out of the box, including taxation related features. They have good documentation for development, simple setup for testing locally. I am not really aware of any other provider that offers that many features out of the box, with good documentation and customer support. The risks are there, but when starting a new business, its a smaller risk than going with an alternative and building out these features yourself.

• by Waterluvian on 1/6/23, 1:16 PM

  I think the answer is that you’re falling victim to some biases in how you perceive the problem.

  You’re not hearing from all the happy customers and you’re possibly getting info from sites that heavily bias towards high tech and strong, loud opinions.

• by samwillis on 1/6/23, 11:26 AM

  I think it has become known that HN is a place you can get attention from senior execs, so we are seeing a spike in posts. Stripe are no worse than any of the the others, they just are larger and have a higher profile.

• by arnon on 1/6/23, 1:10 PM

  Truth is Stripe billing works fine for us.

  We've built around some of the limitations and expanded it to be super powerful (e.g., we built a cashback system based around Stripe's excellent webhooks https://arnon.dk/how-we-built-a-cashback-system-with-stripe/)

  I don't need it for the stuff that "would keep money hostage" as others say so I haven't experienced it at all.

• by dinkblam on 1/6/23, 1:26 PM

  > Why do people still use Stripe?

  because Paddle is even worse, they nearly killed our business out of ill-will, stupidity and incompetence.

  so far Stripe works a lot better.

  one thing that seems essential is having (at least) two payment providers working, so if one is trying to wipe you out, you can just flip a switch and have a working backup. we use FastSpring for all countries that require VAT being remitted, and could extend this to all other countries to prevent any service disruption.

• by sgent on 1/10/23, 1:41 AM

  The only reason I can think of is that Stripe (and Paypal) have much lower credit standards for merchant, making it easier to sign up for. In addition, they have more marketing in the consumer space, and have done a lot of work to make it easy to integrate with online tools.

  Most credible merchants would do better with a bank or similar processor, assuming they have some experience in programming interfaces (or at least troubleshooting them).

• by ajeet_dhaliwal on 1/6/23, 1:15 PM

  We originally used it at Tesults.com (the test automation reporting dashboard) because it's got a great API, documentation and to some degree due to the reputation of the company. Overtime, we've had no issues with it and so currently see no reason to change. It's possible we don't run into problems because Tesults is a b2b service and customers don't typically do things like charge backs and we deal with any requests for cancelations/refunds etc. promptly but that's just speculation.

• by Kaibeezy on 1/6/23, 11:20 AM

  Never had an issue. So much better than PayPal on disputes.

• by neximo64 on 1/6/23, 11:27 AM

  I think you might want to know its not usually Stripe doing that but their bankers & its likely to happen with any alternatives too.

• by KomoD on 1/6/23, 11:50 AM

  > Stripe services is not unique and dozens of alternatives exist out there

  Feel free to list them.

• by netman21 on 1/6/23, 1:22 PM

  From our own experience Stripe has excellent customer support. I use Stripe for SaaS subscriptions and Square for integrating with my Woocommerce site.

• by rvz on 1/6/23, 12:19 PM

  The truth is, it is the HN darling. Even moderators here have contacts to the Stripe employees and use HN as a customer service desk.

  Unlike what the HN echo chamber will tell you, the answer is to use multiple payment gateways rather than go all in on one. It makes zero sense to be stuck on to one payment gateway.

• by nicoburns on 1/6/23, 1:33 PM

  I think that the alternative servives aren't really any better in this regard. They are often cheaper than Stripe, but that comes at the cost of less good APIs and developer support.

• by chrismcb on 1/8/23, 12:21 PM

  Because stripe doesn't a decent job. You'll probably find similar stories with any stripe alternative.

• by djitz on 1/6/23, 1:28 PM

  Perhaps a good place to start would be your recommended, and superior, alternative?

• by xtiansimon on 1/6/23, 1:25 PM

  Strategic partnership with other vendors locking people into Stripe processing?

• by nprateem on 1/6/23, 11:29 AM

  Because those people don't live in the HN echo chamber

• by andrewfromx on 1/6/23, 11:49 AM

  Yeah this sounds like a rant for web3 to go mainstream but then I'm sure there will be _other_ problems with "stealing their business money or holding it hostage" but at least it will be decentralized!

• by paulcole on 1/6/23, 1:17 PM

  All the comments here standing up for Stripe (by those with little actual first-hand knowledge on the subject) really show the value of HN. Great marketing project by YC.

• by kittyn on 1/6/23, 4:11 PM

  “…bankrupt by now”

  or

  “why do things not scale how i want them to”

  sounds like a skill issue

• by throwmeup123 on 1/6/23, 11:18 AM

  Because for every thread you read there are millions of sellers using it without a single problem.