Stripe has a slick API, but their banned merchant categories (anything telecom or networking related) have caused trouble for many potential clients, esp. as Ubiquiti integrated them as their first payment processor.
The distinction between high risk consumer sales & B2B low risk sales is not drawn by Stripe.
Most of those categories are from financial institutions or card networks. Stripe has been working with them so we can support more businesses, and I know of quite a few networking equipment businesses that run on Stripe today. If you're still seeing any trouble, we'd love to take another look—our support team's at support@stripe.com (and my email's edwin@stripe.com).
Support told me that our business could not continue to use Stripe 2 years ago, we've been with Payment.ninja since (and pay a little under half what we used to pay Stripe).
I took what Stripe Support told us very literally, and we ceased using DigitalOcean and one other service since their only recurring billing options were Stripe.
We don't want to break Stripes ToS or do wrong by our clients, hence our contract-less, B2B only, monthly prepaid business model. Apparently this is too high risk for your company?
I'm 90% certain Stripe has had a few fly by night calling card companies sign up with them, and gotten burned when the calling card company gets a ton of chargebacks for not delivering everything promised.
Thus, a blanket ban on Telecom and anything vaugely related (like ISPs). Certain flagship clients like Twilio get a pass, but smaller players like SignalWire, Telnyx, Teli, etc do not.
The Ubiqiti forums are also littered with ISPs that signed up with Stripe (since Ubiquiti integrates with them) used it for a few months w/o chargebacks or any fraud, but got an email one day saying they were not allowed to use Stripe. Appeals are consistently rejected or go unreplied to.
I emailed Edwin at Stripe 4hrs ago, have not heard back from him.
That's true that ISPs and WISPs can't really use Stripe (many use Adyen), but pure-VOIP companies offering hosted PBX and such are welcome at Stripe based on feedback I received from several people who work at Stripe.
When I asked Stripe Support about servicing VoIP companies last year they referred me to the prohibited businesses section and said:
"Historically we have seen that the telecommunications industry is one with too high of a likelihood of customer chargebacks. These need not necessarily be chargebacks in fact; the likelihood of potential chargebacks is also a deciding factor in our deliberations."
The distinction between high risk consumer sales & B2B low risk sales is not drawn by Stripe.