I'm no defender of stripe (or corporations) but the one thing I always find interesting is that a lot of the complaint stories are one sided as the company can't release any information due to privacy. Many times these complaint stories have cases of fraud or other problematic issues and use the public forum to generate publicity. There are cases of people getting caught up inadvertently as well.

What does it matter if it's one-sided? Reading the complaints and the seqience of events give me perspective on whether something like that could happen to me as a platform user.

In the real world, I am not going to get Patio11 to respond as he's doing here. I'd get a CSR rep working off a script. So I don't really care what the CEO's POV is.

Patio11 is one of the most responsive public internet users out there. On twitter, he’s not the absolute most responsive, but he has a standing invitation for anyone to contact him about nearly anything on his website, and he takes it very seriously[0]. I know multiple people at Stripe who have been asked to look into things he’s found out about, and he follows up. I won’t claim that he’s perfect about this, but I struggle to come up with anyone at any company of remotely similar scale that is more likely to do this.

Disclaimer: I’ve somewhat recently gotten to know patio11 a bit, but he’d previously responded to my tweets and replied to my emails, long before our paths actually crossed.

[0] https://www.kalzumeus.com/standing-invitation/

Unless Patio's email address appears in the customer support section of the website, how responsive he is is immaterial. He's posting on HN, not in their ticket management software.

It is not really different from Elon Musk responding to a tweet about Tesla service, but not actually lifting a finger to escalate the ticket.

The one-sidedeness is that the poster could be lying, and Stripe isn't allowed to call them out

Yes but they have the ability to shut down accounts with no grace period or recourse.

A rare case where one-sidedness goes both ways. Except I'm guessing a business owner will lose more sleep over an account termination than Stripe execs will because somebody criticized their service.

They choose not to call out lying. That could be the right choice! Of course if they do call it out they could be sued for slander/libel, but that isn't the same as "not allowed".

uhhh their privacy policy doesn't apply to disputes

https://stripe.com/privacy

it mostly applies to 'personal information'. it applies to transactions if they're 'end customer' transactions (customer's customer). And per 3d in the policy, 'consent' is a basis for data processing, so stripe could ask to comment publicly on the dispute, and then the customer could let them

If you process more than say $10,000 per year, you should have multiple payment providers.

It's doubtful that Stripe is worse than other payment processors, they just process more payments than most other. Payment processors universally suck, partly because they live in fear of VISA and MasterCard. They tend to overreact or have automated systems that will falsely flag account.

Most have okay support, but resolving issues can take time, especially if the credit card companies are involved. In the meantime, you're kinda screwed.

All the stories you linked share the naive assumption that they could just integrate with Stripe and that's payments sorted.

If you rely on just a single company to handle your payment I assume that what you're doing the a side-hustle and that you have another job that pays the bills. You need multiple payment processors and an easy way to switch between them, that is the sad reality of online payment processing. You may have a preferred processor, typically the cheapest provider, but you always have a backup. That also helps you when your primary processors inevitably have an outage.

You could argue that you have the same issue with using a single cloud provider, but their incentives are a little different. Being too heavy handed could cause customers to leave a given cloud provider, costing the provider money. If Stripe isn't heavy-handed enough, they could lose their integration to VISA, costing them their entire business.

10k? That's a tiny amount to have to get a second payment processor. Additionally if you are dealing with physical cards you probably also need a second set of card readers?

Could be $10K, could be $200K, depends on your tolerance for risk.

And, yeah I was thinking online only. If you need card readers you're pretty much stuck with one provider. Where I've seen people get in trouble with their payment processors it has only been online. Terminals are rather difficult to misuse these days.

If you deal with both online and card readers, keep those on separate accounts. That is two account at the payment processor (PSP) and two accounts with the acquirer company.

$10k is pretty small for a physical business ($30/day if you're open every day), so I'd be surprised if you had more than a tablet with a headphone jack card reader. A second reader from another processor isn't that hard to manage (you might want a second tablet in case the first one has issues anyway).