Stripe raises $600M at nearly $36B valuation

I love the slick interface, but it's simply not worth the thousands per year I'll be saving with the switch.

For me the main selling point for any payment processor is the minimization of fees. Sure, the API's are nice, but I already use a payment gateway for that.

I'm a few clicks away from saving thousands. Am I missing anything?

One thing I notice is, I get much less fraudulent payments through PayPal, and when I do get them it's handled automatically (and most of the time they end up being not fraud because PayPal investigated it and released the funds). 100% hands free, $0 in fees.

With Stripe, not only do I get more fraudulent payments but you need to pay $15 as a dispute fee through Stripe when you lose the case and pretty much all fraud causes through Stripe will be lost (because it's actual fraud). It also takes like 20 minutes to fill out the forms, create fax-compatible sized screenshots and a lot of other boilerplate information if you plan to contest the dispute.

It's a shame Stripe doesn't offer the Radar service (helps detect and prevent fraud) with custom rules as part of their normal service. You can only get it if you pay insurance fees, which are added fees on top of the normal amount.

Combine that with the new Stripe SCA compatible APIs and sketchy docs and yeah I'm in the same boat as you. Stripe is no longer an immediate "of course I'm going to use Stripe" decision. Braintree is looking pretty good at this point.

Honestly, you are the first person to make a good case on using PayPal over Stripe. Especially with the arbitrary horror stories I hear about PayPal all the time.

> It's a shame Stripe doesn't offer the Radar service (helps detect and prevent fraud) with custom rules as part of their normal service. You can only get it if you pay insurance fees, which are added fees on top of the normal amount.

I agree. This should be standard.

> Combine that with the new Stripe SCA compatible APIs and sketchy docs

Would you please describe what is sketchy? Their docs seem pretty good... but I am now just hearing about SCA.

https://stripe.com/guides/strong-customer-authentication

With PayPal, the fraud experience has been nothing short of amazing. Out of many many thousands of transactions, I've only had about 3 or 4 transactions get flagged as high risk by PayPal. What this means is PayPal will hold the funds, review the transaction and then either give you the funds if it's legit or do something else if it's not legit.

I've had 0 cases on PayPal where fraud / disputes actually took place. Of those 3-4 transactions, they were all released. None of this required any intervention by me. I just got notified by email from PayPal when a high risk transaction occurred. 100% of the funds were put back into my account a few days later (short of the normal 2.9% + 30c fees).

On Stripe, I've also had many many thousands of transactions. I've had a number of fraud transactions in the process which ended up as disputes. Stripe sends out an email letting you know, but then it's now on you to decide if you want to contest the dispute. This dispute typically happens when someone who got their credit card stolen sees an unknown charge in their records.

Now you need to fill out like 8 form fields and supply screenshots and server logs of proof that someone was accessing the material they've stolen (I sell digital courses so there's no physical item). The screenshots need to be sized perfectly to be displayed in portrait mode on a sheet of paper that gets faxed over to the person reviewing it from the bank, otherwise it'll be unreadable from their perspective and you'll auto-lose the case.

Stripe doesn't let you see a real preview of these screenshots and they even alter the uploaded image size in your preview which makes it hard to preview what it will look like from the reviewer's POV even though that's the only thing that matters.

After doing that, it takes about 2-3 months to get a resolution. You get charged a $15 bank dispute fee (on top of the full amount of the product of course) which is non-refundable unless you happen to win the dispute, but if someone got their card stolen then you're not going to win the case. You also don't get any information from Stripe about the review, other than you won or lost. Stripe says it's because banks don't give them any info beyond that. Fine, that's ok, but yeah the overall experience is very very bad.

Then on top of that, Stripe sells a Radar service that you need to pay extra on top of for each transaction to get better tools to help prevent fraud before it takes place. They choose not to give it to everyone because I guess they profit from dispute fees and fraudulent transactions.

The kick in the teeth is that the data Stripe uses to train their Radar / anti-fraud service is data provided by business owners who have trusted Stripe with their business. Now they are selling that data back to us in the form of insurance fees on each transaction (the Radar service you need to pay for).

I haven't personally used Braintree yet but from what I read in their docs, you get that type of anti-fraud service baked into the normal 2.9% + 30c (don't quote me on that, but it very much reads that way on their site).

Whatever PayPal is doing (and in turn Braintree since it's a PayPal service), they're doing a fantastic job at combating fraud and disputes, especially compared to Stripe.

> Would you please describe what is sketchy? Their docs seem pretty good... but I am now just hearing about SCA.

Their docs are typically good, but the SCA / Payment Intents docs are not really at the same standards as the rest of their documentation yet.

Come back in a few weeks when you've implemented it.

What's interesting is I run a podcast about running web apps in production and I've had a bunch of folks come on the show who use Stripe to accept payments.

All of them have said the experience with implementing SCA with Stripe was pretty rough. These are seasoned developers running successful platforms too.

They've all done it in the last couple of months as well.

I had low hopes because the server logs were long gone (over 90 days). However I had logs from our email provider showing reads and clicks from our emails so I sent a screenshot of that. I said Wordpress said they logged in once when they bought it and never again (of course, anyone could say that). I said their account email matched their Stripe email which had their name in it, and their IP matches where the billing address is so it seems to be a real person. I also said they'd never responded to any emails sent to them from us to resolve this.

Despite being nearly certain this was just a change-of-mind chargeback I didn't have high hopes because that's a lot of conjecture rather than evidence but it worked out.

We also had an early fraud warning giving us notice to refund and avoid the chargeback fee. I chose not to because it looked legitimate to me which was probably a mistake despite how it worked out.

We also use Paypal. My major issue is their internal dev team/processes seem broken. We got stuck in a 'verify your identity' loop for months. The business support person was great, patient and understanding. But no one could fix it. We'd pass the check then overnight it would revert and block transactions, sometimes multiple times a day. We setup a second payment processor as we should've much earlier. Eventually it was fixed without explanation or notice. Braintree is probably a lot better on this front but having the Paypal logo more prominently displayed has a lot of value for some customers who don't like the unfamiliar.

I've won 100% of the disputes where it was pretty clear the person wanted to just grab the content for free and then do a charge back. The problem is Stripe not blocking the real fraudulent transactions where a bad actor stole someones credit card and signed up with that. These are the ones where I've lost 100% of the time (for good reason since it was fraud). Stripe didn't prevent those from occurring where as PayPal has blocked every single fraudulent transaction before it took place and I didn't have to sign up for extra fees or lift a finger to get that protection.

To my understanding (and I may be wrong) with Braintree the customer would still see PayPal's branding if they check out via PayPal. They would see something like this: https://articles.braintreepayments.com/img/developers/pay-wi...

I asked PayPal for their advice, and on that advice I keep email confirmation, IPs and timestamps of download, login, registration and payment IPs, billing address, etc. -- doesn't seem to help when I submit it all as evidence.