You've been in business 4 years, and it's never occurred to you to look into alternate payment processing? Surely you saw there was a risk of this?
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I was employee #10 at Eventbrite, founding engineer at Reforge, Techstars alum, startup founder X 3. I can't imagine treating my users like this and I am really upset with how Stripe is handling this situation.
The situation: I own an online SaaS company that processes $500k+ per year through both Stripe and Braintree. I've been using Stripe for years.
Today I received this email:
[b]"Our systems recently identified charges that appear to be unauthorized by the customer, meaning that the owner of the card or bank account did not consent to these payments. This unfortunately means that we will no longer be able to accept payments for
Refunds on card payments will be issued in 5–7 business days, although they may take longer to appear on the cardholder's statement. Please refer to your dashboard for a list of the charges to be refunded[1]."[/b]
I have NO idea what payments they could possibly be referring to & support doesn't respond to my numerous messages. They won't tell me which payments are being refunded (dashboard link they provided just sends me to the list of ALL our payments).
There was a button to verify my identity, which I did, and an hour later, I got:
[b]"Thank you for completing our verification process. Unfortunately, after conducting a further review of your account, we’ve determined that we still won't be able to accept payments for xx moving forward."[/b]
I have messaged my friends who work at Stripe, and edwin@stripe who works there who responded to the last HN thread there was about this (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21030633).
Until I get a response through a backdoor way in, my business is at a complete halt.
I could technically switch over all new payments to go there right now, but I have 4 years of customer data in Stripe that would be horrible to migrate.
In particular, dozens of renewals happen per day that are now being lost.
I'm also curious how rough the translation and reimport would be if you had an alternative, ready to go solution. "The customer DB" is sacred and untouchable to many businesses, and capturing that "as a service" is certainly a danger to the continued operation of a shop.
20 years ago our shop was running a conference, and had offered folks a "pre-payment plan" for the signup fee; where they could pay the $495 or whatever in 3 installments. We ran this for a year, and then a month before the conference was to happen the AMEX processor we were using decided they didn't like our politics, refunded all the outstanding charges we had, etc.
Sorting out who had paid what, if someone had paid with another card, or wanted a refund; was an absolute nightmare. Only about ~500 people iirc, but the fixups kept consuming time for months after.