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Comment by meagher | Hacker News Reader

What makes Stripe good now is what made it good way back when they first launched: Handling payments sucks and they make it suck less.

The design, etc. is the gravy on top of a successful runaway train.

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The remarkable thing about the culture around Stripe is that they still get the credit for the things they did well in those early days, even though they are far from the same service now that they've scaled up.

Objectively, today's Stripe is often a relatively expensive and unreliable way to collect money from your customers. The API and developer documentation are no longer as simple and effective as they once were, particularly if you need things like PSD2. Something fundamentally changed about Stripe's support a few years ago, and it seemed like almost overnight they went from routinely having knowledgeable people replying with helpful suggestions to having people who can't even be bothered to read your message before hitting whatever button sends boilerplate reply #74 with platitudes #27 and #53 at the start and end.

Much of this is understandable. Obviously you're not going to get senior people from an organisation the size of Stripe today personally responding to messages the way they used to. Some of the complexity due to PSD2 itself has been forced on them. Appealing to a wider range of merchants with more diverse needs is inevitably going to make some parts of the system more complicated.

However, the hero worship they still seem to enjoy in various forums, including this one, is remarkably cult-like now. Recommending the Stripe you remember from days gone by, particularly if you haven't recently used any of the other services now competing for the online payments market, might even be harmful to those starting small businesses today, who might be better served by one or more of the alternatives and should at least be considering the full range of options available to them.

This is my experience too.

> who might be better served by one or more of the alternatives and should at least be considering the full range of options available to them.

Which alternatives should I consider, if I need PSD2? I've written about my experience with Braintree above; there's SagePay but every client has been pleased to move away from them.

PSD2 implies Europe, so my first question is whether to accept cards as the primary means of payment at all. The various direct payment schemes are typically cheaper, more reliable and, in some countries, much more widely used. If you are handling recurring billing via a Direct Debit scheme then you are probably also outside the scope of the SCA rules that are going to interrupt payment flows using cards whenever the EU member states finally insist on following them.

I've used GoCardless to do some of this, but depending on where you are based, there seem to be quite a few other services now that offer some or all of the relevant schemes.

UK based here, so for most projects I/clients want cards as the primary payment method due to the audience as they are one-off payments.

I've used GoCardless on one project; as the developer I didn't enjoy the experience at all. Setting up testing for all states was painful (as was getting items to the right state to use their scenario simulator). I see Stripe have rolled out UK Direct Debit support now; hopefully their documentation and testing story are better than GoCardless.

I certainly agree that testing these integrations is unnecessarily painful, but given that both Stripe and GoCardless offer much the same facilities -- a single sandbox environment, but without comprehensive simulation of all important scenarios and with nothing useful for either automated integration testing or offline simulation at the developer's desk -- I'm not sure I'd say either is much better than the other. The only major difference I can think of is that since they simulate roughly realistic timing as well, GoCardless can also take several days to complete a test run for a new integration or bug fix, which is obviously absurd.

> Something fundamentally changed about Stripe's support a few years ago, and it seemed like almost overnight they went from routinely having knowledgeable people replying with helpful suggestions to having people who can't even be bothered to read your message before hitting whatever button sends boilerplate reply #74 with platitudes #27 and #53 at the start and end.

That's definitely my experience with Stripe support over the years, too. A definite degradation. Really annoying.

> The remarkable thing about the culture around Stripe is that they still get the credit for the things they did well in those early days, even though they are far from the same service now that they've scaled up.

This describes the broader Silicon Valley tech scene quite well too.

People worship others for founding/funding X company, being employee #Y at a certain unicorn, creating a cool feature 5+ years ago for a dead app, etc.

I've found that their email support is far better than their live chat support (and I assume phone support too). The last time I used their live chat support I had a confusing back and forth until being told to just use email support.

This is mostly it.

Before Stripe payment processing was abysmal. There was no thought at all given to the developer/implementer experience.

Stripe basically put a clean and straight forward API and product around the mess.

I know java is 'not cool' but it feels like javadocs in 2002 which are generally well organised by virtue of myriad of conventions, as opposed to docs in some other langs. which can be hit and miss, though getting better.

Stripe is a pretty good example of good product experience for those having to 'do the work', because they will likely have a lot of say in it, in the long run.

I second that!

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