This is a maddening writeup to read, only because for developers and business owners the single most important part of our businesses, receiving money from paying customers, is also the most excruciating, arbitrary, and frustrating part of our businesses as well. Stripe was "supposed" to fix this. But as we all know, banking and payments is hard.

I run a nice successful business where premium subscriptions are my primary revenue model, and I as well relied on Paypal for years as my payment card processor. Some notes about my experiences over the past 20 years

1) The Paypal hell-ban thing is real. I had a handful of customers open support tickets monthly with me and indicate no matter what they did they could not successfully send us a credit card payment using Paypal as our payment processor. Paypal just says "Nope" and that's it. For all of the customer's payment methods.

2) It's true, there is a subset of people in this world that absolute loath Paypal and will open support tickets telling you so, which means there's a lot more of those people out there that just bail.

3) A few years ago I transitioned to Braintree payments as my primary credit card processor since I wanted to resolve #2 and just provide a simple hosted credit card form. Surprisingly, the transition was pretty easy, the APIs and webhooks were documented nicely, there were libraries available, and it didn't take me long at all to get up and running quickly. The onboarding process was pretty onerous (you'd think I was taking out a 10 million dollar mortage on a vacation home) but once we got going everything has been super smooth. Highly recommend Braintree.

4) I left our existing Paypal integration in place, and shockingly almost 25% of my transactions still come from people who deliberately click on and decide to use Paypal in place of just a simple "enter your credit card information" form.

I've never run into freezes, or some of the other nightmares seen out there, but definitely payments even in this day and time can be maddeningly frustrating. And there's always chargebacks and some of my favorite customer "excuses" for demands for refunds etc. Like:

1) "My 5 year old son signed up for an account on your service and purchased a premium subscription, please provide a refund immediately" - transaction happened at 2am local to the customer and you've got to provide your credit card CVV.

2) Customer purchases a 2 year premium subscription and then opens a support ticket and demands a refund because "I'm not quite sure what this is" - meanwhile they could have purchased a 6 month subscription to try it out just fine. A surprising number of people will just bulldoze through and buy the most expensive option and then have buyers remorse.

3) "The browser autofilled everything and submitted the payment without my involvement whatsoever" - and then demand a refund. Never mind customer has to literally click the "Pay Now" button.

4) And of course the fraudulent chargebacks. They'll open support tickets and correspond with you and demand refunds and then charge it back as an unauthorized fraudulent charge. Maddening.

5) Various other crazy excuses for demanding refunds or charging back something instead of just outright saying "this isn't what I expected for xxx reason" - they'll throw spouses, kids, criminals, everything under the bus instead of themselves. It's wild.