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Comment by danpalmer | Hacker News Reader

Did you have a Stripe account manager? If so, get them on the case – they know you and can advocate for the business and explain the product internally. At the very least they might be able to give you a much more detailed explanation of which precise features are causing issue and how you could resolve those things.

If not, why? Payments are a core part of any SaaS business, and it's important to have trust with important suppliers like that. Getting an account manager and proper business contract go a long way to preventing issues like this. It's somewhat unsurprising that Stripe don't have much trust for companies just signing up for the service as it's generally high risk for abuse.

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I don't. My MRR is $5 currently, peaked at around $40. I'm far too small for Stripe to care about me. I was running this as a passion project. I'm not sure how to even get an account manager (does it just happen if you become big enough to matter?)

Some companies will proactively reach out, others need to be reached out to. It's possible this is too small, but then again many pre-revenue startups will get this sort of treatment so it's not just about money.

The thing to remember is that Stripe (or your cloud provider, or your email sending provider, or any other SaaS) get something out of that relationship – they get a sales channel, they can trust you more, they can lock you into their services, they can show you more of their value – these sorts of companies basically want these relationships. The fact you can sign up with a credit card and never talk to anyone is sort of just to appease devs that don't want to talk to anyone, it's not how they make money in the B2B market (it's a bit different for B2C or B2B-ish services like Squarespace).

This project sounds pretty neat, and I could see it appealing to the audiophile market. I know people who would be interested.

But, I'm sorry to say, it sounds like Stripe cancelling your service wasn't the biggest issue, but that the service never found its market. Looking at the site I couldn't tell what it was or who it was for, and it looked a bit dodgy. Copy like "we're not google. we won't kill the site" (said twice) makes it sound like a hobby rather than a company, and even if that's true, it's not going to go over well for marketing. Also, it's sadly somewhat ironic given that the service has indeed gone. I totally see the vibe you were going for, but I think that vibe is one that typically maxes out at a handful of friends using it.

Thanks, I agree... it was never intended to be a "real company", which was ultimately to my detriment. The irony of killing it hurts, so I'll probably just leave it up for the existing users, and (hopefully) find some other payment processor. It only costs me a few dollars per month to host it, so I am not super worried about the money, but it's a huge motivation killer to be ousted from Stripe. I was happy with keeping it "indie and scrappy" and only friends using it, and I went through a lot of pains to make it so the architecture was always break-even, but I never expected my payment processor to bail on me.

Yeah it's tough. I'd love for hobby projects to be able to be sustainable like this, but I understand that taking money comes with so much regulation and auditing throughout the whole stack (KYC, credit card companies, taxes, etc), so I can see why it's not always viable.

At an MRR like that I wonder why you even bother with the payment service. It seems like a giant barrier to entry if it isn't making money anyway. Or do you use it to limit the influx?

Honestly good question. Mostly I do it to discourage abuse. I configured the infrastructure so that it should always break even if people fully utilize their storage. But this project would probably be more suited to use something like Patreon (assuming it's OK with their ToS!). I'm open to alternative ideas for sure.

Its unsurprising that stripe doesn't trust their customers who sign up for them via their standard channels?

It's not that they don't trust them, it's that those accounts are the least possible trusted accounts that they have. They have the least information, the least relationship, the fewest checks have been done.

And yet they're paying customers, and deserve respect as such.

Sure, but it's understandable that there are malicious users paying for these services as well, and it's hard to distinguish between them when there's this little info.

This is my whole point – by getting an account manager and building that relationship you quickly, and massively, change the level of trust compared to a credit card number you stuck in a landing page.

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