This reads like victim blaming.. "I bet the business was wearing something slutty. If they didn't want the stripe gang to bother them, they shouldn't have been wearing that".
What does a business soundness have to do with stripe robbing them?
It depends on the business model. For a high margin business, it might be fine, but for a business that has slim margins, it could significantly reduce the amount of product they can buy over the next quarter, which could make net margins negative.
Even in a high-margin business, and even if the funds may eventually be returned, having funds not suddenly held by surprise can create real problems. These create real distractions, extra entirely unprofitable work that is only to secure what is already due to you.
This is not acceptable from a critical infrastructure vendor.
That anyone is willing to reveal just how obtuse they are by attempting to justify it is astonishing.
I was specifically responding to the question of whether or not "if you can't tolerate a loss of 3k, isn't your business practically doomed?"
To which the answer is "It depends on the business." These things also don't happen in isolation; most small businesses will be able to survive $3k frozen for a quarter on a good day, but even well-run small businesses have bad days.
Yup! Good days and bad days (weeks/months) — in the good times, all kinds of bad stuff can happen without much impact, and in the bad ones, small things can become real problems, even existential problems.
This says NOTHING about the quality of the business.
Notice that both Tesla and SpaceX are extremely good businesses yet were within weeks of bankruptcy at several points in their history — a bad event at the wrong moment, even though very small percentage-wise, could have tipped them over the edge and they'd be history.
If you're self employed and your monthly income is 5k$ from your business, 3k is a lot and can mean that you're unable to pay bills or food for this month.
Average annual turnover for 1-9 employee companies in the uk is ~£500k, £3k represents around 8% of their monthly turnover. There's no world where that is insignificant.
Well then it should be f-ing NOTHING to stripe, and they should shorten their hold time. No doubt they, with all their supposed programming intelligence, can come up with a fancy algorithm that reduces their risk by 99% but releases the money within a week.
So can I borrow it for four months? I’ll invest it and give it back but I’ll keep the interest. Oh by the way inflation will have devalued it. Sorry about that.
Won’t make any difference to you as your business is robust, right?
Clearly stated by someone who has never run a legitimate small business.
As someone who has run them for decades, it can be a SERIOUS issue at the wrong time. Sure, there are good times where it'll hardly be noticed, and can be dealt with in due course.
However, there are OFTEN other times when $3K failing to show up when expected can create real problems. Cash Flow is key.
To even suggest that it is OK for a company to arbitrarily cutoff funds, merely because it might be resolved sometime next year and "shouldn't be a problem" is massively ignorant and ethically bankrupt.
For your own sake, and for others on HN, read the room. Stop posting such 'hot takes' that only broadcast your bad assumptions based on massive ignorance of the topic and distract from the actual discussion (or if you're just trolling for responses, pls take it elsewhere).
I have run a small business, and I am somewhat familiar with payments infrastructure. From my perspective, it is the room that is ignorant. Have you ever had a customer fail to pay an invoice on time? Have you ever not been reimbursed for expenses in a timely manner? Have you ever been charged the wrong amount? Had a supplier go bankrupt?
If 3k cash flow made or break my small business, then I would've been toast within months of starting. If it's a real business, then 3k breaking the bank means you're over leveraged.
I'm not saying what Stripe is doing is okay. Nobody but Stripe and the OP have enough context to make a fair judgement. It certainly sucks, especially if OP did nothing wrong. If OP feels this is truly unjust, then that's what small claims court is for. But calling it theft when your payment processor withholds funds is an exaggeration. Is it theft if I pay my bills late?
Depending on how late you pay them, YES, it is theft, and can be so judged in court.
>>. Have you ever had a customer fail to pay an invoice on time? Have you ever not been reimbursed for expenses in a timely manner? Have you ever been charged the wrong amount? Had a supplier go bankrupt?
Yes, all of those things. And I pointed out that SOMETIMES, they can go by almost unnoticed and dealt with in due course, but OFTEN they can create real problems. It is one thing when they happen by accident, but when it is the result of capricious and hostile decisions by a vendor, it is an outrage.
Your own argument points this out - if $3K is supposed to be so manageable to a small biz, then it is not even a daily rounding error for Stripe, and THEY should give him the benefit of the doubt, and not externalize these costs onto the small biz.
I'd also point out that just the fact that you're justifying paying your bills late as "well it isn't theft" already tells me that you are in the class of ethically-challenged shady operators with whom I work to avoid.
Just because you make a profit does not mean that you are running a sound or ethical business or personally have either of those properties. I'd suggest you do some rethinking.
It doesn't matter — even if it started entirely as an accident— the vendor's failure to promptly address it, and the fact that that failure is a systematic property of their operation, puts them into the outrageous category.
It's like when you're on hold for 20minutes hearing recordings about long wait timed due to "high call volume".
No, it is not high call volume, it is the damn company systematically understaffing the call center and overloading their workers to extract more money and externalize more costs onto their customers.
We should avoid doing business with them if possible.
I agree it's ridiculous that the vendor has gone radio silent -- in any other industry this would be deadly behavior.
But I've been in weird, regulatory spots before where communication is forbidden pending investigation or an audit. If you get flagged for money laundering, they're not allowed to say "hey we flagged you for money laundering", and possibly not even allowed to say "we're looking into it".
What would you call it if I broke into your house, stole your TV and laptop, and told you "I'm just holding them, I'll return them someday, probably 240 days from now but maybe later".
Your issue with the analogy is that it doesn't include an indefinite timeline for the eventual return of the property? You might be missing the forest here.
Stripe actively markets to the smallest of businesses.
My church uses Stripe for various fundraising events. It would cause a serious cash flow issue if our payments for the bbq chicken fundraiser were held up for 3 months. We don’t have $3k to pay the chicken guy.
A key feature of Stripe is daily deposits. To me it’s understandable that they will flag transactions to address risk. But there has to be a process to adjudicate quickly.
