Comment by echelon
7 days ago
The Stripe horror stories are adding up, making me think startups will move to different platforms.
A friend in China recently got shut down by Stripe for a perfectly legitimate business. They moved to Creem.
Stripe cares about big business. Startups can't really be moving the needle much for them anymore.
Stripe's APIs have become too confounding for small business anyway. They care about big business shaped entities at the expense of smaller scrappy players. Easy things aren't easy. It sucks.
You have to build your own hooks and logic for upgrades and downgrades. The event types are mismatched yet you have to listen across several semantic classes to capture the right state changes. Absurd, legacy/big biz focused garbage.
It should be click a button and integrate one API and webhook and you're done.
Huge opportunity.
> Creem
I kinda liked the website, I feel like there are some good features within this website, the more competition the better, Kinda like its referral and split model within co-founders, especially like this for something like a course website/maybe even Patreon alternative, combined with Cloudflare workers/Hetzner. I am seeing a lot of competition within this space, Does anyone have a github awesome-list about these or should I create one?
On personal experience, Just recently, I still have 12$ of my money stuck within Pulsedmedia/their payment provider as I had done a (crypto) payment but their system has failed to recognize it and Pulsedmedia could do nothing about it, not cancel or accept the deal as after 24 hours or at this point close to 48 hours, yet no response by coinpayments or any response at all.
All of this happened because I had accidentally sent them the whole amount but just 60 cents less... let that sink in, Pulsedmedia says that they can't do anything but as a customer, I don't feel like recommend Pulsedmedia anymore because of my experience with their payment provider being so bad and they have said that they have no control over, not even refunding me. Man, a lot of the times, I feel like payment processing should be a solved problem but recent experience indicates otherwise as I felt restlessness from my money being stuck in limbo
Either refund me as soon as possible or allow me to have a service, having to open up mail multiple times and seeing no response feels really frustrating even if the money might be low, I would still like to have it back. I feel like your choice of payment provider matters quite a lot and it can be a differentiating factor even, for the end consumer.
I had heard some good things about pulsedmedia within the forums I browse but when I had raised tickets, they had responded to me with AI too :-/ It felt extremely weird typing everything out taking time only to be responded with I hear you--you are extremely right. I don't want to blame pulsedmedia here but man oh man, some payment processors make me feel so rageful, and I think that I am fairly patient in most cases, but having money stuck no matter how tiny definitely makes me a bit stressed.
If I learn anything from all of this, it's to not have a shit payment provider, heck I might even try becoming a customer and raise issues like payment getting stuck or see their customer support response times before buying them.
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