Edwin from Stripe here. I'm sorry this happened. We have one bot/automated reponse, which is our first reply to say, "we've received your message and we'll get back to you soon." Beyond that, every interaction with Stripe Support is with a human. We've invested quite a lot in support this year—the team itself is larger, and each week, we now survey tens of thousands of Stripe users who've talked with our support team recently, and 4/5 say they're satisified. But it sounds like we've dropped the ball in your case, and I'd love to learn why. Would you be able to forward those emails to me at edwin@stripe.com? (And if anyone else reading this had a similar time with us, please email me. I'd really like to help dig into each one and see what went wrong.)

I went around and around with support to get opted out of Stripe Capital spam emails (they claimed to opt me out, but I kept receiving emails about Stripe Capital), and in the process they broke my notification preferences causing me to get a daily batch email. When asked to undo the damage support referred me to a beta setting in the Stripe website IIRC.

Overall, terrible experience.

FYI, you need to start including unsubscribe links in your emails to be CAN-SPAM Act compliant.

The errors I've seen with some startups is that they rely on the unsubscribe mechanism of the mail sending platform, but then they use their customer-base emails across multiple mail sending platforms (and obviously people unsubscribe from one but they remain subscribed on the others).

Hopefully it's not the case here with Stripe (fingers-crossed)

I’ve seen this go badly in the other direction too. Customer unsubscribes from a marketing email, but then is unsubscribed across the whole mail sending platform causing them to not receive critical updates about their account. I sadly believe that email notifications are a part of UX that is often forgotten yet always creates so much friction when done poorly.

Their regular platform notification emails titled "Your funds are on the way!" include no opt-out link, these were sent via Amazon SES.

The mailer platform they use for Stripe Capital spam appears to be marketo.org, and those did have an opt out link.

Another data point. I have not used phone support, but been a customer since 2013 and have used the live chat quite a bit. It has always been extremely good. Never gone around with a bot. Last chat was maybe 1 month ago.

Recently I’ve had nothing but bad experiences with Stripe live chat. Several times agents didn’t understand English well enough to process the specifics of my issue, so they gave canned generic replies. Other times they weren’t familiar with Stripe’s own UI (I’m not talking some little-known API- I’m saying the Stripe Checkout config Dashboard). I learned to stop wasting time hoping to get a live chat agent who works at Stripe (rather than what appears to be an outsourced VA engaged for quick replies on live chat in my timezone), and instead ask questions on Stripe’s IRC support channel.

Would you be able to send the chat (or the email address on your Stripe account) to me at edwin@stripe.com? Stripe live chat should be better than that—I'm sorry.

Same, I've used both phone and chat many times and every time it's been a wonderful experience.

If Patrick reads this, their support had us going around in circles. We originally had an account manager, then we got a new one, then we got told we're not having an account manager and ended up getting a different person for the same expensive issue...

We were using managed accounts for our customers, wrapping Stripe to provide payment accounts to our customers. Stripe was allowing our customers to process refunds on payments even if they had negative balances and had no automated notifications in place to send us notice of these negative balances.

Stripe gave us no notice, and shut down payments for all of our customers and accounts until the balance was cleared. We basically got an email one day saying pay 40k~ and we'll unlock your accounts. This behaviour was going on for about 18 months I think, it wasn't just some issue that came about over 2 weeks. We were running our business in such a way that to us looked profitable and well-ran but Stripe was keeping an internal debit against us which they decided had reached it's cap and email us.

Their thinking was that they didn't have any responsibility to send notifications to us and they also didn't need to restrict refunds, we should do it on our application.. except the information we needed wasn't even available to us.

About 3 months afterwards, their platform magically started doing exactly what we were saying should have been their responsibility from day one. When you hit robotic support people who are reading from a script, your account manager is removed and your business depends on processing payments they really had all the power.

Very unhappy about this and we're still paying off the $40k that they decided to collect overnight from us...

Running this type of custom platfom with managed accounts for your users isn't a light responsibilty—if those users start going into the negative, you'll have to communicate with them to prevent that. (We have the `balance_retrieve` API call designed for this purpose.) Please don't take this as some sort of shunning of responsibilities on our part—managed accounts were designed like this so Stripe doesn't have a direct relationship with your customer (they may not even know Stripe exists!). But like you said, it allows you to wrap Stripe for payments, so you can own this relationship and the health of their account. For _standard_ accounts with Stripe Connect, Stripe would own this and we'd send notifications warning of negative balances. We have a guide on how this works: https://stripe.com/docs/connect/account-balances.

That said, it does sound like we could've handled this better—and we really shouldn't be that abrupt. Could you get in touch with me at edwin@stripe.com and I can look into what happened and see what we can improve for future cases?

I'm still emotionally invested in how angry this episode got me because we ended up needing to downsize because of it and it wasn't like we were printing money from the decision to use managed accounts and we absolutely didn't budget for an overnight 40k expense. We understood the liability issues, that's why ultimately we had no leg to stand on, but the crux of how poorly Stripe handled this was:

- "0 day" notice. Boom, account shut down. Don't like it? Well pay clear every single account.

- You let accounts process refunds even with active chargebacks. This isn't a default "sane" position. We had no way of reacting to this.

- The period this went on. From the first negative balance to "Day 0" was well over a year. Not once did you send a notice or friendly email this was happen. It literally went from happy days to business destroying lock outs overnight. We had customers leave us with serious negative balances which we could have possibly collected if they were still customers. Overall we only managed to get about 1k back from our customers.

I think this is a real issue as I suffered from a very similar issue with Stripe Connect (see my post below) yet support seemed oblivious that you could fall into this trap. In my case, refunds were going through even when we were checking the available balance was greater than the refund amount on our server before permitting the refund request to be sent to Stripe. I do understand and agree with Edwin that a Stripe Connect custom account is responsible for its users but it just feels a bit un-Stripe that it's really not clear how to handle refunds and what the edge cases are.

Only when I realised Stripe was treating funds that were already allocated to an upcoming payout as 'available' or 'cleared' did the penny finally drop. So the refund for $100 would go through, the payout of $200 would then go through and then the customer account would be $100 in the red which would be deducted from our company Stripe account. Now we have learned to count the value of upcoming payouts as unavailable when working out the balance available for refunds.

Luckily for me this didn't happen too many times and I was lucky that my customers were billing enough that the shortfall on their accounts was cleared within a few days/weeks, but I can easily see how this could spiral into a big problem for a startup where customers are not billing so much.

I've had this too. I'm pretty sure they've outsourced their support (or at least moved it overseas). You ask them simple questions and you get an answer which completely misses the question.

I had to resort to trial and error to find the answers to my questions about Stripe Connect and refund timings as it turns out that Stripe will count a balance as available even if the whole balance is already tied up in a scheduled payout, causing havoc with evaluating whether an account has sufficient balance to make a refund or not.

Took me 18 months to work out as I don't think this is documented anywhere and support were clueless!

I've had a similar experience.

I asked a fairly simple question last fall - why Apple Pay showed up in Stripe Checkout for new subscriptions, but not when doing an update.

First answer: "Ask Apple!" (No.)

Second answer: "Apple Pay can't be used for recurring charges." (No.)

Third answer: "We don't support that yet on updates." (Apparently correct, but ugh.)

@tebbers and @ceejayoz — I couldn't immediately find either of these exchanges on the Stripe side, but I'd like to see how we can fix this. Could you forward those emails to me at edwin@stripe.com?

Done, thanks.

Been a user of Stripe's since when it was called /dev/payments. I've also had two terrible experiences with Stripe's developer support (and my co-founder has has one of his own).

I tweeted about it and @mentioned Patrick Collison back in May[1]. I was bloody impressed that he replied[2]. I shared my experience w/ him over email. Didn't hear back (didn't expect to) and not sure anything got fixed.

At least they're listening. Stripe was great because it was no-nonsense and heavily focused on a great developer experience. That focus sadly seems like it's in decline.

1- https://twitter.com/kareem/status/1243540147775451136

2- https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s%2Fjvjl1m808lx8a8t%2FPatr...

Hey, we did reply! (We investigated the issue, ensured your problem got fixed, and started some systemic work to solve the broader category of issues here.)

I bring this up just to make clear that we do care a lot about every single problem like this.

Apologies - after revisiting the email thread you did indeed reply saying you’d take a look. My bad!

Meant to say that I didn’t get an update on fixes (nor did I expect / need one). Great to hear you’re addressing some of the systemic issues though. Makes me feel good that using Stripe will get back to being a joy to use.

And btw I know you care. The fact that you’re here anytime there’s a Stripe thread and that we engaged on Twitter shows that. The hard part seems to be ensuring others in your org care the way you do as you scale. Happy to see that still is the case at Stripe.

Every CEO out there should learn from this - the Twitter interaction, your email follow up, and your response here.

Might not be the most efficient way, but what the heck - you are showing how a CEO is able to deeply care about the company's product and its customers.

Adding another datapoint on this: I’ve been a Stripe customer for 5-6 years and have received outstanding customer service.

This includes immediate callbacks by phone, knowledgeable support on disputes, etc. Each time the support person has been more knowledgeable than I’d expect at a company this size. For more context, in case it matters, we process roughly 200k of through stripe annually.

10/10 service for me.

I've used their IRC channel in the past (#stripe on Freenode IIRC)

Using IRC will 100% get you much better developer support from Stripe. It's staffed only by developers (a very good team of people IMO).

Disclaimer: former stripe employee, worked directly with said team.

Ive been very happy with Dwolla and their level of support is wonderful. Our small team gets a slack channel with our rep and a few others and they respond quickly.

You should check out Finix