> Their dev support on discord

This is also a red flag

Stripe is developer centric. Discord has a lot of developers in their community.

I don't really like Discord, but i must admit it is a smart choice.

Right, but what if my mother wants to start a business? She's not a developer. Should she avoid Stripe?

What kind of company builds itself as only being a product usable by developers? We're a small niche market at best.

I would hope your mother is hiring a developer to build her payment infrastructure if standard over the counter solutions like those iPhone swipe attachments don't work for her.

> Stripe is developer centric.

What kind of excuse is that? I've seen so many small businesses using Stripe. I doubt all their owners are developers who are comfortable with Discord.

A normal forum would be better in most ways.

>it is a smart choice

For the customer?

It could be worse. Sorbet is on free Slack, which means any discussions older than a month or two are deleted.

Incredibly amateur hour if true.

Serious question: what's the alternative?

Paying for Slack so messages don't get lost?

Zulip is pretty good for this.

By default, you have a linear, IM-like UX, but it is trivial to fork conversations on specific topics.

There's these things called "forums" that we used to use...

I’ve seen Discourse work pretty well for public-facing support.

Using Discord for support is a major red flag.

As opposed to IRC? Slack?

Discord has excellent moderation tools, is economical and relatively user friendly (compared to IRC). If you desire a public space for your community to engage with you in real time, I'm not aware of a better alternative.

Discord is not a public space. It's not indexed by search engines.

No, you're supposed to use the abysmal Discord search feature to find your question among a billion chat messages, or post it in one of the 150 channels we have for each topic under the sun. No sorry, wrong channel. Oops, your message got lost somewhere in the thousands of messages we receive per day.

Discord support is hell on Earth.

What’s wrong with using email or Intercom?

Nothing. It would be preferable to Discord, in fact.

What about good ol' forums? Indexable by search engines and proper moderation tools that have stood the test of time.

Like a GitHub issue tracker? The concept of forums is not lost on me, but I think the point of a chat service solves different problems.

My history might be a bit fuzzy, but that exists in lineage from when Stripe had an IRC channel for dev support.

This is Stripe opting to go to where a core customer segment (developers) live. Discord sucks but from a business perspective it’s smart. You wouldn’t use their Discord chat for just any issue.

> My only consolation is that every other provider is just as terrible.

My experience with Authorize.net support was really good. Their tech stack/api was absolutely archaic, but you could talk to real humans.

And the thing about their tech stack is its old..but absolutely workable. They have examples in pretty much every language, decent documentation, and support. And they are very slow to sunset things because their customers are slow moving traditional businesses. So code you write for a customer may work without tweaking for 4, 5, or even 10 years.

In my case, 20 years. No change in API calls in that time.

Very few errors, except in the early days. I hate them because of the complexity of the solution (I needed a relationship with a separate "payment processor" that has changed names/systems/owners five times in those 20 years) but I have had few problems with withholding etc.

But my monthly charges and individual charges are very consistent, and chargeback rate very low (but not zero).

At the time I championed switching to Stripe. If I’d known then what I know now I’d have never done so.

This looks really good. Apart from anything else, they have a fraud detection tool that you can configure to match your own requirements, and can control yourself what happens to payments when filters are triggered:

https://www.authorize.net/en-us/resources/our-features/advan...

I have always been able to get a service rep on live chat within 5 minutes... which is literally a "Live Chat" button on their contact page not even hidden.

Note this is different than the Discord dev chat which is for technical questions.

Once I get live chat it may take a day or two to resolve but if it takes longer I just hop on live chat again and pester them until it's escalated.

> I have always been able to get a service rep on live chat within 5 minutes

That's neat and all but try to get them to actually fix anything. They will 100% move you to email once you explain your issue (assuming it's not "I can't find my password" or equally basic) and then you will be in limbo. I hope you enjoy no one responding to your ticket for days/weeks at a time even after you provide them with all the info they ask for.

>Their support page on their website has Phone call and messaging grayed out. You can only email. If you email, you get robots.

According to the OP.

But as you can see in the Reddit comments, there are people posting screen shots showing that is absolutely not true. Which leaves 3 options:

1. The UX was confusing and the OP couldn't find those options.

2. Stripe somehow has some logic that disables it specifically for that person or that person's region.

3. The OP didn't actually try and is lying in their post.

1 and 3 are more negative reflections on the OP than Stripe. And for 2 I'd need more details.

I saw this in the replies to the comment:

> The "chat" and "have us call you" options get greyed out once they have frozen your account.

But from my own experience, that is wrong. Also OP didn't say their account was frozen just that the money from that particular transaction was being held.

There's someone else down thread here who says that they've had the call/email greyed out on their Stripe account as well.

>Stripe somehow has some logic that disables it specifically for that person

I'm not sure why you wrote this as if it'd be a grand technical challenge to implement. Locking-out specific features based on X criteria is pretty damn common.

I don't particularly care in any case, I just had the impression that you might of missed that specific line when you wrote your original comment regarding the short wait times you've had when calling support.

Edit: Seems like you saw the other post as well.

>But from my own experience, that is wrong.

Well, from my vantage point I see 2 people claiming it gets greyed out and 1 person (you) claiming it doesn't. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

> I'm not sure why you wrote this as if it'd be a grand technical challenge to implement.

No, I meant that as literally "somehow" as in "has some logic to"... no implication of difficulty. But I can see how that may sound that way.

> Well, from my vantage point I see 2 people claiming it gets greyed out and 1 person (you) claiming it doesn't. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

3 people is not a large sample size. I did notice an issue where it is grayed out until you select a topic. Which may be partially at play here (which is a UX issue).

My accounts got temp locked because they needed to verify some KYC information. Maybe there is another more severe level of lock that does gray it out. But then I'd need to know way more details about what Stripe thinks the OP did to get that lock before I start blaming Stripe or the OP.

>Maybe there is another more severe level of lock that does gray it out.

FWIW I asked upthread to a Stripe person, and they do apparently grey out the support/call buttons in certain situations.

As another Redditor commented:

> The "chat" and "have us call you" options get greyed out once they have frozen your account. They do not allow such users to have them call. You can only receive a call if they have not frozen your account.

I suppose you can create a second account and then contact support from there, but they'll probably flag you for ban evasion and make your situation worse.