At this point I’m fairly convinced Stripe is Paypal 2.0, at least in spirit:

* Turns a blind eye to misdeeds on its platform

* Locks out adult creators/vendors after taking their money

* Is ubiquitous, but not well liked

I love that Stripe changed the game of fintech and made it accessible to more parties in a programmatic way, but I find myself repeating “avoid Stripe” to a lot of folks asking me for advice on dealing with payment nowadays for those reasons.

▲

gyomu 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

That’s just the nature of these industries.

1) Incumbent is slow, clunky, unpleasant to deal with due to years of accumulated constraints to deal with

2) Newcomer can differentiate themselves by being nimble and pleasant to work with, taking market share

3) Over time newcomer has to deal with increasing amount of scrutiny, fraud, overhead, CYA type practices, etc

4) Newcomer is now incumbent, goto 1)

▲

mattmaroon 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Who do you recommend as an alternative?

▲

Cider9986 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Nowpayments is good for an easy crypto payment gateway.

No affiliation, I've just seen them used–it would be better if you self-hosted a BTCPay server.

▲

stego-tech 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I don’t have one at the moment, at least for my circles (artisans, craftspeople, adult creators in general). Much of it has fallen back on PayPal for folks without an LLC to hide behind, or Square if they’re incorporated as a business. The trick has been discretion and operating in a gray area: “novelty goods”, “graphic design work”, and “outerwear” as item descriptors or db entries, obscuring the actual content without actually lying or deceiving the payment processor.

Most paypros, most of the time, won’t look too hard unless there’s a problem or you’re tripping some internal security measure (like raking in a lot of cash in weird amounts). Of late they’ve been more intrusive due to some weird eTeen puritans, but that’s quieting down again as they remember they like making money, and throwing legal content off their platforms can very quickly cause an exodus of customers looking to avoid having their funds seized.

	▲	rsanek 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That's pretty clearly deceiving. Would expect to run into problems with that kind of approach regardless of the specific payment processor -- everyone has T&C that you must follow.