Reminds me of the whole "Just run this cURL request and a payment is made, it's that easy." messaging that Stripe used to have right at the top of their landing page in the beginning, showcasing not only how easy their payments API was but also that they were a company by developers for developers. Brilliantly simple :)
I just realized what stripe has done is now I always tell clients "payments are the least of your worries" thanks to stripe. Hard to understate that sea change.
Which is true, unless your business falls in their "Prohibited" list [1]. It's quite a long and wide ranging list, which would appear to restrict many businesses from accepting Stripe payments. For example, 51. Personal computer technical support and many things to do with travel and tourism: 13. Airlines, 23. Currency exchanges or dealers, 27. Cruise lines, 49. Timeshares, 50. Centralized travel reservation services or travel clubs
That list looks to me mostly like a list of things that are either scams, or that Stripe and the CC companies have perfectly Bayesian-rational reasons to believe are scams. Travel and tourism is the only one on there that strikes me as coming from CC agreements rather than that.
"Personal computer technical support", for instance, is almost certainly referencing the scam where someone cold calls you and tries to explain that your computer is infected. There aren't a lot of legitimate businesses that could be called "personal computer technical support", and I suspect of the ones you may even be thinking of that Stripe may classify them differently. I imagine the mom & pop shops are classified as hardware vendors who happen to also offer services and the more serious versions of that business are "consulting". (And at that point, probably not using Stripe anyhow.)
I'm not so sure. I think it could be argued that many open source service models fall under Personal Computer Technical Support. Let's say I set myself up as a Linux guru (I'm not, but for the point of the argument, let's pretend). If someone then phones or emails me after borking their installation and I fix it for them (either in person or perhaps remotely), it could be argued that I'm offering personal computer technical support. However, the above scenario could be a legitimate open source software business model in many cases - develop consumer open source software and provide paid for service to support it.
I didn't say that there is no possible overlap with legitimate industries. I'm only pointing out that all the instances that I know about (not necessarily a representative set) of little computer support businesses also have a storefront where they are selling a usually-modest array of hardware for upgrades and such, and Stripe may classify their business as something other than "personal computer technical support". For all I know, that's why they all seem to sell a modest, almost perfunctory, array of hardware upgrades.
My guess is things like alcohol and porn, things that are not intrinsically illegal but are still legal hot potatoes of compliance. An online alcohol vendor that had an "age check" that was easy to game ("yes, I'm 21") would be easy to set up and make a lot of money, but a lot of laws would leave Stripe legally in bad shape when the hammer came down, but the PR could be an even bigger disaster.
In addition to pc86's point, my comment wasn't targeted at you personally. There are certainly businesses that will be in the Stripe exclusion set. However, I was arguing against the implication that they've got some sort of really extensive set of exclusions that lots of people will need to worry about. For all the entries on it, it's not truly that large. Mostly it's just the fact that while they need the "don't do illegal things" clause, it's way easier to exclude specific things and then tell people that they fall under that specific rule than to get into lengthy and fruitless arguments about whether or not a particular activity is legal.
I stopped recommending Stripe when they stopped accepting my card. Despite me pointing this out to them, nobody at the company has done anything concrete to fix it. Sadly, they are no longer a company by developers for developers.
In addition, they are pretty useless in some regions where they do not support locally dominant payment methods.
This comment is so off base, I can only imagine it might be a sleazy competitor with a throwaway account, or the single most unlucky Stripe customer in the history of Stripe.
