r/stripe

Got tired of finding out about payment issues from customers.

Our webhook processing silently stopped for 6 hours. Stripe was delivering fine. Server up. Dashboard green. Payment attempts processing. Revenue not recording.

Found out from a user.

6 hours. 4 orders an hour. $80 average order. $1,920 gone before anyone noticed. And fixing it at hour 6 means refunds, support tickets, and customer trust you don't get back. Fixing it at minute 30 is just a fix.

Most teams monitor whether Stripe is up. Nobody monitors whether the full sequence actually completes.

What we track now:

payment.initiated never reaching payment.completed within 5 minutes - alert fires with amount and last event received.

Our endpoint stopped receiving - no webhook processed during business hours - silence alert, check our processing layer immediately.

Webhook triggered by Stripe, backend never processed it - event shows delivered on Stripe's side, no corresponding action in your system. The gap nobody checks.

Payment failure rate crossing baseline - alert with failure reasons and retry counts.

Refund spike - unusual volume in short window - alert with order details.

Payment from a new location - country or region never seen before on the account.

Unusual order amount - single transaction significantly above or below your baseline - alert before it's processed or disputed.

The more expensive failure is never the one that errors. It's the one where nothing fails, nothing errors, the flow just quietly stops completing. Stripe's default notifications don't catch that.

Same pattern shows up everywhere else too - no new user signup in 4 hours, AI agent looping silently, cron job that stopped running Thursday. Stripe is just where it hurts fastest.

What does your current setup look like for end to end business flow monitoring?

Hi all,

My Stripe account just got shut down. I first got an email stating “Suspected fraudulent payment on your Stripe account”, and then a bit later I got an email saying my account is closed. How come a business with thousands of dollars gets shut down after their FIRST (and only $30) dispute. Any help would be appreciated.

I am a web administrator for several manga platforms. I used Buy Me a Coffee to collect support to cover my server costs (Contabo) and CDN fees (Cloudflare).

https://preview.redd.it/e2fs46zsmp0h1.jpg?width=955&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=6775b0c86e5c05f408df3c20affdcaa6122139a1

https://preview.redd.it/neca8bzsmp0h1.jpg?width=474&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=020280aea45d2411b1f02d10ff4acc95f31f7802

The Issue:

After accumulating $293.68, I requested a payout. They reviewed my account, admitted I have hosting expenses, but decided to DEACTIVATE my account and REFUND all the money back to donors under the guise of 'Copyright Violation'.

Why this is a scam:

They allowed me to collect money for months and took their fees.

They only cared about 'copyright' when it was time for me to withdraw.

I have already paid out-of-pocket for the infrastructure to provide the content. By refunding the money, they are making me pay for the audience's 'free' access.

They admitted in an email: We recognize that you may have already incurred hosting or infrastructure expenses However, we are unable to override the refund process.

Basically, they decided I should work and pay for servers for free. Avoid Buy Me a Coffee if you are a creator They will wait until you have a balance and then refund it to look like heroes at your expense.

Hi, I am a teen trying to create a small business and when doing the stripe onboarding I am using my parents information (they know about it) but my parents don’t have any kind of registered business. Is that a problem? Will it ask for more information about the business later on?

Thanks a lot.

been running a SaaS for about a 6mo now, have a Wyoming LLC, Wise account, Stripe set up through the LLC. everything is technically legitimate.

but i can't shake this feeling that i'm one dispute away from losing access to everything. i've read enough horror stories about Pakistani founders getting their Stripe accounts terminated with no warning and funds held for 90 days. sometimes for no obvious reason. which is why i haven't integrated stripe with my site yet.

a few things that keep me up:

• my customers are businesses in the US and UK. they're not shady. but even one chargeback from a confused client could push my dispute rate over 1% and trigger a review.
• as i scale and revenue grows, large inflows into a relatively new account could flag something.
• i have no real recourse if Stripe decides to terminate. no phone support, no appeal process that actually works.

i've been looking at switching to Paddle as my primary processor since they act as the merchant of record, meaning chargebacks and disputes are their problem not mine. seems like the obvious solution but i wanted to hear from people who've actually dealt with this.

before anyone says "just use Paddle", i already looked into it and yes, the API is solid, webhooks, Node/Python SDKs, usage-based billing built in, and you can embed the checkout directly on your site without redirecting customers anywhere. PCI compliance is also fully handled by them. so the technical side seems fine. what i actually want to know is the real-world experience.

questions for anyone who's been through it:

1. has your Stripe account actually been terminated or held? what triggered it?
2. are you using an MoR like Paddle or Lemon Squeezy? has it actually been smooth or is there still always a chance of getting banned?
3. is there any way to actually reduce the risk on Stripe, or is it just permanent anxiety?
4. for those doing B2B SaaS specifically, do your clients care which checkout they see (Stripe vs Paddle)?
5. are there any other better options than the ones discussed above?

would really appreciate honest answers over theoretical ones. there's a lot of generic advice online but not many people talking about their actual experience running this stack from Pakistan.

My business is failing. I sell my work made to order and over the past year because of certain life situations I started offering more discounts to keep the cash flow coming in but did not manage to keep up with the work load.

Now, I am so behind on pending orders and have so little money I am in a seriously rough spot. I have about $10,000 in pending orders. Most of the work has been completed but I've run out of money to buy some of the things required to fully finish and ship them.

The account connected to my stripe has no money. I am considering refunding all of my pending orders and letting stripe be unable to collect them from my connected bank.

I would send a very honest message to my customers about what is going on. I think many will just take the refund but some will also be open to reordering from me through a different payment processor.

How stupid is this? Will stripe send my account to collections?

My business will work if its not made to order. I have the space needed to scale into ready made pieces but I've never been able to fully make the switch because of how long my pending orders list is.

I could continue accepting orders through pay pal and I think some of my customers will just buy back what they ordered once it’s a finished piece.

EDIT: this is with the intention of paying stripe back. I know that debt doesn’t just disappear but since I don’t have loan options it seems like my only option

I had a complete disaster yesterday and I’m curious if anyone else has moved away from the "standard" integration. We had a brief database timeout right as a bunch of checkout sessions were completing. Stripe tried to send the webhooks, my server choked with a 500 error, and everything got out of sync.

The worst part isn't even the server crash, it’s the recovery. Trying to figure out exactly which events failed by digging through logs and then manually checking them against the Stripe dashboard took me hours. I felt like I was doing data entry instead of engineering.

I've decided I need a middle layer. I want something that just catches the webhook immediately, stores it, and then lets me retry it or inspect it through a clean UI if my app fails. I’m tired of the "silent failures" and the stress of deployments potentially breaking our payment flow.

Is everyone just building their own custom queue with SQS or something similar to act as a buffer? Or is there a simpler way to manage this that doesn't involve me maintaining more infrastructure?

I’m trying to understand a Stripe fee that seems way higher than expected.

I created a Stripe invoice for €468.99:

- €460 product/service

- €8.99 extra fee line

Client is from France and paid using Apple Pay with a Visa card.

My Stripe account is a US LLC account, but EUR currency is enabled on it, so there shouldn’t have been a currency conversion on my side.

Stripe took €20.89 in fees, which feels really high (~4.45%).

I initially thought adding the €8.99 as a separate “fees” item would prevent Stripe from cutting into the product amount, but now I realized Stripe charges fees on the total invoice amount anyway.

What I’m trying to understand is:

- Is this normal for a US Stripe account receiving EUR payments from EU cards?

- Does Apple Pay increase fees or is it just treated as the underlying Visa card?

- Could this be because the Visa was commercial/business?

- Does Stripe Invoicing itself add extra fees on top of card processing?

Would appreciate if someone who deals with international Stripe payments can explain the breakdown a bit better.

Running an ecommerce operation for about 3 years now and were seeing something that's been bothering me. Our chargeback and dispute win rate is pretty low compared to what other sellers mention. Were losing disputes we probably should be winning and I cant figure out why.

The evidence part is where I think we're failing. We have order confirmations, tracking data, delivery proof, but when it comes to actually presenting it to the payment processor or bank, it doesnt seem to land properly. 

Ive talked to a few other founders and they mention things like having your evidence structured a specific way, knowing what details actually matter, or even timing of when you submit. But I haven't found any concrete guidance on this.

Feeling like were leaving money on the table here and cant quite put my finger on what the gap is. What are you guys doing differently that gets better results?

Buenas, tengo un par de SaaS en los que cobro con stripe, y he visto que no van a sacar ninguna solución que cumpla con verifactu, por lo que tengo que ir buscando algún programa que haga como de "conector" y en cada cobro que reciba me genere una factura.

Sabéis si hay alguna solución en el mercado? No soy programador, por lo que agradecería si es sencilla o no-code.

He visto una que se llama easy-verifactu pero ya que estoy, buscaba un programa en el que pueda emitir facturas manualmente también, ya que de vez en cuando tengo que hacer alguna, a parte de las que me genera stripe.

Gracias de antemano!

Struggle is real when you register a company in USA and foreign resident. No one understands true needs of founders. I found almost no one who can take off the tax burden and accounting for a SaaS company who is just starting up.

Company I work with don’t even understand state sales tax liabilities and how to charge customers, whether to collect tax from customer or not. And many more. Any help is really appreciated.

Hello all,

Relatively new to Stripe, but I've been integrating it into my application and testing onboarding. I tried implementing standard, but the user friction is enormous. I'm basically asking casual users/sellers to go through a 15 minute onboarding process that would be expected of a business.

Express is better but $2/month fees on every active user? That's tens of thousands of dollars a month at scale.

Considering PayPal instead, which has it's own issues and caveats, but seems much better for seller onboarding.

How did ya'll navigate this?

For my app to hit market MVP, I need help with my stripe integration through stripe express, for some reason it’s not talking to each other and keeps breaking my code! This is literally the last part missing before going to IOS/Android for processing and testing and launch.

If someone could spare sometime to work with me, I have had great luck so far with someone from this group that will be awesome, I promise if this is big as I am getting feed back for. I’d be highly rewarding as a help for the build out.

I have a OnePay card and I wanna use it on strtipe but everytime it says Unable to authenticate your payment method. Any fixs?

https://preview.redd.it/7dilivvi9hzg1.png?width=931&format=png&auto=webp&s=892de4c6126e2d17ac626d51b8383a78996af482

Nothing on the status page is shown, so I am looking for a workaround...