Tell HN: Coinbase is a joke (product and support)

I work with Ukrainians and paying some of them has been a challenge, so we decided to give payment via BTC a try. I got a personal Coinbase account to play around with it, to get more familiar (I had never purchase any crypto until then). Once I got the account and proved to myself that it should work, I started the process to get a business account.

The business account took a long time to get. Probably 2 months. The amount of information they asked for was quite surprising to me. As a founder, I had never given this level of detail to anyone for any purpose. I assumed that it was due to regulations Coinbase were under, but honestly, I do not know. The end goal was important enough that I was willing to go along.

Once I went through the onerous process, I linked our business checking and purchased some BTC and tried to transfer it. I was told there would be a 13 day hold on the funds before they could be transferred to my consultant. I went through support and was told to use a debit card and there would be no hold.

Since I didn't have a debit card, I had to get one. After it came, I tried to add it and I got the error: An error occurred / Business cards are not supported.

That was in mid-December. Here we are in late January and it is still not resolved. Here's a thumbnail of what has happened in between:

- I submitted an email ticket, where they sent me canned responses for the first week or so. They really never seem to understand the issue.

- After a few weeks they finally told me I had a personal account and I couldn't add a business debit card.

- I showed them screengrabs of my account proving that it was a business account.

At this point they ghosted me.

A week ago I tried a chat on the website. I explained everything above and it came down to this:

A person can only have either a personal or business account, but not both

Let's ignore the fact that they let me open both accounts and never said a word about it. They even let me connect a debit card to my personal account and a checking account to my business account.

Next, they told me if I deleted my personal account I could add the debit card to my business account. I did that. No change.

I started a chat again and after a long time bumped it up a level and said someone would get in touch with me via email.

Yesterday I got an email that my new ticket was closed and asked if my issue was resolved.

At this point, I deleted my personal account and my business account is stuck in "personal" mode and I can't add a debit card, so the hold time means it's useless.

I just want people to know that Coinbase is a complete joke of a company. Don't use them.