Tell HN: Stripe closed my GPT-3 G.Sheet addon because they think I “sell essays”

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34801809

by cosbgn • 3 years ago

47 64 3 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Apparently Stripe is closing GPT-3 tools because they "are unable to accept payments for the sale of essays and other academic work". I tried to appeal but no luck. What can I do? The tool is EndType.com and I obviously don't sell academic work

pocketarc• 3 years ago

What do you mean when you say that they closed your add-on? Did they stop your add-on from working, or did they just close your Stripe account? If it's the latter, you should be able to sign up with another payment provider and leave them behind.

motoxpro• 3 years ago

Agree. There are dozens of payment providers you could use in this situation.

This call for help rubs me the wrong way.

benjaminwootton• 3 years ago

It still takes effort to switch and there may be an issue with the original payment provider retaining your funds.

Payments are a critical part of your business and it's a disaster to be switched off at zero notice.

Yes, the obvious mitigation is to support two providers, but that can be a big investment when you want to integrate with your book keeping, fulfilment systems etc.

And if customer service was a bit more proactive then people wouldn't have to come to social media to flag when they have been treated unfairly.

I'm happy that people have an escalation path through social media noise as I've had to rely on it myself many times.

thunkshift1• 3 years ago

And the random cancelling doesnt rub you the wrong way?

dmak• 3 years ago

Aside from government regulatory requirements, am I the only one who thinks Stripe shouldn't have this kind of say? I know there are business categories that have more risk which may or may not be allowed to transact, but this particular instance seems like a huge power trip to me.

Perhaps someone with better insight can educate me on this matter?

its-summertime• 3 years ago

AFAIK, the moralizing comes from higher up (Banks, Visa, Mastercard), instead of Stripe themselves.

Alternatively, it could be a category of transactions that eventually almost always see high fraud (e.g. kids paying for essays using parent's money, parents reporting the transactions afterwards).

daveoc64• 3 years ago

It's really all about risk.

There are certain categories of transaction that see a lot of disputes.

Payment processors, banks, and card schemes (like Visa/MasterCard) don't like disputes - they are costly to deal with.

londons_explore2• 3 years ago

But stripe already charges the customer for disputes, and presumably makes a little margin on top.

I can understand if they're saying "we think you're about to get a lot of disputes, and you may not be able to pay for all of them, so we're going to hold some of your money for a few days just to see".

But that isn't what they're saying.

johngladtj• 3 years ago

It's really not. It's about regulatory requirements and political pressure (including the attempt to avoid said political pressure)

curiousgal• 3 years ago

Don't use them?

smca5• 3 years ago

Stripe works closely with banking partners and card networks in many countries. These institutions have strict rules that govern them. We have an obligation to uphold those rules—and so the decision to support a business isn't solely up to Stripe. We wrote more on that here (as it can be a understandable source of confusion): https://stripe.com/blog/why-some-businesses-arent-allowed.

Essay mills fall under the category of "deceptive" products and services. It's clear we made a mistake here in looking at this particular business and we've re-enabled the account (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34802504). In particular, we didn’t correctly distinguish between augmenting the ability to write content vs. buying essays to commit academic fraud. We'll be revisiting our internal policies to better dilineate between these categories.

gwerbret• 3 years ago

While I'm sure the OP appreciates the successful "support via HN", it seems very clear that the real problem with your organization in this regard is people needing to do this in the first place. OP did say of the initial ban that "I tried to appeal but no luck."

Vanit• 3 years ago

If it weren't for your intervention would Stripe have made this correction through its regular processes?

febeling2• 3 years ago

The problem is probably related to the alerting system being automatic. The rate of fraud is likely much higher than we all can imagine, I once read a number about credit cards, which was incredible.

And if you know the constraints of classifiers where recall and precision are a tradeoff, and consider that basically fraud cannot happen for economic reasons, you can imagine that yanking up the recall (loss avoidance) at the expense of precision (stomping over innocent false positives) is tempting and lucrative, at least on short term.

roddux• 3 years ago

Find a new provider that won't randomly shaft you for spurious reasons.

ceejayoz• 3 years ago

For example…?

rvz4• 3 years ago

Stripe might have detected that you are grifting with an AI chatbot and is clearly telling you not to do that on their payment gateway.

Like I said before [0], perhaps it is better to go on multiple gateways. At least then you can continue your hustle / grift on another payment processor rather than complain here and use HN as Stripe customer support.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34747526

weird-eye-issue2• 3 years ago

This is an awful take

Also, they are likely using the OpenAI API which is not a "chatbot", and was built exactly for the purpose of building apps like this

KyeRussell3• 3 years ago

Grift? What is this? Twitter? Stop using such loaded trendy vitriolic language and take this for what it actually is.

rvz4• 3 years ago

Grift?

Yes. Selling AI snake oil is indeed a grift.

It also doesn't surprise me that with the recent hype of AI all over the place, Stripe would be taking extra steps in cracking down on new so-called AI companies and scams selling their snake-oil re-packaged as 'AI' to ride the hype cycle.

This one is just low hanging fruit.

Stop using such loaded trendy vitriolic language and take this for what it actually is.

Exactly. It is actually a 'grift'. Just like the rest of the low effort so-called AI companies sitting on someone else's APIs. It is another plain old confidence trick which is as old as the hills.

smca5• 3 years ago

Can you email me at smca@stripe.com?

We support a bunch of AI businesses on Stripe and I'd like to take a closer look. (What you're describing doesn't sound unsupportable to me.)

water-your-self• 3 years ago

Employee vigilantes browsing forums is not a viable method of customer support.

Kelteseth• 3 years ago

Have they ever responded to this criticism on HN? This is so weird, and it really shows that you should stay away as far as possible from Stripe.

parker_mountain4• 3 years ago

It's not, but employees who see things that are wrong and shrug their shoulders isn't exactly viable, either.

RGamma• 3 years ago

Scale first, clean up later. It's the DNA of unicorns.

Applejinx2• 3 years ago

Seems you can usually replace 'not a viable' with 'only available' and be in basically the same place.

Practically, you gotta thank the person for the role they're taking on.

Holistically, they're not really part of the system, so that role doesn't exist. They're certainly not getting paid to do that and it needs to not scale up to where it's interfering with their real job.

rgrieselhuber• 3 years ago

Seems like it is though.

KyeRussell3• 3 years ago

I’m surprised by how often I see these threads about Stripe specifically. I don’t know how much of this is because Stripe is the biggest player, or how much of it is because people have learned that you can come here to get your stuff sorted. Honestly, to me, it doesn’t matter. There are a handful of beyond viable Stripe alternatives that I’d be tempted to use because this is just teaching me that this is a regular thing that happens for anything but the most bland Stripe uses. I vaguely understand that anything financial has these sorts of ham-fisted risk controls. That doesn’t help quell the unease I have about Stripe. The optics are just…not great.

FredPret• 3 years ago

Same. I put my startup on a different platform because of things like this. I’m not a crypto bro but I strongly hope crypto eventually develops into a system where I can just get a direct payment from my users without a pearl-clutching middleman like Stripe / Paypal / whatever.

cosbgn2• 3 years ago

Hi Sam, I just got a personal email from you and my account is being re-enabled. I just want to underline the fact that I did send 3 different appeals and they all got refused, and it seems that HN is the only way to get attention from Stripe. I like Stripe but is getting painful to deal with this sort of support. Thanks for looking at my case personally!

smca5• 3 years ago

I'm glad I could help resolve this for you. The number of appeals you had to step through to get to this point is frustrating and I'm sorry for the hassle.

We're going to take a closer look at our policies for businesses tangential to "essay mills" and how we can better delineate between them so that this doesn't happen again.

jcq3• 3 years ago

Tech industry let these actors have too much power, they can cut any business at their will. Web3 is the answer, I hope it is. Matter of time before they get replaced.

heartbeats4• 3 years ago

It's unlikely that web3 will solve it; cryptocurrency already exists, and its many serious issues are not going to be solved by a fresh coat of paint or "moar adoption".

If you want an actual solution, look at FedNow. This would enable direct bank account payments, like in most of Europe, with a government-run intermediary in the place of MasterCard/VISA. This changes the censorship situation from "four out of four must accept" to "one out of thousands must accept".

creshal4• 3 years ago

The situation in Europe isn't quite as rosy. SEPA is a huge PITA, usability wise, and closer to US ACH transfers; and so most countries have their own special sauce online payment solution that serves as central point of failure for that country's customer base. Belgians use Bancontact, Austrians use EPS, Germans use giropay, Dutch use iDEAL, … or, more often, don't, and just use Paypal or credit cards anyway, since it's so much of a hassle.

And even if you wanted to implement all these systems, it's so much effort that you're back to relying on payment providers like Stripe, realistically.

rvz4• 3 years ago

If you want an actual solution, look at FedNow.

Fed No.

The US is not the world and the rest of the world is certainly not on FedNow, and never will be.

At least with stablecoins like USDC on Ethereum, Stellar, Solana, etc it is available today 'right now', worldwide, 24/7 and with instant, same day transfers with low fees.

KyeRussell3• 3 years ago

If - and this is a big if - anything if any value ever happened in web3, the same ‘risk people’ would implement the same hamfisted risk controls on top of it in service of making a system that people actually want to use. The risk controls are stupid but they’re in service of something. People outside of your bubble don’t want “digital cash”.

urbandw311er• 3 years ago

Wait, you don't actually think Web3 is a real thing do you? Oh bless. That's kind of sweet.

Applejinx2• 3 years ago

I had a look at your website.

How is it obvious that you don't sell academic work and/or a paid tool to write essays for kids? It looked like 'have GPT-3 write stuff in Google Docs, but more so' to me.

What are people going to be doing, journaling?

The Stripe thing is a separate issue, I'm calling out your 'I obviously don't sell academic work'. Oh come on. Really? Who's gonna pay for this?

febeling2• 3 years ago

Guilty until proven innocent?

uoaei3• 3 years ago

Well, you kinda do?

It doesn't really matter what you want your product to do. It's what people do with your product. Intentions are easy to fake, it's the outcomes that people care about.

Tell HN: Stripe closed my GPT-3 G.Sheet addon because they think I “sell essays”

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