Tell HN: Braintree is no longer startup-friendly
30 by jjeaff | 7 comments on Hacker News.
About 3 years ago, after researching payment processing options, we chose Braintree. The thing is, they were still riding on the goodwill they had built up thus far pre-paypal purchase. Paypal is a total nightmare for some people (especially if you plan on growing fast), so the fact that they were recently purchased by them, should have been a red flag, but customers and reviews still seemed positive. One of the selling points with Braintree was always that once you are underwritten, they are going to work and grow with you. Unlike Paypal, who will arbitrarily freeze your funds at the most inopportune moment. Apparently, Paypal has now applied this same policy at Braintree. One of the features we offer our customers is allowing them to sell event tickets through our software. They can use their own merchant account, but we encourage them to use our in house system (braintree marketplace) because it is usually faster and easier. And so it worked fine for 3 years, slowly growing, processing more and more payments through more and more sub-merchants. Hundreds of thousands of dollars. Then they just decided to shut down 2 of our newest customers and hold 100% of their funds ransom for 180 days. More than $50k for a single customer which is a terrible burden. Reasons given was that we had a sudden increase in marketplace sales from this new customer and they don't want the exposure (even though we processed even more than this from a single sub-merchant last year in a short period of time). So just wanted to put it out there that Braintree is now up to the old tricks of Paypal. Lull you in to a false sense of security, then lock up your funds suddenly for whatever reason with no recourse. If you currently use Braintree, be careful, even with a good growth history on file with them, they are no longer startup friendly as they can't seem to handle spikes in activity or at least have no desire to do so.
About 3 years ago, after researching payment processing options, we chose Braintree. The thing is, they were still riding on the goodwill they had built up thus far pre-paypal purchase. Paypal is a total nightmare for some people (especially if you plan on growing fast), so the fact that they were recently purchased by them, should have been a red flag, but customers and reviews still seemed positive. One of the selling points with Braintree was always that once you are underwritten, they are going to work and grow with you. Unlike Paypal, who will arbitrarily freeze your funds at the most inopportune moment. Apparently, Paypal has now applied this same policy at Braintree. One of the features we offer our customers is allowing them to sell event tickets through our software. They can use their own merchant account, but we encourage them to use our in house system (braintree marketplace) because it is usually faster and easier. And so it worked fine for 3 years, slowly growing, processing more and more payments through more and more sub-merchants. Hundreds of thousands of dollars. Then they just decided to shut down 2 of our newest customers and hold 100% of their funds ransom for 180 days. More than $50k for a single customer which is a terrible burden. Reasons given was that we had a sudden increase in marketplace sales from this new customer and they don't want the exposure (even though we processed even more than this from a single sub-merchant last year in a short period of time). So just wanted to put it out there that Braintree is now up to the old tricks of Paypal. Lull you in to a false sense of security, then lock up your funds suddenly for whatever reason with no recourse. If you currently use Braintree, be careful, even with a good growth history on file with them, they are no longer startup friendly as they can't seem to handle spikes in activity or at least have no desire to do so.
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