Blame Stripe’s back-end banking partners. Stripe (and similar companies) have to err on the side of caution, because if they get shut off from processing credit cards, they’re hosed themselves. Since as you mentioned your company does a very small transaction volume, servicing your business or anything else with a hint of being drug related is high risk for Stripe with essentially zero reward.
Is it OK to blame consumers for granting the Visa/Mastercard duopoly control over our spending habits? If a card network doesn't like a company, they can kill it (unless the users are motivated enough to use bitcoin, which only happens when you're facilitating illegal trade a la Silk Road). Intricacies of Visa's policies actually ended up killing a well-funded startup I consulted for.
Is it high-risk though? Or is it just perceived that way? It wouldn't surprise me if Stripe and/or the banks saw the word "weed" and shat a brick without actually performing any kind of analysis.
> If that is the case then I might as well consider dealing with the banks directly.
Which you can do, if you have enough charge volume. Are you charging $1 million/month yet? If not, you probably don't have enough volume to carry any weight.
I keep seeing these "whine" stories on HN about "Fuck stripe! 5 days notice?! How dare they!". 5 days is pretty reasonable for someone taking an inordinate amount of risk on you. I can count on one hand the number of HN posters I'd provide upfront financing for in the 5-6 figure range. If you don't like it, find a provider more to you're liking.
You can tear Stripe from my cold, dead hands before I'd go to another processor, 5 day notices be damned. They are leaps and bounds better than the alternatives, and it should be recognized that they face the same hurdles as businesses with funding risk do.
> Which you can do, if you have enough charge volume. Are you charging $1 million/month yet?
No and I will never charge a million dollars a month through anything as I'm in the UK and over here card processing doesn't require anything remotely like that volume and we have a healthy local market for card processors if I choose to go elsewhere.
Unfortunately that wouldn't work for the posts author. The Obama administration DoJ and FDIC put the squeeze on bank accounts of broad categories of industry that they found distasteful without any actual evidence of high-risk: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point
