Yet another Hacker News

28 points MelkerWendelbo 1 hour ago 10 comments

I'm the founder of Zorq AI (zorqai.com), an AI video and image generation platform based in Sweden. I want to share what happened to us as a warning to other founders, and to seek advice from anyone who has been through something similar. We launched in November 2025 and grew quickly. On March 24, Stripe flagged our account for a routine credit review due to a spike in volume. We submitted all requested documents. On March 28, Stripe closed our account permanently citing "unacceptable level of risk." Our current Stripe balance is 803,043 SEK (~$85,000 USD): Available: 556,906 SEK Pending: 246,136 SEK

The critical part: Stripe support confirmed in writing: "If a balance still remains in your account after eligible payments have been refunded, it will not be made available to you." No specific legal basis. No policy violation cited. Why disputes occurred — being fully transparent: There were two real technical issues on our end that we want to be honest about:

Our Stripe webhook handler was being rate-limited by Cloudflare (429 errors), causing credits not to be delivered to some customers after payment. We fixed this with retry logic and manually resolved every affected customer same day. Our infrastructure provider unexpectedly went down, forcing a 25-hour emergency migration. We built a recovery system so customers could restore their credits using their Stripe receipt number. Every customer who reached out received credits or a full refund.

We acknowledge these issues caused disputes. We have resolved all of them. Why this is legally questionable: Stripe Technology Europe Limited is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland as an EMI under PSD2. We are in the EU. The permanent withholding of merchant funds without a documented legal basis is questionable under EU payment regulations. Stripe has not cited which specific clause or policy we violated. What we are doing:

Submitted a formal appeal with full documentation to Stripe Contacted lawyers regarding PSD2 implications Filing complaints with Finansinspektionen (Sweden) and Central Bank of Ireland

Has anyone successfully challenged Stripe's fund withholding in the EU? Has anyone worked with lawyers experienced in this specifically?

db48x 1 hour ago | parent

You have to sue them. If you don’t sue them, they’ll keep doing it.

Imustaskforhelp 1 hour ago | parent

I am not sure about Stripe terms of service but don't most companies have some hatch-key terms of service to prevent suing. (I am not sure about stripe but there are some products that if you use their service, then you can only sue them for 1$ for example)

My recommendation feels as to get the money as soon as possible and then contact a lawyer and see if they can get enough pay-off from this somewhat, rightful lawsuit.

IANAL, but Maybe if they make even more than 85k$ by suing them right now, then perhaps they can sue them right now but maybe a lawyer here can give more definitive answer as to how they should proceed (and perhaps they shouldn't listen to any of us online people especially about the law)

OP, I suggest contacting a lawyer just in case.

BartjeD 1 hour ago | parent

In most European countries, UK excluded, the law of contracts doesn't work this way.

Reasonableness and good faith are implied in contracts. If a clause kills the essence of a contract maliciously, the court will not enforce it.

clort 54 minutes ago | parent

As I understood it, even in the UK there is the concept of a 'reasonable man' as in, the contract should perform as a 'reasonable man' would expect. If it does not, that is enough to get such terms discarded. So, you cannot just obfuscate the contract with impenetrable legalese that excludes reasonable things and expect to get away with that. Which is not to say that (insurance) companies will not try.

my source for this was an ex career insurance man (retired out)

echelon 1 hour ago | parent

The Stripe horror stories are adding up, making me think startups will move to different platforms.

A friend in China recently got shut down by Stripe for a perfectly legitimate business. They moved to Creem.

Stripe cares about big business. Startups can't really be moving the needle much for them anymore.

Stripe's APIs have become too confounding for small business anyway. They care about big business shaped entities at the expense of smaller scrappy players. Easy things aren't easy. It sucks.

You have to build your own hooks and logic for upgrades and downgrades. The event types are mismatched yet you have to listen across several semantic classes to capture the right state changes. Absurd, legacy/big biz focused garbage.

It should be click a button and integrate one API and webhook and you're done.

Huge opportunity.

Imustaskforhelp 1 hour ago | parent

(Not related to Stripe) but I tried to go to your terms of service and I didn't see a mention of any company and the mail within support is a gmail, zorqaiservice@gmail.com, So do you have a corporation formed

I am also unable to see a page like who-we-are, to verify this post especially given your new account. For more legitimacy, I somewhat suggest some way of manually verifying your account/claims

That being said, there have been cases within past where Stripe team has contacted here, Someone once joked about Hackernews being the golden ticket to Stripe support.

I hope that your problem gets resolved quickly as I can understand it must be very tense.

It is definitely some feeling when you just feel un-heard by a large corporation and get into its shenanigans that it really sucks, so messaging them on social media becomes often times the last resort.

0x3f 1 hour ago | parent

You don't mention any timeframes here relating to when the bulk of payments happened. It's quite reasonable for Stripe to hold what they see as high-risk funds in _anticipation_ of more disputes coming in.

opengrass 58 minutes ago | parent

You don't. 1% DR = ban. I forget the snapshot. Disputes should be refunded to be void and that user banned. If you incur more in fees than a DMA plan you shouldn't be using Stripe for cards anyway. Only ACH, PADs, crypto. The hook should be on a subdomain only allowing Stripe IPs in WAF.

kkfx 47 minutes ago | parent

Read also https://shaun.nz/why-were-never-using-wise-again-a-cautionar... than understand why crypto (not stablecoin) shift is a need not because their are good (they are not much) but because they can't block us. Banks and fintech have dug their own grave with such behaviors, and they'll resist until common people will understand.

0x3f 39 minutes ago | parent

> Banks and fintech have dug their own grave

Most of the annoying stuff with banks is just a response to government regulation.