thoraway1010

You miss the point entirely.

Currently because the volume of bogus support requests is so enourmously high, and the fraud attempts also very high - the cost to properly do something like handle account lockout requests properly (on the scale of billions of users) would be EXTREMELY high.

Google is actually pretty clear for consumer accounts, if you lock yourself out your content is lost and they suggest setting up a new account.

Cell phone companies do handle this, you can do things like sim swaps etc with a real person - but you are usually paying $50 - $100 per MONTH with them. And even there plenty of folks have complained of having 2FA codes stolen as a result of this convenience.

If they could charge $50 or $100 to provide paid support (a situation that is actually very COMMON at the enterprise level) for at least some people this will be worth doing. Then the business case is there to staff / resource etc the fix.

Currently, with youtube / gmail etc, the revenue per user is so low it will NEVER make economic sense to have humans dealing with an account.

But keep on banning paid support and you'll keep on getting no support.

A great idea! I'd love to run stuff in this zone. Rotate through a bunch of errors, unavailability, latency spikes, power outages etc every day, make it a 12 hour torture test cycle.

I wonder if Apple and Google and Facebook and Microsoft and Stripe had just done something "anti competitive" and entered the payment space squarely themselves if rates would come down. They seem more consumer experience directed than other players.

The security they can deploy (apple pay seems pretty good now as long as card onboarding isn't broken) seems like they could drive down to basically low interchange?

The other thing is trust. They have (yet) to screw customers on pricing that I've seen. Has amazon ever raised prices on an existing service? I'm not saying the prices are any good, but they don't seem to go up.

So you can spin up in a few seconds, scale, stop and even invest in the platform without worrying too much. Also - they don't seem to discontinue services that quickly, again, doesn't feel like you will be screwed.

I just had a call TODAY with a vendor, the price could be as low as $30/unit or $120/unit - that's a near 4x delta from sure to hell no for our use case. Sales guy needs to go talk to their manager to see if they can get us the lower pricing. And who knows if next year (it's annual) we'll again get their "manager" to sign off on the lower pricing.

Something about enterprise sales folks thinking is very short term. No price transparency - maybe we can qualify and squeeze them for more per unit. Or maybe get them in low and squeeze them on renewal once they've invested. The overhead of dealing with them is so high too. Show me actual product screens (not talking heads and bullet points). By the time you get to the demo you have wasted a week of your life.

So big thumbs up to AWS here. You can see baseline pricing up to huge traffic. You can see savings plans discounts up to large amounts etc.

My requests - pass interchange onto the customer - and allow merchant to do so explicitly at whatever rate they want (not cash discount or anything). Ie, merchant might cover first 1% of interchange, pass rest on (so "premium" card holders with high interchange and high rewards pay the big price). We do have to get to chip+pin so the fraud issues diminish.

It's not just enterprise - many small / mid size places are much much happier (myself included) with an invoice attached.

AWS gets this right (even though invoice is high level). You get something that can be quickly forwarded down / up and around and end up in the AP system / accounting system etc in good shape (ie, vs a 6 page PDF of an email chain). They just care that third party invoice is there in good shape with approval by whoever owns the expense line its hitting.

No insurance hassles - I did medical billing for a bit. The insurance co's basically just run around doctors because they KNOW folks give up. You could absolutely force the $40 extra payment if dr + patient etc proved it out / appealed it - but often not worth it. Also govt billing into central county system for the poor - ugh - the bureaucracy / overhead was a nightmare (always having to recertify to financial need / paperwork this and that - 50% of time was on stuff I'd consider no value add).

For a while I had individual insurance (prior to obamacare). Because it had pretty high deductibles, I would just do a private pay / cash doctor for primary care etc.

Some big wins:

NO discussion about whether something was covered or not! You want to get service, just call.

No crazy surprise bills - yes - I once tried to go to urgent care for something at the main hospital, but NO ONE would tell me what I would be charged as a cash pay client. Yes, it can be expensive to do cash pay, but with a doctor billing by the time you can basically predict / know your cost.

Service - you are paying by the hour. I never felt pressured out the door (no surprise). The service is good to great.

Convenience - I got someone close who used his downstairs as his office. Have a problem, go in and get checked out. Because you don't need the huge billing infrastructure I think you can get away with smaller office sizes. To pay for a full time biller you need a few doctors, who then need a receptionist etc etc.

Most startups IP is not worth $200M no matter what they think.

This guy was a grade A jerk too - if he doesn't do time then white collar crime is going to be even more unfairly under-enforced.

I've got the dual yubico key thing going. It seems to work fine. I don't need to pick overly complex passwords if I don't want to.

Google does this well. Yubico Security Key + they seem to monitor my logins / rate limits etc.

I deal as do many folks with relatively to extremely sensitive info (yes, also have stuff on auto-delete).

Complex passwords require a password manager - if those get updated and rooted then my yubico seems to save me again.

In fact, with yubico I have a few passwords I memorized that aren't TOO crazy long - with a 2FA hardware key you may be able to SIMPLIFY passwords and still have good security.

And the yubico is EASY! Clip it to your keychain and go.

Retail is crazy miserable for the person actually MAKING the product.

Getting INTO stores is hard. The store can dump product back onto you - so they have no risk. The price on shelf has NOTHING to do with what you get, if you are small you are already going through some intermediaries. Ie, person making product, packing, shipping to distributor (some make you pay cost to get it to them), then distribution costs then retailer markups then return handling yadda yadda. THEN retailers will ask you to run promos and give them discounts or they will drop you.

3%? EVERYONE would pay that. In retail I'd say person making product gets maybe 20%? 80% is taken by others?

That's awesome! However, it WILL result in stripe attracting a LOT of the crappy billers (ie, folks who mislead / make customer unhappy etc). If your business is < 1% refunds, no worry if fees stay. A fair number of business have just 1 or 2 refunds PER YEAR.

Other business obviously have MUCH higher refund rates (sneaky autobill businesses etc). For these loosing 5% on the refunds matters if they have a lot of refunds, so they'll be very tempted by no costs if you autobill and get caught. They'll just autorenew everyone, autosign up and then be VERY good about refunds to avoid chargebacks. Even if just 30% of customers don't catch a few months you end up with real money.

Of course, CUSTOMERS may hate these players, but stripe I guess is focused on what works for the businesses generating lots of refunds.

I think we are just going towards centralized trust proxies.

Ie, if you are paying for google apps, have credit card on file, meet their rate limiting rules for outbound with SPF / Dkim etc then you are probably OK. Some random IP doing direct mail? Much less likely to be OK.

Given govt has done such a bad job in this space, these big corps are essentially picking up the slack / trust that you'd normally say govt was responsible for. Gives them a metric ton of power, and they don't tax so have no money to provide any corresponding service.

I'm explaining why sites that HOST but do not necessarily send content are blocked.

I've got no problem with their operation, but YOU are going down a VERY dangerous and slippery slope by saying I can't block domains that clearly host trash because they might host something else.

On my network I can block child porn, malware sites, scam sites and even entertainment sites like youtube. If you are running a service that mixes the content together, then you may be blocked by folks (like me) who don't have time to chase down every (free) subdomain you allow scammers to create.

That is my right. Period. Full stop. That is not censorship.

Folks here get censorship confused. The govt does virtually nothing to stop these scam sites - so they are certainly not being censored. I'm fine if govt does nothing, as long as communities of people can block these places.

And yes, if you run a site on the internet and don't make it slightly difficult for scammers to use your site to host crap, then other folks in the neighborhood will move the heck away from you.

Malware and childporn reduction efforts also often go after the hosts of that content. I'm not sure why calling the folks hosting this stuff what it is incorrect. Sure, childporn folks don't actually necessarily "send" child porn, they just respond to requests from viewers. But they host it.

These scam sites are like that - do you really think you can make $30,000 a week working 30 minutes a day from your home computer if you just send these idiot $25?