Stripe has been a phenomenal company to work with. They are an exemplar for many things. The way that they manage API version comes to mind after reading this article. AdvicePay wouldn't have been as enjoyable to build if it wasn't for the quality of documentation and sanity of their schema / API. They have taken design seriously, and their product seems to pair quality of design and quality of engineering, which is a beautiful and rare thing when these are balanced. However, we have recently experienced a major disappointment when upgrading to their latest API version that seems completely undocumented.

We have been rocking custom connect accounts for the last few years. This has allowed us to own the on-boarding experience and essentially make stripe invisible to our users. This has the added benefit that when our users receive payments from their clients, the money is transferred directly to their connect account and not mediated by our platform account. There were a handful of ways we could have set this up, but this was a direct recommendation from Stripe. We were one of the early adopters of custom connect accounts, and it has been a solid experience thus far.

There were a handful of API calls that needed modifications, but we were able to keep things mostly the same. We moved this to our staging environment, and tested the flows that our users go through. Everything was working splendidly, and we deployed without much concern. A few days later, sentry notified us that a client who belonged to a newly created account could not add bank accounts. Rut roh. This worked in staging, using the same API version as production. We cannot duplicate the issue in our test environments. We have been waiting on feedback from Stripe support and not really getting anywhere. We’ve learned that connect accounts must accept the ACH terms & conditions, but since we are using custom accounts, they cannot log in to accept the terms, and we cannot use the API to accept the terms either. Don’t forget that our flow has been working for a couple of years as well. We appear to be stuck in some sort of purgatory where the requisite steps to allow ACH are not accessible. This seems like a use case they just didn’t account for, and it’s been surprising that after 3 weeks of reaching out, we are still in the same spot as when we began. In their docs, there is nothing calling out that direct charges with custom connect accounts using ACH will be blocked. Even their own support team was caught off guard.

Sadly, the error occurred after we had the ability to revert our API version. In the mean time, we’ve thrown up some banners to alert our users to the situation, but we are been told that these things “can take a long while to resolve” from Stripe support. I'm writing this mainly in hopes to inspire some urgency for a fix on Stripe's end. Overall, Stripe has done right by us and recent events have seemed out of character for what we're used to from them. We've been going hrough their regular support channels (checking in every day) only to hit dead ends and be left in the dark about any sort of timeline. We're not sure if a fix could take half a year and we need to start rewriting ASAP (which would be super painful), or if we should hold out for a fix. Meanwhile, our product is suffering. We are essentially a billing platform, so new accounts not being able to take ACH payments is huge - half of our functionality is blocked.