Is Stripe Killing Liberapay?

Liberapay is a support method we've made available for both Techlore & Surveillance Report supporters to contribute to our causes. What's special about Liberapay is it's open source, more privacy-respecting than Patreon, and far more transparent. But, nice things can't always last.

What happened?

We have two Liberapay accounts, one for Techlore and one for Surveillance Report. This is done to keep finances separate between the two. Liberapay offers two payment processors: PayPal & Stripe. Stripe is much preferred as there are fewer fees and it integrates far better with Liberapay—even Liberapay encourages Stripe:

Previously, we only had one Stripe account we linked to both Liberapay accounts, where we manually calculated the difference from there. To streamline this, we created a new, dedicated Stripe account for Surveillance Report that we only linked to Liberapay.

After receiving our first Liberapay payment, Stripe banned our new account:

After investigating, Stripe is claiming that Liberapay is against their ToS for crowdfunding. We appealed and they rejected our appeal.

Was this a one-off incident?

The unfortunate thing is the stux Mastodon server had their Stripe account shut down too on the very day of writing this blog (They used Liberapay):

I don't know if they had the exact issue as we did, but it's eerily similar. Based on my understanding of Stripe's ToS, I don't believe Liberapay fully complies with their rules. (Hard to tell!) Their restricted businesses list clearly outlines crowdfunding as a risky business, though it's unclear if it's officially banned on Stripe. But given Surveillance Report was banned, I have to assume it's a possibility.

For context: many businesses, orgs, and individuals rely on Stripe for receiving their income! This is a big problem for anyone who has to make money online. For many platforms, Stripe is the default.

There are a few possibilities for what's happening:

Liberapay alone is being picked up as a risky transaction from Stripe, so Stripe is occasionally banning accounts that accept funds through Liberapay
Stripe is getting more intense about their crowdfunding policies and banning accounts that use them for crowdfunding.
These are all coincidences. (....)

Where is Liberapay?!

Yes, Stripe is the problem here. But Liberapay shares some responsibility too. I reached out to their support almost 2 weeks ago regarding this (pretty serious!) issue.

I have yet to receive a response. Given how heavily Liberapay pushes Stripe with no warnings of this happening, I feel they should be doing more to reassure people using their platform can do so safely. In the meantime, if you're a creator, org, or business using Stripe on Liberapay—do so at your own risk.

Update: Turns out there's an open GitHub issue regarding this! If you have been impacted or have suggestions to make to the team I'm sure they'd be happy to hear!

What's next?

I've gone ahead and removed the Techlore Stripe from our Liberapay accounts as a precaution. We will no longer be linking Stripe accounts to Liberapay out of fear of getting these crucial accounts banned. Stripe allows the same business to have multiple accounts. PayPal doesn't allow this. And unfortunately, we are unable to link one PayPal account to multiple Liberapay profiles. So here's our solution:

The Techlore Liberapay is being retired and being transitioned to a similar offering we just created on our forum! - This is how you can officially become a Techlorian and gain access to exclusive communities like our Signal group!
We are using the one PayPal account for the Surveillance Report Liberapay, which will remain live but only with PayPal. We feel this is the community that relied the heaviest on Liberapay and we didn't want to take it away.

Sorry about this. I go out of my way to try and make sure the boring admin stuff stays out of the public so we can just talk about the important stuff: digital rights. But sometimes our admin stuff is important, so I hope this was insightful. If anyone has any insight or feedback to give us, please contact us!

Thanks for reading, and if you want to support Techlore the newest way to do so is by becoming a Techlorian!