Update: Stripe is holding over $400k of mine with no explanation [resolved]
Lots of posts here along the lines of &quot;it&#x27;s not good when you need to resort to social media shaming to get customer support&quot;, but I&#x27;ll take the contrarian view, or at least explain why this dynamic exists.<p>The past 20 years has seen an explosion in Internet services, but a fundamental (often unspoken) quality of these services is that they must keep individualized customer support costs <i>very</i> low in order to be profitable. I mean, just look at Google, which has billions of end users. You can argue that Google takes in a ton of money, but it&#x27;s not hard to see that if every Google user just had a single support call requiring 30 minutes of a support rep&#x27;s time a year, that Google&#x27;s profitability would tank (never mind the difficulty in hiring that many reps in the first place).<p>So all these services invest a ton into automated support and systems to ensure the vast majority of users never need support from a real human. That usually works well, except when you get some of these edge cases, and, <i>very importantly</i>, these edge cases are usually the worst when the customer behavior, while totally legit, &quot;looks&quot; pretty similar to malicious usage.<p>So, in that case, I&#x27;m <i>glad</i> that these back-channel avenues still exist when someone gets stuck in the machine. I wish there were a better alternative, but I really am at a loss to think what that could be. The social media channel essentially acts as a filter, as only things that are real problems are likely to get upvotes or lots of visibility. A trade off for users being able to get tons of value for (relatively) very cheap prices is that the &quot;tail end&quot; of support requests is usually pretty nightmarish.