Public record

The Stripe file

Stripe can close a merchant account at any time and hold the balance in it. Its own agreement says so, and sets no maximum length for the hold. Below are 520 first-hand accounts of that happening, with amounts, dates and the periods merchants say they were quoted.

Every entry is something the person it happened to published themselves, on a page you can open: a post under their own posting name, or a complaint to the Better Business Bureau, which publishes complaints with the filer's name removed. They are their reports, not our findings. Where Stripe replied in public, that is recorded too.

Stripe against the other companies in this record

69 of the 520 Stripe cases here say they were quoted 120 days, the period Stripe's own policy names, and 458 were still waiting when the merchant last wrote. The table sets those counts against every other company with 20 or more cases in the record.

What each company's cases in this record say, companies with 20 or more cases, as of 3 November 2026

Company	Cases	Still held when last heard	Median amount stated	Told six months or 180 days	Told 120 days	Told 90 days
Stripe	520	458 of 520	$4,909	11 of 520	69 of 520	11 of 520
PayPal	413	390 of 413	$705	180 of 413	14 of 413	2 of 413
Venmo	180	174 of 180	$200	17 of 180	0 of 180	0 of 180
Shopify Payments	140	105 of 140	$7,000	1 of 140	37 of 140	4 of 140
Square	117	104 of 117	$2,500	4 of 117	2 of 117	26 of 117
Wise	105	98 of 105	$1,900	0 of 105	0 of 105	0 of 105
Payoneer	98	72 of 98	$1,760	5 of 98	0 of 98	0 of 98
Skrill	53	49 of 53	$129	0 of 53	0 of 53	0 of 53
Airwallex	46	44 of 46	$5,165	12 of 46	0 of 46	1 of 46
Cash App	43	42 of 43	$256	0 of 43	0 of 43	0 of 43
SumUp	39	33 of 39	None stated	0 of 39	0 of 39	0 of 39
Paddle	34	30 of 34	$2,200	14 of 34	0 of 34	5 of 34
2Checkout	23	18 of 23	$647	7 of 23	0 of 23	1 of 23
Eventbrite	22	18 of 22	$1,100	0 of 22	0 of 22	0 of 22

The rows count what is on the public record, not a rate among each company's customers: a company whose public complaint channels are busier shows more cases, and the sources differ (most PayPal, Stripe and Square cases come from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's complaint database, most Paddle cases from Trustpilot and the Better Business Bureau). "Told" is the period the merchant says the company gave them, in their own words, not a term of service; a case that names two periods counts in both rows. "Still held" counts silence as well as money that never came back. Every case, with its public source, is on the record, and the same counts with their rules are on the data page.

2. What the reports have in common

Read together, the accounts above repeat the same shape. The merchant is told the balance is being held against the risk of future disputes. A period is quoted — 90 days, 120 days. The period runs out. The money does not arrive. ¹²

In the longest-running of them, the merchant says a 90-day hold was followed by a second 90-day email, then by a notice extending the reserve a further 30 days "due to the elevated dispute risk here" — 210 days in total, on a balance they put at $31,829.65. ¹

The first five entries in the file (HF-2026-0002 to HF-2026-0006) were posted between 2019 and 2025. Four of those five say they had no disputes and no refunds during the hold. Three of them published their Stripe account id in the post. None of those five ever posted an outcome, which is why 3 are recorded here as still held and 2 as unknown rather than as losses: an account that stops being updated is not the same as an account that ended badly, and this record does not fill that gap with a guess.

The nine Stripe entries recorded from 23 to 26 September 2026, posted between 2023 and 2026, include outcomes the first five do not. In two, the merchant quotes Stripe in writing that a balance left after refunds "will not be made available" to them (HF-2026-0156, HF-2026-0157). In two others, the merchant says Stripe refunded, or said it would refund, the held money to their customers instead of paying it out (HF-2026-0129, HF-2026-0161). Three of the nine were quoted 120 days. One merchant posted the next day that Stripe had reactivated the account (HF-2026-0159), and one says a smaller sub-account was paid out while the main account stayed blocked (HF-2026-0158).

Among the first five, Stripe replied in public on three of the threads. On the 2019 post an employee wrote that the company was "handling this with VF over email", and the merchant confirmed receiving it; no result was ever posted.¹ On the 2022 design case an employee asked the merchant to email them direct, and the merchant replied that they were "finally getting in touch with a real person at Stripe"; nothing further was posted on that thread either.² On the 2022 platform case the merchant says a Stripe employee told them the company could not support their business, but said nothing about releasing the balance.³

Most of the file now comes from one place. 443 entries are complaints filed with the Better Business Bureau against Stripe, Inc. between October 2023 and September 2026. BBB's own note at the top of that page reads: "Complaints on file concern issues with the release of funds and account suspension and/or termination of accounts." When we read it on 11 October 2026 the page listed 1,848 complaints in the last three years. ⁷ We read the 599 of those that state an amount and mention a hold or a payout, one at a time, and recorded a complaint only where the filer says Stripe is holding a stated sum. Complaints that turned out to be about something else — refunds to customers, chargebacks, negative balances, fees — were left out, and so were letters that appear word for word under different names.

Of those 443, 11 later wrote that the money was paid and 3 that part of it was. In 31, the page does not say how it ended — most often the filer marked the complaint resolved without saying whether any money arrived — and those are recorded as unknown. In the other 398, the last word on the page is that the money is still held.

Another 36 come from the r/stripe forum on Reddit, posts from January 2022 to August 2026.⁸ We searched it for the words people use (“funds held”, “reserve”, “payouts paused”, “120 days” and others), read 191 of the 194 posts that came back (three would not load), and recorded one only where the poster describes their own account and gives an amount, a hold period or a date. Questions, advice threads, posts written for a friend and accounts taken over by someone else were left out. In 6 the poster later wrote that the money was paid; in 26 the last word on the thread is that it is still held; the other 4 do not say how it ended. In six, the poster says the date Stripe gave for the money passed or moved without a payout (HF-2026-1616, HF-2026-1617, HF-2026-1618, HF-2026-1628, HF-2026-1632, HF-2026-1637).

3. What the agreement says

The merchant accounts above are one person's word each. The contract is not. The Stripe Services Agreement — General Terms, last modified 18 November 2025 — is published by Stripe, and it settles two questions people usually only ask after the account is already closed. ⁶

Read the second one again for what is not in it. The size of a reserve, and how long it lasts, are set by the Reserve Notice — a document Stripe sends you at the time. The General Terms define the reserve but fix no ceiling on it. Searching the whole of the General Terms for a stated number of days returns two: a 10-day period to cure a breach, and a 30-day notice period on an intellectual-property claim. Neither is about your money. ⁶

The General Terms themselves name no number of days for a hold. Stripe does publish one elsewhere: the Unacceptable Risk Policy says that for accounts it handles under that policy the pause on payouts is typically 120 days from the first email, followed by a formal review whose outcomes include continuing to hold the balance or cancelling the payout. The policy says that if it conflicts with the user's agreements, the agreements prevail, and it does not say what happens to a balance after the review other than that list.⁹ The 120 is a typical first pause, not a limit on how long a balance can be kept.

4. If your account has just been closed

This site is a record, not a law firm, and the honest answer is that nobody can promise you a way to make a payment processor pay out faster. Two things are worth doing on the day it happens, because both get harder later:

1. Export everything while the dashboard still opens. Payouts, balance history, disputes, customer records. Whatever route you take later — arbitration, a regulator, a court — it runs on documents you can no longer download once access is revoked.
2. Get the hold period in writing, and keep the message. Ask, in a written channel, exactly how long the balance is held, what would extend it, and what happens at the end. Every account above hinges on the difference between what the merchant was told and what then happened, and that difference is only provable if you kept the original.

Then file the case here. A frozen balance that only exists in your inbox is invisible; the same balance in a record with a date, a figure and a source is countable. That is the whole of what this site can do, and it is not nothing.

5. If you are choosing a provider

This file makes no recommendation and nobody has paid for a mention on it. Compare it with the Paddle file, the Lemon Squeezy file, the PayPal file, the Shopify Payments file and the Square file, which document different companies under different models — Shopify Payments is the closest comparison here, since its reserve clause caps nothing either, and note that the useful question is the same for all of them, and is best asked in writing before you integrate: if you close my account, how long is the balance held, what extends that period, and what is the written process for getting the money at the end of it?

Sources

1. VF, "Stripe's 210 Day Hold Practices (yes you read that right)", Indie Hackers, 24 December 2019, including the reply from a Stripe employee in the comments. indiehackers.com · archived copy. Read in full and verified 9 September 2026. Filed here as HF-2026-0002. Checked again on 16 September 2026: the original post did not load, while the rest of that site did; the archived copy still shows it in full.
2. interesting_att, "Ask HN: Stripe holding funds for 120 days for no reason", Hacker News, 22 October 2022, including the reply from a Stripe employee in the comments and the merchant's answer to it. news.ycombinator.com · archived copy. Read in full and verified 9 September 2026; comments re-read 10 September 2026, when the status here was changed from held to unknown. Filed here as HF-2026-0004.
3. neginshopper, "Tell HN: Stripe Took Our $159k", Hacker News, 17 March 2022, and the same account posted the previous day as "TELL HN: Stripe STOLE OUR $159k". news.ycombinator.com · earlier post · archived copy. Read in full and verified 9 September 2026. Filed here as HF-2026-0003 — one case, two posts.
4. userclickbase, "Tell HN: Stripe stole $92k of our funds", Hacker News, 8 March 2024. news.ycombinator.com · archived copy. Read in full and verified 9 September 2026. Filed here as HF-2026-0005.
5. Solsticebay, "SHOW HN: Stripe Ignoring Legal Letters and Holding $800k+", Hacker News, 10 July 2025, and the same person as solsbayissue on 30 August 2025 and again on 2 September 2025. news.ycombinator.com · later post · later post again · archived copy. Read in full and verified 9 September 2026; the third post found and read 10 September 2026. Filed here as HF-2026-0006. The first two posts date the start of the hold differently, to November and to December 2024; both datings are recorded rather than resolved.
6. Stripe Services Agreement — General Terms, published by Stripe, last modified 18 November 2025. Quotations from section 10.1(b)(ii)(1) and from the definition of "Reserve" in section 12. stripe.com/legal/ssa. Retrieved and searched in full on 9 September 2026. The observation about day counts is scoped to the General Terms as published on that date; the product-specific Services Terms are separate documents.
7. Better Business Bureau, complaints page for Stripe, Inc., South San Francisco, California, including the business's responses and the filers' replies. bbb.org. The notice and the complaint counts read on 11 October 2026; each complaint filed here was read in full on the same day and links to its own place on the page. The web archive could not save BBB's pages that day.
8. r/stripe on Reddit, the posts linked from each entry. Found with the forum’s own search and read in a browser on 15 October 2026. Reddit answers the web archive with a bot-check page, so no archived copies could be made.
9. Stripe, Unacceptable Risk Policy, "Last updated: July 29, 2026", sections 4, 6 and 7 and the closing note. Read in a web browser on 21 October 2026. stripe.com/legal/unacceptable-risk-policy.