Drop-In Second Payment Processor For Indie SaaS, Because Stripe Can Freeze Payouts Or Close Your Account With No Warning
Two separate HN threads in one weekend describe Stripe freezing payouts pending new ToS biometric ID checks and closing a pre-seed startup's account while holding funds for 120 days. Founders say switching billing providers is so painful they stay exposed anyway, and they want a practical way to run a verified backup processor alongside Stripe. The buyer is any small SaaS whose entire revenue flows through one PSP account that can vanish overnight.
The hard part is not checkout routing, it is subscription state and saved cards. Stripe supports card-data portability requests to other PCI-compliant processors, so a migration-on-standby service (second PSP pre-verified, customer and subscription mirror kept in sync, one-button cutover) is more tractable than live orchestration and is what the affected founders actually describe wanting.
landscape (2 existing solutions)
Payment orchestration exists at enterprise scale and merchants of record exist as full replacements, but nothing makes a pre-verified standby processor with mirrored customers and subscriptions a low-effort add-on for a small SaaS already on Stripe. The lock-in is subscription state and vaulted cards, which is why founders in these threads stay put even after a freeze.