55 engineers on Hacker News describe using PayPal first-hand: 6 endorse it, 29 regret it, 9 are mixed.
“Don't love stripe and they take a big cut but I hate paypal.”
regret · production · tempest_ · 2026-07-15 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we had no refunds or anything and paypal was simply (in email and on the phone) repeating that there was no recourse”
regret · production · anonzzzies · 2025-07-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?“The PayPal integration randomly stopped working and was missing transactions.”
regret · production · human_llm · 2024-10-01 · source ↗ · wrong label?“PayPal seized ~50k from us (check the first link in my original post).”
regret · production · kweks · 2022-10-03 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I had integrated Stripe and Paypal (never again) already”
regret · production · Aulig · 2022-08-30 · source ↗ · wrong label?“So now I'm locked out of my account.”
regret · personal · justinclift · 2020-12-13 · source ↗ · wrong label?“My experience with PayPal was they would at least let you appeal when a limit was hit or you were flagged by their system.”
endorse · production · owowow · 2020-09-03 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We also use Paypal. My major issue is their internal dev team/processes seem broken.”
regret · production · hnick · 2020-04-16 · source ↗ · wrong label?“PayPal Here is also a disaster compared to the rest... many of our transactions failed, so we switched back to Square.”
regret · production · nikolay · 2019-07-05 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Even more work for fixing PayPal's constant CSV changes and API changes to integrate with accounting.”
regret · production · bartoszhernas · 2019-03-22 · source ↗ · wrong label?“after so many fraud charges that my boss couldn't handle the $15 chargebacks we switched to paypal and I no longer had sleepless nights.”
endorse · production · jermaustin1 · 2018-11-30 · source ↗ · wrong label?“But we switched because PayPal just did not work. A significant percentage of card transactions failed for absolutely no reason”
regret · production · foxylad · 2017-08-02 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I refuse and won't use paypal unless there is no alternative... Once you have been burned trying to use them from a dev perspective, never again.”
regret · production · mr337 · 2017-01-28 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I pulled PayPal from all sites I run and won't be using them privately either.”
regret · production · chmod775 · 2017-01-28 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we switched to PayPal and only once did we have an obscene amount of fraud (hundreds of signups from stolen French PayPal accounts)”
mixed · production · jermaustin1 · 2016-09-02 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We run thousands of PayPal transactions per day... Forget all the policy problems. PayPal's basic technology platform doesn't work.”
regret · production · stickfigure · 2016-06-22 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We switched from PayPal because the service was so bad, with 1 in 4 card payments from a very reputable sector (schools) refused”
regret · production · foxylad · 2016-06-21 · source ↗ · wrong label?“PayPal isn't really that bad... We got a massive rolling hold but the whole time PayPal were willing to talk to us. We've even won some customer card chargeback disputes on digital goods through PayPal.”
mixed · production · kalleboo · 2015-01-07 · source ↗ · wrong label?“they can kiss their Paypal problems goodbye because we've switched to Braintree”
regret · production · bkirkbri · 2013-09-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We switched from PayPal to Braintree explicitly because PayPal was too broken for our use case.”
regret · production · tomlu · 2013-09-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?“are happy to have pushed about 50% of our processing away from them. But we probably won't get much past that.”
regret · production · mattmaroon · 2013-08-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?“After paypal shutting down my account on a number of occasions while organising campjs.com, we switched from Paypal+EventBrite”
regret · production · secoif · 2013-05-31 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We have payment declines each day from our US customers and it is often because their payments have been declined by the issuing bank”
regret · production · maxkleb1 · 2013-05-10 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We switched from PayPal to GoCardless for one off payments... prefer it to not having the faff of a PayPal login.”
regret · production · georgespencer · 2013-01-21 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Having dealt with accepting payment via PayPal I can only say: never again - they still owe me money”
regret · production · pmjordan · 2012-08-24 · source ↗ · wrong label?“After countless headaches with PayPal, we switched to Stripe in 1 working day.”
regret · production · pxlpshr · 2012-04-18 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I had no idea most of these existed and have been using Google Checkout since Paypal locked us out.”
regret · production · hm2k · 2011-12-09 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we run between 50K and 100K a month through Paypal... reoccurring payments are a messy with Paypal and I'm not satisfied with Paypal's solution”
mixed · production · blantonl · 2011-12-09 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I have no real complaints with paypal over the years we used them so I can't bash them”
mixed · production · moses1400 · 2011-12-09 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We had a terrible time with PayPal.”
regret · production · dcaldwell · 2011-12-08 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Unfortunately PyPal froze his account with about $20k in it. We switched to a real merchant account”
regret · production · bphogan · 2011-12-06 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We have lots of issues with Paypal, I run a digital deals network for designers, coders, etc and our paypal account is constantly having issues.”
regret · production · brackin · 2011-10-02 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Paypal steals people's money.”
regret · production · econgeeker · 2011-07-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I don't like how much PayPal charges, either, but they've yet to screw me over, so far.”
mixed · production · SwellJoe · 2011-02-18 · source ↗ · wrong label?“The fraud protection stuff at PayPal is better, though not great (too many false positives to call it great), and our rates are much lower.”
mixed · production · SwellJoe · 2011-02-18 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've been using their micropayments system for quite some time now.”
endorse · production · Osiris · 2010-10-31 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We've been using it for 3 years as our online payment processing and every 3 months or so they do something that causes us hassle”
regret · production · 3 yr · nick_swan · 2010-10-28 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We use Paypal and Chargify and they work well together. ... Amex is spotty in what they'll accept from PP.”
mixed · production · Roning · 2010-10-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Not once have I had any problem with them.”
endorse · production · 9 yr · Vivtek · 2010-10-18 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We use the paypal donate function for a registered 501(c)3 and haven't had any real problems”
endorse · production · wwortiz · 2010-10-18 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We ditched paypal because: 1. Their site is very slow which hurt conversions. ... Refund policy sucked.”
regret · production · mmaunder · 2010-09-10 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Their APIs are a mess. Documentation is all over the place and far too verbose... once you understand it and get it working it's actually pretty good.”
mixed · production · 3 yr · SteveC · 2010-09-05 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We run millions of dollars with PayPal and aside from reserves it has been a pretty great experience.”
endorse · production · theduder · 2010-06-30 · source ↗ · wrong label?“At low volume, PayPal Payments Pro is as good as anything I've found, and it is cheaper than almost every other merchant services provider”
mixed · production · SwellJoe · 2010-06-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?“the insight that helped me debug a PayPal API timeout yesterday could help every developer who hits that bug tomorrow”
neutral · production · st-msl · 2026-01-22 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we run both Stripe (for CC) and PayPal.”
neutral · production · leonardteo · 2020-12-03 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we're a PayPal and Stripe Partner and do not hold the money that we process.”
neutral · production · jijosunny · 2019-12-03 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We have used several different payment providers over the years, including PayPal alone.”
neutral · production · watchdogtimer · 2019-03-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“have only changed payment providers once (maybe twice... partly based on ease of deployment and management)”
neutral · production · SwellJoe · 2018-04-26 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We started out using PayPal which has a really similar fee schedule to Stripe”
neutral · production · shiftpgdn · 2012-08-07 · source ↗ · wrong label?“it's the only reason we use them.”
neutral · production · foxylad · 2011-12-09 · source ↗ · wrong label?“handling the callback from the payment gateway (in my case PayPal)”
neutral · production · fookyong · 2010-10-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?“90% of those were migrated from our previous system (paypal) which wasn't subscription based.”
neutral · production · toast76 · 2010-10-11 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We use a basic PayPal Website Payments Standard Account using their name-value pair (NVP) interface.”
neutral · production · watchdogtimer · 2010-10-08 · source ↗ · wrong label?