I run a small website at inter.tube. It lets you upload your music collection and stores it in Backblaze B2. It provides a simple web interface to listen to your collection, and support for the Subsonic API (allowing native apps to use it). Fundamentally it is not very different from something like Dropbox or Backblaze: it is a "dumb" backup that simply stores what you give it. It doesn't perform "matching" against other files, it doesn't allow you to access music you didn't explicitly upload, and it doesn't even deduplicate files between different users. It doesn't allow "sharing" of music either, download links are tied to a short access token for a specific user's login session. The only difference between other backup services is that we use the metadata tags in your uploads to organize things better. According to Capitol Records, Inc. v. MP3Tunes, LLC, this is absolutely OK in the eyes of the law (thank you to a fellow HN user for telling me about this court case). Note that we don't even perform deduplication, which was the main controversy in that case.
I have been using Stripe happily for a couple years now, but suddenly (less than 10 minutes after a subscription payment went through), Stripe decided that I violated their Restricted Business policy, in particular "Products and services that infringe intellectual property rights: Sales or distribution of music, movies, software, or any other licensed materials without appropriate authorization". I thought this was a misunderstanding so I clarified that we don't sell music, just storage space (see paragraph above), but they denied my appeal with a short template response.
This saddens me because my reasons for starting the site are the exact opposite of piracy! I was sick of artists getting paid virtually nothing for streaming service plays, so I decided to buy full albums directly from the artist as much as I could. inter.tube just allows you to keep your collection safe and easily accessible.
I'm posting this mostly to warn other Stripe users that essentially any backup service could "violate" these terms, so be careful about the marketing blurbs on your website. Probably any mention of "music" whatsoever is enough to get your account nuked. I really liked Stripe, always recommended it because of its nice API, but I won't be doing that anymore.
inter.tube will likely die. I'm going to refund my few paying users and disable account registration later, I guess.
As a bonus, I've open-sourced inter.tube. However, it is difficult to run because it relies on a bunch of random cloud services (Backblaze B2 + Cloudflare Workers + Lambda) and there's some hard-coded stuff in there, so it's probably not very useful beyond curiosity. If anyone would like to help me with the open sourcing, let me know, and I'll get back to you whenever I have time. Of course, feel free to fork it as well. I am also on GitHub sponsors if anyone would like to sponsor me to help make it easier to self-host (or at least self-deploy).
Source code: https://github.com/guregu/intertube
Update: I have reached out to the nice Stripe employee who volunteered their email, let's see what happens.
It's been pointed out a few times that my marketing says the site won't die, and me killing it would be very ironic. This is 100% true, and I have decided to leave the site up even if Stripe decides to ultimately close my account. Luckily, our infrastructure costs are very low (<$5 month currently).
I created this site when Google Play Music went down and lots of people were complaining about Google killing yet another product. I don't want to do the same thing to my users.
Finally, I would like to take this opportunity to plug a similar service that I am completely unrelated to. I saw its author post on HN and they seem like they are also a one-man-shop: https://asti.ga This service is different in that it lets you hook it up to your own cloud storage. I am only now realizing why this is such a brilliant idea.
When I saw your headline though, I almost choked on my coffee. We use Stripe too, but as you mention we aren't a locker, we just connect to the user's pre-existing cloud storage (including self hosted if you have that Internet accessible). That said these kind of corporate decrees are often pretty unsubtle and we could easily get caught up in this. I've had enough "policy" nightmares with Paypal and Google to instill a sense of dread when these black box titans change their mind about something and expect you to dance to their tune.
> This service is different in that it lets you hook it up to your own cloud storage. I am only now realizing why this is such a brilliant idea.
I should mention it's not my idea originally - I purchased the service almost two years ago from this guy: https://koenvh.nl/en/ . Funny story really: https://community.asti.ga/discussion/378/astigas-new-owner
Let me be also very clear. When you are going through underwriting, you will feel at times that this was a colossally bad idea, but it pays off its trouble in gold.
Dead Comment
Been using them for a few companies the past year and a half, and migrated more and more of my stuff over to them, it offers the simplicity and clarity of "stripe at the beginning" while already being backed and owned by a major bank (BPCE, 2nd biggest banking group in France). They don't have all the bells and whistles of current Stripe, but for most projets we don't need that anyway.
And there is no bullshit about random overnight account closure with no recourse.
Is it possible to predict this in advance? Can't these companies just do it any old time they feel like it? There's always a first.
Or is there good regulation in France?
In terms of regulation though, short of explicit chargeback or disputed charges, they will never hold your money hostage.
Which is why I added that they're already backed and owned by a major bank, so it's not at risk of changing overnight after being acquired. For reference they exist since 2012 and have over 16k merchant account, including some big names in France (Veepee, Lastminute.com, ...) including some big names in business I feel like Stripe wouldn't touch (Dorcel store / adult toys and movies, Winamax and Pokerstar / online betting and poker, ...).
"Not all eggs in the same basket" ?
I can't seem to find any mention on their website about this.
As far as I can tell, a client paid in a funky way that set off some automated system, and no real person was willing to work with me to get it resolved.
I will never trust Stripe with my business again.
You can't just give up at the first sign of a payment issue, otherwise you're no better than google ;)
And thanks for not closing it back up if you find another payment provider!
I would actually bet that open sourcing it is the best thing you could do for it if you end up wanting to grow the business, especially with how niche it is. There are people like me who wouldn't even consider using the service with it being closed, but it being open gets my attention. It would be absolutely bad ass if the official hosting solution could:
- Let me put in a backblaze token and bucket name
- Store all my uploads in the aforementioned bucket, in a format that I could switch back and forth between open source and hosted versions
I self host a ton of stuff but I'd gladly pay $10 to $15 a year for that service so I can easily switch to self-host in the future but don't have to manage yet-another-service. Given that the bulk of the expense would be backblaze and that would be paid for directly by me, that's almost entirely profit margin for you.
I can see really neat future ideas along this line too, like possibly even point a (to be created in the future) desktop app like Strawberry straight at the bucket and have it play/download my music!
If not, why? Payments are a core part of any SaaS business, and it's important to have trust with important suppliers like that. Getting an account manager and proper business contract go a long way to preventing issues like this. It's somewhat unsurprising that Stripe don't have much trust for companies just signing up for the service as it's generally high risk for abuse.
The thing to remember is that Stripe (or your cloud provider, or your email sending provider, or any other SaaS) get something out of that relationship – they get a sales channel, they can trust you more, they can lock you into their services, they can show you more of their value – these sorts of companies basically want these relationships. The fact you can sign up with a credit card and never talk to anyone is sort of just to appease devs that don't want to talk to anyone, it's not how they make money in the B2B market (it's a bit different for B2C or B2B-ish services like Squarespace).
This project sounds pretty neat, and I could see it appealing to the audiophile market. I know people who would be interested.
But, I'm sorry to say, it sounds like Stripe cancelling your service wasn't the biggest issue, but that the service never found its market. Looking at the site I couldn't tell what it was or who it was for, and it looked a bit dodgy. Copy like "we're not google. we won't kill the site" (said twice) makes it sound like a hobby rather than a company, and even if that's true, it's not going to go over well for marketing. Also, it's sadly somewhat ironic given that the service has indeed gone. I totally see the vibe you were going for, but I think that vibe is one that typically maxes out at a handful of friends using it.
Ironically, by buying instead of pirating, you directly funded the legal and corporate environment that killed your service.
Whereas if you have a turnover of $10k/year, and they're earning only 0.5% of that in fees, then it isn't worth them taking much risk or putting much effort in to earn $50.
It would be nice if people like stripe were more upfront about this. They could easily say "We have determined that your business might be high risk for us. If you pay us $1000 (which will be credited towards transaction fees), then we will work with you to mitigate these risks".
(not blaming OP, it's a cool project and a shame that people aren't being allowed to exercise their right to make a private copy)
Google Music asked me to upload songs and I did. Is Google really going to get sued to oblivion? I doubt it.
> According to Capitol Records, Inc. v. MP3Tunes, LLC, this is absolutely OK in the eyes of the law