Getting rejected by every marketplace payment processor, help
My company is a marketplace that helps singles dating/couples find date ideas to go on - go to this restaurant -> go to this event -> go to this bar, eat this specific food, order these drinks etc. etc. I am not going to post the name or url, I don't want this to come across as stealth marketing.

We have two products - free date ideas that the supply side makes that anyone can just add to their calendar, no payment processing required there currently (we will eventually have additional upsells here, but nothing yet), and custom dates where you pay the supply side for an idea, which is where the payment currently comes in.

I have gotten flagged as "Adult Content & Services" by multiple payment processors now and been unable to use them, and I have no idea what to do. We absolutely don't do anything any reasonable person would consider risky behavior as to why they would keep preventing me - we don't do matchmaking, we don't have explicitly sexual content or goods, we're essentially a specialized version of Quora or Medium or Substack. This has been an insanely frustrating experience that has blindsided me.

I never thought this was a possible risk while working on this product so I hadn't looked at other options until now. I've gotten rejected by Stripe four different times by their customer support, I've even emailed Patrick two different times - he did forward the first (but didn't respond) to a customer support person who then rejected us again and hasn't responded to the second email where I asked him to personally tell me why this would possibly be rejected and how it's not hypocritical that they also work with Tinder (technically as far as I can tell it's just for facial recognition and not payment processing, which would probably be their justification). Highly doubting I will get a response.

Their reasoning has been every time that they do not do "online dating services" which is purposely left ambiguous, and if you go look at their actual mentioned reasons for adult content and services, it only mentions "or any sexually oriented dating services", which certainly does not include my business.

My strong first preference is to still use Stripe despite these Comcast levels of customer support. I need to support marketplace payments and also saving customer payment information for later, while also being PCI compliant, as I don't want to deal with that for later. My company is also US based, so something like MangoPay is out.

I am too small for Adyen, as we haven't launched yet and they have a minimum (even though I'm quite confident we will immediately go over it), I have already tried. I'm currently in the process with Paypal/Braintree, but due to my "market" I have to get approved by someone else, so it's not even guaranteed that I do. The lady also told me this might take two to three weeks for full approval, which is pretty unacceptable to me, as the onboarding of supply and payment is the only part that is left to build, everything else works. I could launch this is in probably an hour or so if they just gave me api keys.

I've also gotten rejected by Trolley for the same reason, although they don't do the customer side of saving payment information, so I would have had to find someone else for that.

I'm not really sure what I'm supposed to do here outside of hoping PayPal accepts me, so any advice would be appreciated. A lot of the payment processors I've found do not do any marketplace functionality akin to Stripe Connect, so I'm not sure if I would have to completely change the process and add the additional overhead of holding the money or manually paying out to Paypal accounts people setup, etc. I'm a one person startup currently, the least amount of legal paperwork I can do, the better.