Stripe put 25% reserve on my account - how do I plan cash flow?

Just got the dreaded email from Stripe. They're putting a 25% rolling reserve on my account with a 90-day hold period. We're doing about $80K/month in recurring SaaS revenue, so that's $20K/month they're holding.

Our chargeback rate is 0.2% which I thought was fine?? They said it's because we're in a "higher risk category" (we sell B2B software to small businesses).

Questions:

• How do other founders plan cash flow around reserves?
• Can I negotiate the percentage down?
• How long until they typically remove reserves?

I have payroll in 2 weeks and this is really throwing off my projections.

Reviving this thread because I just went through the exact same thing and wanted to share what worked for us. We run a DTC e-commerce brand doing about 120K per month through Stripe, and they slapped us with a 30 percent reserve back in August.

What finally moved the needle was switching to a multi-processor setup. We kept Stripe for our subscription customers (lower risk, predictable revenue) and moved our one-time purchases to Braintree. This reduced the volume flowing through Stripe by about 40 percent, and within two months they proactively reached out to reduce our reserve to 10 percent.

The other thing I would recommend is building a risk packet to send proactively every quarter. Ours includes:

• Rolling 90-day chargeback rate with trend analysis
• Customer satisfaction scores (NPS or CSAT)
• Refund rate broken down by reason code
• Fraud prevention measures implemented (3DS, Address Verification, velocity checks)

Stripe risk team actually told us they appreciate proactive merchants because it signals stability. The reserve is not permanent -- treat it like a relationship to manage, not a punishment to endure. @ambulance_runner_12, curious how things ended up for you after the 6-month review?