Yesterday morning I was greeted with an unpleasant notification from PayPal: they are instituting a new policy wherein I will only have immediate access to the first $500 I make each month; all payments made beyond that first $500 are withheld for 21 days.

I called PayPal about it because art is my only job, and I cannot have some of my "paycheck" kept back for almost a month every month. I was informed that they could do nothing about it because my account is too new, and that I was informed of the new policy when I created my account.

I was not. I read every document carefully, and during the first month of my account I received roughly $900 without any funds withheld. This policy change was rolled out, for me at least, with no warning.

After discussing the matter with some very pleasant PayPal representatives, I concluded that there was no way to make an exception for my account in any way, and as a result, PayPal is not going to be a viable payment option for me.

I really tried to give them a fair shot, and to their credit, they have excellent invoicing and customer tracking options; however, I live on the money I make from you guys. Putting a significant amount of it aside "to protect PayPal" (which is what they told me) is simply unacceptable.

So, as of this week, I will be transitioning to Quickbooks Payments Square for my invoicing and payment solution. I already use Intuit products heavily in managing my business, so upgrading my business software to include payment processing is a natural step. It turns out that Quickbooks Online does not have many of the features I'm utilizing in Quickbooks Self-Employed, and invoicing alone is not worth an extra $13 a month, since Square does it for free. I won't be able to handle bank transfers, but that probably would comprise a very small percentage of my clients.

I will be able to accept all major credit cards (including the PayPal card) and bank transfers. I do apologize if this causes any inconvenience.

UPDATE: PayPal has just updated my account and increased my limit to $1000, and there's a possibility that it might continue to increase over time. This comes too little, too late for my taste; as pleasant as their support staff was, I was deeply disturbed both by this policy, by the way it was rolled out, by the inherent dishonesty that I encountered, and by some other info that cropped up during my conversation with support that has led me to believe that PayPal cannot be trusted with processing my payments. So I'm not going back to PayPal, but I felt I should post this update to be transparent about it.