Among other things, you're not allowed to use your own credit card to make a purchase where the money will come back to you, because credit cards want to charge cash advance rates for that.
But it's not a purchase. You're not exchanging real goods or services for that money (unless your smoke tests run a lot deeper than mine). Your motives may be benign, but from a legal/regulatory perspective, it's a suspicious transaction.
Yes. By the letter of the agreement, you are not to use your cards to do test purchases against your account.
You ocassionally see complaints about payment processors when microbusinesses do this and get banned. So it is something that does get checked ocassionally. (There's a top level comment about this)
I think the payment processor doesn't want you to do it because you may issue many transactions and then refund them which incurs cost, or you may be using it for manufactured spend which incurs issuer ire. Maybe it's a brown M&M thing; if you didn't read that part of the agreement, you didn't read anything else, and they may as well kick you out early and avoid hassle.
Generally speaking, no one is getting banned from Stripe for the occasional transaction tested in production, come on. If this was the case, virtually every company I've ever worked at would be banned from Stripe. It's reasonable to confirm your system actually works once deployed outside of test environments.
No disagreement from me that is what the letter of the Stripe service agreement says, but what happens in reality is clearly different. I take that rule as trying to encourage people to use the very good test environments Stripe offer, or to limit scale of test transactions in production, rather than trying to shutdown a paying user (the company) for trying a legitimate transaction in prod with a legitimate card. I have no idea why you would want to risk the first ever transaction in prod being performed by a real customer - why leave it to chance that it is not setup correctly?
I have also been on calls with Stripe support staff where we tried a card transaction in production for testing purposes, FWIW.
