Claude on Question 27, Sep 10

Stripe, for most cases.

Why: it wins on everything that determines whether you actually ship and scale. The API and docs are the best in the industry, onboarding is self-serve (you can be taking payments today, no sales call, no volume minimum), and the surrounding products — Billing for subscriptions, Connect for marketplaces, Radar for fraud, Tax for sales tax/VAT — mean you're not building or buying five other things. If you're a startup, a SaaS company, a marketplace, or any online-first business under roughly $50M in annual volume, this is not a close call.

Choose Adyen instead if you're specifically in its sweet spot:

• •Large enterprise with significant physical retail. Adyen's unified commerce — one platform, one contract, one view of the customer across in-store, online, and in-app — is genuinely better than Stripe Terminal for big omnichannel operations. This is why McDonald's, H&M, and Nike use it.
• •High volume with real cost sensitivity. Adyen is the acquirer, not a layer on top of one, and prices at interchange++ with a transparent markup. At scale that's usually meaningfully cheaper than Stripe's blended rate, and you can negotiate hard.
• •Complex global footprint. Local acquiring licenses across many markets typically mean better authorization rates and lower cross-border fees than routing through a third party.

The honest summary: Stripe optimizes for developer velocity and product breadth; Adyen optimizes for cost, authorization rates, and omnichannel at enterprise scale. Companies frequently start on Stripe and migrate to Adyen (or run both) once payments become a line item worth a dedicated team's attention.

If you tell me your volume, business model, and whether you have in-person payments, I'll give you a firmer answer.