Claude on Question 27, Sep 12

Stripe, if I have to pick one — it's the better choice for the large majority of businesses.

Why Stripe wins by default

• •Time to first payment. Self-serve signup, keys in minutes, no sales call. Adyen requires an application, underwriting conversation, and usually a longer integration.
• •Developer experience and docs. Still the industry benchmark. Cleaner APIs, better SDKs, better test tooling, far more third-party tutorials and Stack Overflow answers.
• •Product breadth around the payment. Billing/subscriptions, Radar (fraud), Tax, Invoicing, Connect (marketplaces/platforms), Issuing, Terminal. Adyen has an equivalent for many of these but Stripe's are more mature and more self-serve — Connect in particular is dominant for platforms and marketplaces.
• •Predictable pricing at small scale. Flat 2.9% + 30¢ is simple, and you don't need a payments analyst to understand your statement.

Where Adyen is genuinely better

• •Unit economics at scale. Adyen quotes interchange++ (interchange + scheme fees + a small fixed processing fee). Once you're processing serious volume, effective rates often land meaningfully below Stripe's blended pricing. Stripe will negotiate too, but Adyen's model is structurally cheaper.
• •Single platform, direct acquiring. Adyen is the acquirer, gateway, and risk engine in one stack across most markets, rather than orchestrating bank partners. That tends to mean better authorization rates and fewer intermediaries — a big deal when a 1% auth-rate lift is worth millions.
• •Omnichannel retail. If you have physical stores plus e-commerce and want one platform, one reconciliation, one customer view, Adyen is the stronger product. This is why Uber, eBay, McDonald's, H&M, and similar names use it.
• •Complex international footprints. Deep local acquiring and local payment methods across Europe, APAC, and LatAm, with better local-entity handling.

A rough decision rule

• •Under ~$20M/year in volume: Stripe, almost regardless of other factors.
• •$20M–$100M: Stripe unless you're omnichannel or have a heavy international mix. Also: get quotes from both and negotiate.
• •Over ~$100M with a dedicated payments team: model Adyen seriously. Basis points start dominating developer convenience, and you can afford the headcount to manage it.
• •Marketplace or platform paying out to third parties: Stripe Connect, unless you're very large.

One caveat worth knowing: many companies at scale run both, using one as primary and one as failover/routing alternative. That's not fence-sitting — it's a real pattern, because concentration risk on a single processor is expensive when something breaks.