Claude on Question 27, Sep 14

Stripe — that's the right default for most situations.

Why: unmatched developer experience and documentation, self-serve onboarding (live in a day), and a product surface no one matches — subscriptions/billing, marketplace payouts via Connect, tax calculation, invoicing, fraud tooling, in-person terminals. For anything under roughly $50–100M/year in volume, the money you'd save on Adyen's pricing won't offset the engineering time and headcount Stripe saves you.

Choose Adyen instead if you hit these conditions:

• •High volume. Adyen's interchange++ pricing (cost-plus, usually a small fixed fee per transaction) gets dramatically cheaper than Stripe's blended ~2.9% + $0.30 once you're processing at scale.
• •Global footprint. Adyen holds acquiring licenses in many markets and connects directly to card networks, which means better authorization rates and fewer cross-border fees than routing through an intermediary.
• •Serious omnichannel retail. One platform for stores and online, with genuinely unified reporting. Stripe Terminal is fine; Adyen is what McDonald's and large retailers actually run.
• •You have a payments team. Adyen gives you more optimization levers but expects you to pull them. There's no self-serve signup and they're selective about who they take on.

Worth knowing: plenty of large companies eventually run both, using one as primary and the other for redundancy and smart routing. That's a good problem to have later, not a decision to make now.

One caveat — specific pricing and feature details shift, so verify current terms directly with each before committing.