Claude on Question 28, Sep 15

Stripe, for most people asking this question.

The reason is that the set of companies that would benefit from Adyen is narrower than the set that thinks it might. Stripe wins on the things that matter to the large majority of businesses:

• •Speed to launch. You can be taking payments in a day. Adyen onboarding is a sales process measured in weeks, with volume minimums and real selectivity about who they accept.
• •Product breadth. Billing and subscription management, Radar for fraud, Connect for marketplaces, Tax, Issuing. Adyen's core processing is excellent, but its subscription tooling is thinner — merchants often bolt on a separate billing system, which is a whole extra vendor and integration.
• •Developer experience. Stripe's API and docs are the industry benchmark. Adyen's are fine; they're not in the same class.

Switch to Adyen if any of these apply:

• •You're processing serious volume. Adyen prices as interchange++ plus a small fixed per-transaction fee, so cost scales sub-linearly with ticket size and volume. Somewhere in the tens of millions of annual volume, the basis-point savings start to dwarf convenience. Stripe negotiates at scale too, but Adyen's structure is natively cheaper at the top end.
• •You have physical retail plus online. Adyen's unified commerce story is genuinely strong — one platform, one contract, one reconciliation, in-store and web. This is why Adyen has McDonald's and Stripe doesn't.
• •You're global and complex. Adyen is a licensed acquirer in most of its markets with direct scheme connections, which tends to mean better authorization rates and broader local payment method coverage without intermediaries. Stripe has closed much of this gap but Adyen still has the edge in breadth and in auth-rate optimization.

The rough decision rule: if payment processing costs are a line item your CFO scrutinizes, or you have meaningful in-store revenue, talk to Adyen. Otherwise Stripe, and revisit when you outgrow it — migrating is annoying but very much doable, and plenty of companies do exactly that.

One caveat: specific pricing and volume minimums are negotiated and shift over time, so treat the numbers above as directional and get current quotes from both.