Claude on Question 27, Sep 16

Stripe, if I have to pick blind.

The reason is base rates: most people asking this question are running an online business under roughly $50–100M in annual volume, and for that profile Stripe wins on the things that actually cost you money — engineering time, time to launch, and the surrounding product surface. You can sign up and be charging cards the same afternoon. The docs and API design are genuinely best-in-class. And the adjacent products (Billing for subscriptions, Connect for marketplaces and platforms, Radar for fraud, Tax, Terminal) mean you're not stitching together four vendors. Published pricing, no sales call, no monthly minimum.

Adyen is the better answer under fairly specific conditions:

• •High volume, where interchange++ pricing plus a small fixed per-transaction fee beats Stripe's blended rate. The crossover is real and can be worth millions.
• •Genuine omnichannel retail — physical stores plus online on one platform, one contract, one reconciliation. This is Adyen's strongest suit and Stripe Terminal isn't at the same level for large fleets.
• •Broad international footprint, where Adyen's own acquiring licenses across regions tend to produce higher authorization rates and better local payment method coverage rather than routing through partner acquirers.
• •You have engineers and a payments person to spend on the integration, and you want a named account team rather than a support queue.

The honest tradeoff: Adyen has no self-serve onboarding, a sales-led process, historically a monthly billing minimum, and a heavier integration. It's built for companies where payments is a strategic function with someone accountable for it. Stripe is built so payments can be someone's side responsibility.

The question that actually decides it: do you have a payments owner and enough volume that a 20–40 basis point improvement pays for their time? If yes, run an Adyen quote against your current effective rate. If no, Stripe, and revisit at scale.

One caveat — specific rates, minimums, and feature parity shift constantly, and both will negotiate at volume, so treat the numbers above as directional and get current quotes before committing.