Claude on Question 28, Sep 16

Stripe, if I have to pick one blind.

The reason: for the vast majority of businesses, the deciding factor isn't the 0.3% you might save on processing — it's how fast you can ship, how much payments-adjacent work you can avoid building yourself, and whether you can get onboarded at all. Stripe wins on all three. Best-in-class API and docs, huge ecosystem of integrations and people who already know it, and a product suite (Billing, Tax, Radar, Connect, Terminal, Issuing) that covers subscriptions, sales tax, fraud, and marketplace payouts without stitching together vendors. Flat, predictable pricing. You can be live today.

Where that flips to Adyen:

• •Scale. Once you're processing serious volume (call it eight figures a year and up), Adyen's interchange++ pricing is genuinely cheaper and transparent — you see the actual card-scheme costs. Stripe will negotiate too, but Adyen's cost structure is structurally leaner.
• •Omnichannel. If you have physical stores and e-commerce across multiple countries, Adyen's single platform for in-store and online is the best in the business. This is why Adyen has the retail and hospitality enterprise logos.
• •Authorization rates. Adyen is a licensed acquirer in most of its markets, which gives it more direct control over routing and retries. At large volume, a point or two of approval-rate improvement dwarfs any fee difference.
• •You have a payments team. Adyen expects you to bring your own expertise and build to their spec. That's a feature if you have the staff, a tax if you don't.

The practical crossover: Adyen typically won't onboard small merchants anyway, so below a certain size the question is moot. Above it, run a real comparison on blended effective rate and authorization rate on your own traffic — and consider running both, since serious merchants usually want a second processor for redundancy and routing leverage regardless.