Claude on Question 27, Sep 17

Stripe — if I have to pick one, that's the answer for the large majority of businesses.

Why Stripe wins by default:

• •Best-in-class developer experience and documentation; you can be live in days, not months
• •Self-serve signup, no volume minimums, no sales cycle
• •Enormous product surface beyond payments: Billing/subscriptions, Connect (marketplaces/platforms), Radar (fraud), Tax, Invoicing, Issuing, Terminal — all natively integrated
• •Huge ecosystem of prebuilt integrations and third-party tooling

When Adyen is genuinely the better choice:

• •High volume (roughly $50M+/yr processing). Adyen's interchange++ pricing is transparent and materially cheaper than Stripe's blended rates at scale, and its negotiated terms get aggressive.
• •Global, especially Europe/APAC. Adyen is a licensed acquirer in most of its markets — gateway, risk, and acquiring in one stack. Fewer hops means measurably better authorization rates and lower cross-border costs. Local payment method coverage (iDEAL, Klarna, Bancontact, SEPA, GrabPay, etc.) is deeper and better maintained.
• •Omnichannel retail. Adyen's "unified commerce" — same platform for in-store terminals, e-comm, and app, with one customer view — is its strongest moat. Stripe Terminal is fine but not in the same league for a 500-store chain.
• •You want a single processor rather than an orchestration layer over others.

Rough decision rule: under ~$20M/yr, mostly online, US-centric, or a marketplace/SaaS → Stripe, no real debate. Over ~$100M/yr, multi-region, or physical + digital retail → run an Adyen RFP and you'll probably pick them. In between, get quotes from both; the pricing delta is where the real decision lives.

One caveat on both: they're deliberately sticky. Whichever you choose, keep your tokenization/vaulting strategy portable if you can — network tokens or a third-party vault — so a migration later isn't a rewrite.