Claude on Question 27, Sep 18

Stripe — for most people asking this question.

The reason is breadth and time-to-value. Stripe gives you subscriptions/invoicing (Billing), marketplace payouts (Connect), sales tax (Tax), fraud (Radar), and card issuing as products you turn on, not projects you staff. The docs and API are genuinely best-in-class, you can be live in an afternoon, and you don't need a sales call to start. For a startup, SaaS company, or marketplace, that compounding velocity is worth more than a few basis points.

Pick Adyen instead if any of these is true:

• •You process meaningful volume — roughly $20M+/year. Adyen prices on interchange++ (interchange + scheme fees + a small fixed markup) rather than Stripe's blended ~2.9% + 30¢. That transparency usually wins on cost once you're big enough to negotiate, and you can see exactly what you're paying for.
• •You're omnichannel retail. Adyen was built for unified commerce — in-store terminals and online on one platform, one ledger, one view of the customer. This is their real moat, and it's why Nike, McDonald's, and H&M use them. Stripe Terminal is good but this isn't the same depth of integration.
• •Authorization rates are your bottleneck. Adyen is a licensed acquirer with direct card network connections in its major markets, not a layer on top of other acquirers. At scale, a 1–2 point auth-rate improvement dwarfs processing fees.
• •You need deep international coverage with local acquiring and local payment methods across many markets.

The honest tradeoff: Adyen expects you to bring engineering resources and volume; there's no meaningful self-serve path, and you get an account manager instead of a docs site. Stripe will cost you more per transaction at scale and has a reputation for opaque risk decisions and occasional account freezes in borderline verticals.

Also worth knowing: these aren't mutually exclusive. Plenty of large merchants run both, partly for redundancy and partly to keep pricing honest. But don't do that on day one — the complexity isn't worth it until you're big enough that a processor outage costs real money.