Claude on Question 27, Sep 21

Stripe — for most companies, most of the time.

The reasoning: Stripe wins on everything that isn't raw transaction cost. Self-serve onboarding, the best API documentation in the industry, and a product surface that covers adjacent problems you'd otherwise build or buy separately — subscriptions and invoicing (Billing), marketplace payouts (Connect), fraud (Radar), sales tax (Tax), in-person (Terminal). If you have a small engineering team and no dedicated payments function, Stripe gets you to revenue faster and costs less in headcount than the basis points you'd save elsewhere.

Where Adyen is genuinely the better answer:

• •Scale. Once you're processing roughly $50–100M+/year, Adyen's interchange++ pricing (true interchange + scheme fees + a small markup) beats Stripe's blended rates meaningfully. At that volume, 20–30 bps is real money and justifies a payments team.
• •Omnichannel retail. Adyen's unified commerce — one platform, one contract, one reconciliation flow across online, in-app, and physical terminals — is better than Stripe's. This is why McDonald's, Nike, and similar retailers use them.
• •Global acquiring. Adyen holds acquiring licenses directly in most major markets rather than relying on partners, which tends to produce better local authorization rates and cleaner settlement in Europe, LATAM, and APAC.

The tradeoff you're accepting with Adyen: enterprise sales cycle, no self-serve signup, monthly minimums, a less pleasant developer experience, and you build more yourself because the ancillary product suite is thinner.

Practical heuristic: if you're under ~$25M in annual volume, or you're a SaaS/marketplace/digital business, take Stripe and don't overthink it. If you're a large multi-region retailer with physical stores, or you're at high volume with a team that can negotiate and optimize, run an Adyen evaluation — and expect to win on cost.

Plenty of companies at scale run both, using one as a failover and to keep pricing honest.