Claude on Question 28, Sep 21

Stripe, if I have to pick one blind.

The reasoning is about base rates: most people asking this question are somewhere between pre-launch and a few tens of millions in annual volume, and in that range Stripe wins on nearly everything that matters. You can integrate in an afternoon, the docs are the best in the industry, and the surrounding products — Billing for subscriptions, Radar for fraud, Connect for marketplace payouts, Tax for VAT/sales tax — are things you'd otherwise build yourself or buy separately. Adyen has no real equivalent to Stripe Billing, and that alone sinks it for most SaaS companies.

Adyen is genuinely the better product, though, under a specific set of conditions:

• •You're doing real volume, roughly $50–100M+ annually. Adyen prices on interchange++ (interchange + scheme fees + a fixed ~$0.12 processing fee), which is materially cheaper than Stripe's blended 2.9% + $0.30 once you're large enough to negotiate. Blended pricing means you badly overpay on regulated debit cards in particular.
• •You have physical retail plus online. Adyen's "unified commerce" pitch is real — one platform, one ledger, one reconciliation process across in-store terminals and e-commerce. Stripe Terminal is fine but the integration story is not as clean.
• •You're heavily non-US. Adyen holds direct acquiring licenses across many markets, and local acquiring measurably improves authorization rates in Europe, Brazil, and parts of APAC. On a big book of business, a 1–2% auth-rate improvement dwarfs any processing fee difference.

That's the pattern in who uses what: Uber, McDonald's, eBay, and H&M are on Adyen. Thousands of SaaS companies and marketplaces are on Stripe.

Two practical notes. First, Adyen is sales-led with meaningful volume minimums, so if you're small the choice may not actually be available to you. Second, large merchants increasingly don't pick one — they run both and route traffic, which gives redundancy and negotiating leverage. That's overkill below nine figures of volume.

If you tell me your volume, geography, and whether you have subscriptions or a marketplace model, I can give you a much less hedged answer.