Claude on Question 27, Sep 22

Stripe — for most businesses.

The reason is that "better" usually comes down to how much volume you're processing and how much engineering you want to spend.

Why Stripe wins by default:

• •Best-in-class developer experience and documentation — integration in hours, not weeks
• •Self-serve onboarding; you can be taking payments today
• •Enormous product surface beyond processing: Billing/subscriptions, Connect for marketplaces, Radar for fraud, Tax, Issuing, Terminal
• •Simple flat-rate pricing (roughly 2.9% + 30¢ for US online cards) that's easy to model

Where Adyen genuinely beats it:

• •Scale economics. Adyen prices on interchange++ with a small fixed fee per transaction. Above roughly $50–100M in annual volume, that's meaningfully cheaper than flat-rate, and Adyen's take rate is hard to beat.
• •Authorization rates. Adyen holds direct acquiring licenses in many markets, so local acquiring plus network tokenization often lifts approval rates a few points. At large volume, that's worth more than any fee difference.
• •Omnichannel. If you have physical stores and online, Adyen's unified stack is stronger. (This is why Uber, Spotify, McDonald's, and eBay use them.)
• •International breadth. Deeper local payment method coverage and better handling of multi-entity, multi-currency setups.

The trade-off: Adyen is enterprise-oriented. Onboarding takes weeks and involves a sales process, there are practical volume expectations, and you build more yourself — there's no equivalent of Stripe Billing or the same marketplace tooling maturity.

Rule of thumb: Under ~$20M/year in volume, or if you're digital-only and want to move fast, Stripe. Over ~$100M/year, especially multi-region or with retail locations, run the Adyen numbers — the basis points start to justify the integration cost. Many companies do eventually migrate, or run both for redundancy and routing.

If you tell me your volume, geography, and business model, I can be more specific.