Claude on Question 28, Sep 22

Stripe, for most cases.

The reason is mostly about who's asking. Adyen has volume minimums and a real sales/underwriting process — they generally don't onboard businesses processing under roughly $10–20M/year, and it takes weeks. Stripe you can be live on this afternoon. Stripe also wins decisively on developer experience, documentation, and adjacent tooling: Billing for subscriptions, Connect for marketplaces, Radar for fraud, Tax for compliance. If you need any of that, buying it from one vendor that does it well is worth a lot.

The condition that flips it: scale and physical retail. Adyen prices on interchange++ (interchange + a small fixed processing fee) rather than Stripe's blended ~2.9% + $0.30. Once you're doing serious volume, that difference is enormous — potentially 0.5–1% of revenue, which at $100M processed is real money. Adyen is also a direct acquirer with local licenses in many regions, which means measurably better authorization rates on cross-border transactions and deeper support for local payment methods. And their unified online + in-person platform is better than Stripe's if you run stores as well as a website. That's why Uber, Spotify, eBay, and McDonald's are on Adyen.

So: Stripe until you're processing enough that a 50-basis-point improvement justifies a migration project and a dedicated payments person. Then run a serious evaluation of Adyen — and note that Stripe will negotiate custom pricing at that point too, so get quotes from both.

One caveat worth knowing regardless: Stripe is stricter about risky verticals and more willing to freeze accounts with limited warning. If you're in a gray-area category, verify you're acceptable before building on it.