Claude on Question 27, Sep 25

Stripe — for most companies, most of the time.

Why Stripe wins by default

• •Developer experience and speed to launch. Best-in-class docs, SDKs, test mode, and a huge ecosystem of integrations. A small team can be taking payments in days rather than running a multi-month integration project.
• •Breadth of adjacent product. Billing/subscriptions, invoicing, Connect for marketplaces, Radar for fraud, Tax, Issuing, Terminal. You get the whole money stack from one vendor instead of stitching together three.
• •Self-serve. Public pricing (roughly 2.9% + 30¢ for US online cards), sign up today, no sales call, no volume minimum.
• •Hiring and knowledge. Far more engineers have already worked with Stripe, and far more third-party tools assume it.

Where Adyen is genuinely better

• •Large volume with thin margins. Adyen's interchange++ pricing plus a small fixed markup usually beats blended Stripe rates once you're processing serious volume — often tens of millions a year and up. That gap can be worth more than all of Stripe's convenience.
• •Unified online + in-store. Adyen was built around omnichannel retail (one platform, one contract, one reporting view for terminals and e-commerce). Stripe Terminal has narrowed this, but Adyen is still the stronger choice for a chain with hundreds of physical locations.
• •Global acquiring and authorization rates. Adyen holds its own acquiring licenses across many markets, so local acquiring and routing tend to produce measurably better approval rates internationally. At scale, a 1-point auth-rate improvement dwarfs processing fees.
• •Direct account management. You get a named team rather than a support queue.

The practical rule

Under ~$10M/year in volume, or if you're pre-product-market-fit: Stripe, without much debate. The engineering time you save is worth more than the pricing delta, and you may not even qualify for Adyen (they've historically had monthly minimums and a sales-led onboarding process).

Above that, and especially if you're multinational or have physical retail: run a real bake-off. Get Adyen to quote interchange++ against your actual volume mix, and weigh it against the migration cost and the Stripe products you'd have to replace.

And once you're big enough, the honest answer is usually both — a primary processor with a fallback improves both leverage in negotiations and resilience during outages.