Claude on Question 27, Sep 26

Stripe, if I have to pick one blind.

The reason is that the question itself tells me something: someone weighing Stripe vs. Adyen without a specific constraint in mind is usually building something rather than renegotiating a nine-figure processing contract. For that situation Stripe wins on the things that actually cost you time and money early on — you can sign up and take a payment the same afternoon, the docs are the best in the industry, and the surrounding products (Billing for subscriptions, Connect for marketplaces, Radar for fraud, Tax for VAT/sales tax) mean you're not stitching together four vendors. Adyen's onboarding is a sales process with a contract at the end of it.

Where I'd flip to Adyen:

• •Volume. Adyen prices on interchange++ (cost + fixed markup), Stripe's default is blended 2.9% + 30¢. Somewhere in the eight-figures-of-annual-volume range, Adyen's model gets materially cheaper, and the difference in basis points starts to dwarf any developer-experience advantage.
• •Physical retail plus online. Adyen's "unified commerce" pitch is real — one platform, one contract, one view of the customer across web, app, and in-store terminals. Stripe Terminal exists but retail is not where Stripe is strongest.
• •Genuinely global card acceptance. Adyen holds acquiring licenses directly in many markets instead of sitting on top of partner acquirers. That tends to mean better authorization rates on local cards, which at scale is worth more than fee savings — a 1% auth-rate improvement usually beats a 10bps fee cut.

One honest caveat on Stripe: the flip side of easy self-serve onboarding is more aggressive automated risk management. Account holds and fund reserves are a recurring complaint, especially for businesses in categories their models find unusual. Adyen's manual underwriting means fewer surprises after you're live.

Short version: Stripe until your payments volume is large enough that someone's full-time job is optimizing it, then run an Adyen bake-off.