Claude on Question 27, Sep 27

Stripe — for most people asking this question.

The reason is that the question is usually asked by a startup, SaaS company, or mid-market business, and in that segment Stripe wins on nearly every axis that matters day one: you can sign up yourself and take a payment the same afternoon, the API and docs are the best in the industry, and the surrounding products (Billing for subscriptions, Connect for marketplaces, Radar for fraud, Tax) mean you're not building a bunch of payments infrastructure yourself. Adyen has no self-serve onboarding — you go through sales, negotiate a contract, and do a real integration project.

That said, there's a clear point where I'd flip to Adyen:

• •High volume. Adyen prices on interchange++ (interchange + scheme fees + a small fixed fee plus markup) rather than a blended 2.9% + 30¢. Somewhere in the tens of millions of dollars of annual volume, that difference gets large enough to justify the integration cost. Stripe will negotiate custom pricing at scale too, but Adyen's default structure is more favorable.
• •Physical retail plus online. Adyen's omnichannel story is genuinely better — their own terminals, one platform, one reconciliation across channels. This is why Adyen has the retail and hospitality logos it does.
• •Multi-region acquiring. Adyen holds acquiring licenses in many markets and connects directly to the card networks. Local acquiring tends to lift authorization rates a few percentage points, which at scale dwarfs processing fee differences.
• •Deep local payment method coverage, especially across Europe, Asia, and Latin America — though Stripe has closed much of this gap.

One practical note: Adyen has historically had volume minimums for onboarding, and I'd treat any specific number I gave you as stale — worth confirming directly.

Short version: default to Stripe, revisit at scale or the moment you add physical stores.