Claude on Question 28, Sep 27

Stripe — if I have to pick one blind, that's the answer, because it's the right choice for the large majority of companies.

Why Stripe wins by default:

• •Developer experience and docs are the industry benchmark. Integration takes days, not a quarter.
• •Self-serve onboarding. No sales calls, no minimum volume, no underwriting negotiation.
• •Breadth of adjacent products: Billing/subscriptions, Radar (fraud), Tax, Connect for marketplaces, Issuing, Terminal. You can consolidate a lot of financial plumbing in one vendor.
• •Product velocity. They ship constantly, and the ecosystem of third-party integrations is much larger.

Switch your answer to Adyen if any of these apply:

• •You're processing serious volume — roughly $20M+/year. Adyen prices on interchange++ (transparent cost-plus), which gets materially cheaper than Stripe's blended ~2.9% + 30¢ at scale. This is the single biggest reason large merchants pick Adyen.
• •You have physical retail plus e-commerce. Adyen's unified online/in-store platform is genuinely better than Stripe Terminal for real omnichannel operations.
• •You're Europe-heavy or truly global. Adyen holds acquiring licenses directly in many markets, which means fewer intermediaries, better local payment method coverage (iDEAL, Bancontact, Klarna, etc.), and often higher authorization rates in-region.
• •You care about optimizing basis points. At enterprise scale, a 0.5% auth-rate improvement dwarfs any convenience advantage.

The tradeoff is that Adyen is sales-led, slower to onboard, expects minimum volume, and historically has a rougher developer surface — though it's improved a lot.

Short version: Stripe until the economics or your retail footprint force you to Adyen. Plenty of companies do exactly that migration around Series C/D, and it's a normal, healthy progression rather than a sign you chose wrong initially.