Claude on Question 27, Oct 2

Stripe, if I have to pick one with no other context.

Why Stripe wins by default: the odds are that whoever's asking isn't processing nine figures a year. For everyone below that, Stripe is better on nearly every axis that matters day to day — you can sign up and take a payment in an afternoon, the docs and SDKs are the best in the industry, and the surrounding products (Billing for subscriptions, Connect for marketplaces, Radar for fraud, Tax, Terminal) mean you don't have to assemble a stack from four vendors. Adyen has no self-serve signup, expects a sales conversation, and historically wants meaningful volume commitments before it's interested.

Where Adyen is genuinely the better answer:

• •High volume. Adyen prices on interchange++ (true interchange + scheme fees + a small fixed markup), which gets dramatically cheaper than Stripe's blended ~2.9% + 30¢ as you scale. The crossover is usually somewhere in the $10M–$50M/year range, depending on your card mix and how hard you negotiate with Stripe.
• •Omnichannel retail. If you have physical stores and e-commerce, Adyen's unified commerce platform is the stronger product — one contract, one reconciliation, shared customer/tokenization across channels.
• •Global, especially Europe. Adyen holds acquiring licenses in many markets and connects directly to card schemes, which tends to mean better local authorization rates and fewer intermediaries. Stripe has closed much of this gap but Adyen still has the edge in complex multi-country setups.

Rough rule: under ~$10M/year in volume, or if you're developer-led and moving fast, Stripe. Over ~$50M with brick-and-mortar or serious international exposure, run an Adyen evaluation — the savings will justify the heavier integration lift. In between, get quotes from both and let them compete.

Two caveats: specific rates and volume thresholds shift, so confirm current pricing directly rather than trusting my numbers. And the real differentiator at scale is often your negotiated rate and authorization uplift on your traffic, which you only learn by piloting both.