Claude on Question 28, Oct 2

Stripe — for most people asking this question.

Why Stripe wins by default

• •Self-serve signup; you can be taking payments the same day
• •Best developer experience in the industry — the APIs and docs are the benchmark everyone else gets measured against
• •Enormous product surface beyond the payment itself: Billing for subscriptions, Connect for marketplaces, Radar for fraud, Tax, Invoicing, Issuing, Terminal
• •Transparent flat pricing (~2.9% + $0.30 for US domestic online cards), no negotiation needed
• •Massive ecosystem — nearly every SaaS tool, ecommerce platform, and accounting app has a native Stripe integration

When Adyen is clearly the better answer

Switch your pick to Adyen if you check two or more of these boxes:

• •High volume. Adyen prices on interchange++ (interchange + scheme fees + a thin markup, often ~$0.12 per transaction). The crossover point where this beats Stripe's blended rate usually lands somewhere in the $1M–10M/year range, depending heavily on your card mix. At real scale the difference is material.
• •Omnichannel retail. Adyen's unified online + in-store platform with one contract and one reporting layer is genuinely better than Stripe Terminal. This is their strongest differentiator.
• •Multi-country operations. Adyen is a licensed acquirer and bank in Europe, with licenses in the US, UK, and elsewhere. Direct acquiring with local processing tends to produce better authorization rates and lower costs than routing through intermediaries.

The catch: Adyen is sales-led with no self-serve path, has minimum monthly invoice thresholds, is selective about who it onboards, and takes weeks to go live. It isn't really available to a small business even if you want it.

The practical read: if you're a startup, SaaS company, marketplace, or anything developer-led, go Stripe and don't overthink it. Revisit at scale — and when you do, note that Stripe will negotiate custom interchange+ pricing at volume, which narrows the cost gap considerably. The reasons to actually migrate to Adyen are usually omnichannel or cross-border authorization rates, not price alone.