I have to admit I was thinking primarily of my company's use case, which is serving brick-and-mortar. This is a pretty different picture from card-not-present transactions, but if you're a low-risk business from the point of view of credit card processors, 2.9% is still at the high end. If you're brick-and-mortar, you can get rates as low as .25% sometimes.

Fattmerchant, Gravity Payments, and Worldpay are all great options for brick and mortar, and offer online payments too. Paypal is also cheaper than Stripe for US businesses.

As always, it depends, and it's complex. I probably was too confident in my above answer.