What about Stripe versus Adyen or Square?
We're used to winner-take-all when it comes to these unicorns, but I'm not convinced it will stay that way. With many of these service niches, there's a ton of money to be made and enough needs / feature differentiation for competition.
Square's market cap is $25B today on the public markets with a 2019 estimated net revenue of $4.5B and almost $100B in transaction volume. I don't have any insight into Stripe's numbers, though I'd guess it's probably not 40% more than that? Willing to be surprised of course, it's a great company.
The real question being asked here is: "Is Stripe's valuation likely to hold up when they go public one day?"
Can Lyft develop their own payment tech because they only transact in the US and Canada, and global transactions are where things get complicated?
I like most things about Stripe, but Shopify is also growing like crazy, has an awesome founder, and provides the only alternative to Amazon right now and is valued at $35B.
IMO costs are the worst reason to pick one of these providers at scale. They're all operating with a very similar cost basis, so you know they can each more or less match eachother, and if you come in with sufficient scale they'll offer custom pricing. Their costs are determined by the payment networks and their ability to mitigate risk and fraud. Stripe got a rep for being willing to match anyone even if they lost money in the process.
I haven’t used the two products, but is Stripe 50% better than Adyen? Why would I use one versus the other? How easy will it be for Lyft to develop its own payment technology?
I don't think "better" matters in current valuations. Nor does comparison to competitors really matter too much to the valuation - what matters are the revenue streams and potential for future earnings. So the number of current clients, and prospective clients, seems more relevant.
> How easy will it be for Lyft to develop its own payment technology?
Depends what you mean here. Any of these large companies are going to have their own merchant accounts (or should) processing payments for them. Stripe needs to either 1) take out the bottom of the market, which is what I thought they are competitors were doing and/or 2) come in cheaper and/or more convenient than maintaining your own payment services and such, which I think they do in some cases.
Adyen's MarketPay fee varies depending on payment method and is about 1-5% + 12¢ per transaction. I've contacted them to ask what one could expect for MC and Visa, but Amex and Discover are 3.95%, so I imagine similar. No mention of any other fees.
So for smaller dollar transactions (~$5), Adyen appears to be cheaper. Also, they support ACH, which Stripe does not.
sources: https://stripe.com/pricing https://www.adyen.com/pricing/full-list