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Comment by stripesucks | Hacker News Reader

I didn't use a specifically named competitor. I simply stated "direct merchant account." Authorize.net is not a Stripe competitor, it's a gateway, not a processor.

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Stripe is just a bundled merchant account + gateway. It isn't like you can break up the bundle, so Authorize.net is losing a potential customer each time a business goes to Stripe. So I would say they are a competitor who works with partners (merchant account providers) to provide the same service as Stripe.

I used Authorize.net circa 2010 at a large cell phone manufacturer for processing micropayments. They changed their API without notification and it broke payments for a few days, and it was really crappy considering they were supposed to be a "big dog" in the industry. Any changes were supposed to happen first in their staging environment and our test-suite ran against it to make sure it still worked before it was signed-off to be deployed into production.

Also, when I was in the UK, getting a payment processor (we had our own merchant accounts) pre-Stripe was a royal PITA. They wanted all sorts of documentation and proof that we were a "real business" before letting us process payments.

TBH, it seems like Stripe and PayPal are being pushed by "risk management" corporate suits into being unreasonable and treating their customers like United Airlines' passengers. A few years back I would ordinarily point people over to FeeFighters' Samurai to shop the best deals on payment gateways, but GroupOn decided to buy them and make them commit seppuku.

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