Stripe is quite literally double Braintree's rates, with no value-add.
And on top of that, they hold the float for up to thirty days?
Good luck, guys. You're going to need it.
'Cause that's what I've seen so far from Stripe. They're incredibly responsive and helpful. They even changed their SSL cert provider for me because older BlackBerries had a rough time with their prior cert provider.
Not to rag on Braintree, they've sounded like a good choice for a long time, but Stripe's changing some of the rules of the game. Killing the need for a merchant account is a really big deal and I'm happy to pay their rate.
[1] This isn't a rhetorical question, actually. I'd be interested in whether you can do this with Braintree.
All designed and written in the last few years, and thus completely free of legacy insanity from the 70s.
You need your own Merchant Account though. They'll find you a provider if you need one.
But I can speak to the economics of all this "complexity" of which you speak.
We currently use CyberSource for our gateway and associated banks for our Merchant Accounts, and we maintain several accounts. Each account takes less than a day to set up, with our representatives at each company.
Integrating with the CyberSource API takes roughly 20 developer-hours.
An increase in transaction costs to 5%+0.30, would cost us roughly the salary+benefits+taxes+overhead of two fulltime developers, per year. That's a cost that's simply unacceptable.
There is also the issue of "killing the need for a merchant account", being problematic from a number of legal/accounting angles( tracing this transaction from A to M, entity separation and identifcation ), as well as customer service angles( what is this PAYCSTRIPE_TCMERCH charge on my card?? ).