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Comment by Ecco | Hacker News Reader

I rarely see Adyen mentioned in those HN threads. They might not be as big as PayPal or Stripe but in my experience they are really good.

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Unless something has changed, Adyen only works with businesses with payment volumes in the millions. They don't have a sign up form. It's a "Contact Us" kind of thing.

Their definition of a small business large enough to talk to was annual $50m in card transactions. At that size, your transaction costs are pretty low and the white glove service starts getting pretty good.

probably also an american bias on HN, while Adyen mostly active in Europe

Mollie [1] is a smaller PSP that doesn't have a minimum (also Dutch).

[1] https://mollie.com

I hope their API and SDK got better. It was a pain to implement and use some years ago. Stripe was light years ahead and we ended up switching. Also the capital demands from Adyen were much higher than Stripe.

I would say they’re ok now. But that being said, I feel like we’re putting too much emphasis on the ease of integration anyway. Sure, it’s your first interaction with a payment gateway. But it’s also something you really only do once... I believe other criterias are a lot more important.

Management: "Hey guys, we need to implement some sort of payment system". Developers: "Ok, we'll see what's out there." Developers: "This one isn't well documented, this one isn't either... Oh hey this one is." Developers: "We suggest Stripe." Management: "Ok"

I think you vastly underestimate the importance of ease of use.

Well it is a hard problem, isn't it? First impressions do matter, sure

Management might also have a problem later in case of non-payment/chargebacks etc

But, in general, people need to look past the first impression

Accurate, appropriately detailed, and up-to-date documentation and references are about way, way more than "first impressions".

I really don't see how it's a hard problem either? How often does a payment gateway API really need to change? Just spend the resources necessary to get it right. If you really need to, hire (another) FTE on docs.

Yes but you'll only know how good it really is once you try it

At first glance some docs look good but when you go to use it, it's confusing/incomplete/outdated

I don't think anyone argued that great docs are sufficient for a great API. They are a requirement, though.

I feel like stripe changed their api every day. They support legacy apis forever but you could definitely have a full time job keeping up with the latest version of stripe.

Stripe also has much better transparency for troubleshooting. You can see exactly what happened to a payment, when and why. In the Adyen UI, it's not even simple to find a given payment. Stripe also has much better docs, and their API makes more sense and gets in your way less. As a developer, I much prefer integrating and dealing with Stripe, over Adyen.

I had to integrate with them years ago. The API was really terrible. Inconsistent, badly documented and overall look like it was released prematurely. It scarred me for life.

At least previously they had unattainable minimums for most small enterprise. Looks like that might have improved since.

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