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Comment by username_my1 | Hacker News Reader

I genuinely don't understand why anyone would use stripe for any scaled up business compared to adyen for example.

stripe has a lot of value for out of the box integration, but if you're running your own custom solution you will need to put the same effort to integrate stripe at a 3x cost compared to adyen.

I understand it's a silicon valley thing and most likely those who use it don't get the same public pricing other people get, but aside from branding stripe is extremely expensive compared to comparable solutions.

and 4% of your top line is a huge thing to pay

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It’s been a long time, but having dealt with Adyen a few years ago my take away was they are way more punishing regarding your implementation (we had calls randomly fail, users not getting redirected, notifications out of order etc.), with more options but also more rope to hang yourself.

Those are all use cases we needed to cover either way and we did, but errors were part of the routine more than exceptional events. In comparison Stripe was way smoother and documentation/support a lot easier to grasp.

We’ve been a customer for 7 years now and it has been exceptionally stable setup

But yes their documentation can be a bit poor around the edges and if you don’t really know what you’re doing

I’m pretty sure adyen requires a decent amount of volume before they will allow you to use them, like in the 10s of millions.

Stripe provides self serve with is nice for getting started and I’m guessing once you’re big enough to jump to adyen, you can likely get a discount on the sticker price since you have bargaining power

Is it really though? It very much depends on your definition of 'scaled up'. Sure, you wouldn't run a Fortune 500's payment processing through stripe's public pricing plan.

But for a $10M SaaS startup, this would come to $350k/yr (assuming some amount of non-credit-card and non-taxed payments). I would say at least 60% of that you would pay anyway to other payments processors, even doing all the software stack yourself (nothing is free in the world of finance, after all). So that leaves you with $140k p.a. for a software stack that covers billing UI, invoicing, taxes, financial reporting. It's far from obvious how you can come up with a comparable solution yourself with a budget of at most 0.5 developers and 0.5 designers that your $140k would get you.

Yes 160k extra a year out of 10m is a lot

That rather depends on gross margin.

If it costs 1 extra human to build everything you’re losing money leaving Stripe.

If someone has revenue $10M per year, I guess it would be more than 1. Also probably they would get discount in stripe if some trusted business has revenue in that range.

If it costs 1 extra human 1 full year to build then you (roughly) broke even on that year and are up every subsequent year. And it doesn't cost nearly that much.

i can tell you firsthand that Stripe rates can be very competitive, and if you’re looking to enable some complicated fund flows it can be a great fit. I saw companies with transactions numbers in billions of dollars considering moving to Stripe.

The real question is how much do you want to put your eggs in a single basket. The company I’m at now has a multiprocessing setup that requires more work but isn’t completely dependent on a single provider.

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