I work in the industry for a payment processor. It's not a silicon valley startup (it's basically run by salespeople) but we have way better pricing and you can get someone on the phone if you have an issue.
Reading HN, you might think Stripe is the only option.
Having said that, feel free to share your company becaise I m always open to evaluatin for our company (low 7 figures ARR)
That's their reputation, but it doesn't always stack up in reality.
Recent example: https://twitter.com/levelsio/status/1600316372344373249
Canonical HN example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30535572
The association of Stripe with simplicity and good dev experience could be more due to Stripe's marketing/PR than the views of devs who've used Stripe APIs, at least from the few things I've read.
Of course things change, and now Stripe's API has been rewritten to extreme complexity with scattershot documentation and unintuitive terminology. (I sell products, but in the API I have to sell prices??)
I don't think it's marketing/PR so much as a halo effect and reputation from years ago. My experience with stripe 5 years ago was/is simpler and easier than it is looking at it today. More products/services/options/requirements - it's more complicated than it was years ago.
But looking at it for a project 5 years ago, it was certainly simpler compared to authorize.net for what my project needed. Just the UI alone to go in and manage/test things was more straightforward and pleasant, even when I hit issues and roadblocks. Authorize.net looked like it hadn't changed much since 2005 or so when I'd looked at it then. May be better now - haven't looked since 2017.
For example, Stripe applies discounts prior to proration. So if a customer applies a $100 per month discount on a $1000 subscription, and signs up halfway through the month, they're charged (1000 - 100 * 0.5), not the more intuitive ((1000 * 0.5) - 100). Nitpicky, but not what I expected.
As an example, a few years ago the EU brought in Strong Customer Authentication (SCA). Stripe was one of the few companies ready for this, being ready about a year before. I used them at the time and adopted their SCA support and it worked well.
We also happened to be considering alternative payment processors at the time. Braintree had some basic support for it, not fully ready, and seemingly undocumented. Other suppliers didn’t even know about SCA despite notionally taking GBP payments.
Of course it’s fine to only sell to the US market, but Stripe is pretty good in many places and I suspect that’s a significant contributor to their popularity.