Every time I ask people about this, they say it has an amazing developer-friendly set of APIs. But it’s hard for me to believe nobody has been able to replicate this experience a decade later, when Stripe’s APIs are sitting right there to crib off of.
Speaking from experience at the table at some of these deals, Adyen or other competitors would often approach my employer (large e-commerce company) offering a better deal, but executives would merely take the deal to Stripe and say "match it or we're leaving", and they would.
Given the cost of leaving is only somewhere between $50-200k depending on the complexity of your checkout systems, the client base isn't particularly sticky.
I'm bearish on Stripe for this reason. If they're just racing to the bottom with Adyen and others then where are they going to make money? Their other products are pure garbage (Stripe Radar is worse than useless).