Plus, if you're a startup, you don't really know how much you're going to be selling (or not selling). It's a good idea to keep associated costs variable until you have some better benchmarks.
Stripe is unquestionably the fastest, easiest way to be able to accept credit card payments online without making yourself look like an amateur by having google checkout or the like. Not having to go through the process of getting a merchant account--and the way their fees are structured--has been a huge time and sanity saver for me, both for myself and for projects I've worked on.
In theory, you could do it in less time, but only if you already have your business licensed, registered and a business bank account set up in exactly the right way.
But since that's part of the list of things you need to do to get a traditional payment provider set up that Stripe doesn't require, it's a little disingenuous to pretend that setup times are in any way comparable.
I set up Stripe for two of my products recently. In both cases, it was a matter of minutes to get the account verified and processing real charges from real credit cards and having them sent to my bank account.
In return for doing all that work for you their fees aren't as competitive as other alternatives. That's fair given the work they do.
Also, we have volume discounts for people processing more than a million dollars a year, so this may be something you'd be interested in.
The per-transaction fees are lower, but there is a monthly (or yearly) cost. The API is big because it covers so many cases that you probably won't use.
Plus there are fees. Sure, they'll let you do e-checks (every customer wants those, right?), but that's a fee. Return? That's a fee. Chargeback? Fee. Process transactions in real-time instead of a batch at the end of the day? Fee. Log into the web interface? It's free, but it kinda slow and hard to use so you'll waste far more time that you would expect.
If you've got a business that does a lot of sales, or sales of very hight dollar items, that kind of thing can really add up. But if your sales are smaller or much more sporadic then the time investment and all the little fees may end up making Stripe cheaper. Sometime an extra 1% more than pays you back in lack of stress.
Also, for what it's worth, I remember PayPal, Google Checkout, and Amazon all being roughly the same as Stripe.
We use stripe for everything else we build for clients though, and it's awesome.
You have no clue what you're talking about. I guarantee Stripe will charge you CB fees too.
Only way Stripe is worth the time and % they jack it up is if you do LOW volume.
edit: 5 seconds in google and Stripe charges $15 for a chargeback, same as Chase. Basically paying Stripe 1% + another $0.15 or so per transaction. NO THANKS! No one doing any type of CC volume would be dumb enough to give that $ away.
If you're interested the service is called the Customer Information Manager. You can use it to store any secure data that you'd rather not be responsible for. I've used it to great success.
My main reason for my love affair with authorize.net? Recurring billing. They nailed it.
For most people, they aren't (and don't want to be) experts in payment processing. Improving their product moves the needle by more than 1% for the same (or less) effort than spending time on payment processing.
Stripe is an amazing service and their founders are amazing people. I wish I could blow them, but they probably wouldn't even let me b/c the VCs are already all over that. On the other hand, for people who enjoy saving money, becoming PCI compliant and saving 1% + trans fees is another alternative and there are numerous tutorials available to help anyone do that within a few hours even if you are severely autistic.