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Comment by siren2026 | Hacker News Reader

siren2026

I wish Adyen was as good at marketing and hype as Stripe was.

Stripe is really good at making themselves look like a way bigger deal than they are.

There’s a huge difference for small business owners.

Stripe has a Get started button. You click it, fill out a form, get your site approved in maybe a day, and start making money.

Adyen has a Talk to our team button. You close the tab and never think about it again until you’re making serious money.

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Edit: that is, of course, by design. Adyen doesn’t want small businesses. From the sibling comment:

> only able to support businesses currently transacting more than €5M per year

Adyen has resellers. Mollie is one example, they do have. Get Started and no lower limit. These smaller parties rely on the bank license of Adyen

Are you sure about that? From Mollie's webiste:

Mollie B.V. is licensed and registered as an electronic money institution with the Dutch Central Bank (relationship number: F0038). Mollie UK Ltd is licensed and registered with the Financial Conduct Authority as a payment institution in the UK (FRN: 977968).

Mollie also doesn't want small businesses, unfortunately. (We were rejected as too small.)

Matches my experience. They didn’t state any reason in my case, though.

Really? Must be a recent thing then..? I've used them for all sorts of small (and not so small) things.

Mollie doesn't resell Adyen, nor does it rely on Adyen's banking license.

Lightspeed is powered by Adyen and serves smaller businesses.

https://www.adyen.com/knowledge-hub/lightspeed-integrated-pa...

Seems to be focused on retail / POS, not online payments. Though they do have eCommerce page and even API:

https://www.lightspeedhq.com/ecom/

https://www.lightspeedhq.com/pos/retail/api/

Sadly pretty normal for European companies. The penalties they face for signing up a bad customer are so much harsher they won't risk letting just anyone sign up without actual KYC not just checkbox KYC. This is the same reason Hetzner turns away 50% of its customers.

I used to work at Stripe and they subject to the same penalties as Ayden. There is a misconception that Stripe is an American only company, they have dual HQ model in Ireland and San Francisco. Since they are an Irish founded company and they have an EU entity “Stripe Technology Europe”. They can be kicked out of entire countries and regions if they didn’t have an extensive KYC systems and be fined just the same.

Since Stripe operates by working with a BIN (banks that sponsor them within each country) generally like all payment providers. While the decline rates for new customers are not public, they are very high, especially for industries that aren’t allowed like Adult Content, Weapons, and Gambling [1]. Also revocation of existing accounts can happen often if KYC systems flag anything, like Stripe Identity, Connect, and Radar.

[1]: https://stripe.com/en-br/legal/restricted-businesses

> especially for industries that aren’t allowed like Adult Content, Weapons, and Gambling

Well, it does makes sense. I’d be more interested in the rejection rate for businesses that are allowed but are just starting up.

Mollie (also Dutch) existed even before Adyen (and way before Stripe). They have no problem dealing with small customers, and have always offered a trivially easy to use API.

Love for Mollie - and literally had this exact theme last year at work. Stripe implemented, then customer A couldn't use it due to US base, so went to Adyen, built integration, rejected as less than $5 million as first responder said, then went to Mollie.

Only gripe is no embeddable checkout but its not a huge deal, and they have superior test platform than even Stripe. The test cards are right there in slide in panel, and you have option to select paid/cancel/fail etc to test different outcomes.

Not sure how would that change for Stripe dealing with EU companies.

They have to comply with the same regulations.

Why don't they have a fax option so you absolutely never think about it again?

No point in marketing when you outright reject customers:

Thank you very much for the comprehensive feedback.

I have taken a look at the information you have provided and unfortunately, at this time, Adyen is only able to support businesses currently transacting more than €5M per year or businesses which are currently supported by a Plugin built by Adyen. The reason for this is so that we are able to provide the right level of support and resources to our merchants at the right stage of their company growth.

If you would like to stay up to date with our payment offering please do sign up to our newsletter here.

In the interim, I want to ensure that you find the right provider, so I would like to direct you about payments. They are specialists in finding the most relevant payment solutions for all business models and I have no doubt they will offer you several great options.

I wish you the best of luck with your business moving forward, and hopefully we can reconnect in the future.

Kind Regards,

Ana Sales Specialist

What are these plugins? Could any business choose to use one, or are they highly specialized?

It's the list here:

https://docs.adyen.com/plugins#built-by-adyen

At some point you realize that your smallest customers generate the least value but require the most support.

Shedding low value users to others makes you stronger and them weaker.

You can't just actually shed all your low value users and then poach the high value users, because then you're only competing for customers who are already large and have already long since integrated one of your competitors. This is often a somewhat harder problem than taking a lot of low and even slightly negative value accounts and hoping some of them become high value.

Small customers grow into bigger ones later on. At least they do in the US, maybe this doesn’t happen so much in Adyen’s part of the world?

I wish more companies would try to serve tiny shops at the same time they serve multi million euro companies. The requirements for the two are very different, as is the support and customer care requirement. Integrating directly with Adyen as a small business is like running a kubernetes cluster on AWS to host your blog, except they'll have even less time for customer support to spend on your tickets when things don't go right.

Platforms like Stripe where anyone can sign up at any time drive up prices because the amount of low-profit companies needs to be offset by the companies making more. Great for small startups but a bad deal for major companies.

Stripe has also been criticised for forcing growing companies into enterprise plans the moment they hit certain growth numbers. That's one way to keep the business profitable, but it's not necessary if you only take on businesses that are already profitable enough dedicate a sales team onto.

Once you hit a certain processing threshold, stripe underwrites you. The benefit is some people get better deals or get to skirt by rules just by being immaterial.

Separately: Once you hit a certain threshold, you get an account rep and can ask for IC+ billing. This is sometimes better than the blended/sticker rate.

And furthermore, once you're really big enough, you can negotiate down Stripe's markup on the interchange. (As with any big enterprise contract).

A big reason Stripe got big was because they got their YC cohorts to use it. Payments before that was complicated and even though PayPal existed, most people didn’t know you could process credit cards like Stripe, you don’t need a PayPal account or wallet. It’s why they bought Braintree and that added even more confusion.

The lesson is, marketing to developers works. And the best way to market to them to by making their job easier.

Another reason is their competitors didn't get it the value prop because everyone had been competing on rates, and little thought given to developer experience... early on a lot of Stripe's competition's apis used fixed field text as the format for transactions.

Like with everything in business and engineering, there's a tradeoff. My previous employer used Adyen as major payment provider (for quite some time, too). Their cost structure is sensible, the payment methods they support are convenient[ß], and their functionality is reasonably solid even in the edge cases. But everyone who maintained the payment service kept cursing Adyen for their awful APIs. The python runtime powering the old system had to carry an unmaintainable and effectively abandoned library to be able to process the Adyen payment gateway messages.

From what I understand, Stripe's main value proposition was: "how can we make this gnarly, confusing and complicated system an easy-to-use service that does NOT require the end-user to internalise the entire payment provider state transition universe?" That is obviously a valuable service, but is it valuable enough to charge an ongoing rake of nearly 300 basis points?

ß: for some weird reason people still insisted that they absolutely must be able to pay with Paypal. 2+ years of fighting cross-corporate politics + KYB and still having to stomach insanely high commissions left a properly bad taste.

Having built on Authorize.net and a few other gateways before Stripe, I'd say yes - but the value that justifies the rake isn't the nicer API, it's what you no longer have to own. The moment you're paying out to third parties you're on the hook for KYC, identity verification, and the whole compliance/risk surface around moving other people's money. Connect absorbs that. Handing those pieces off so I stay compliant on payouts and can actually focus on the business is worth far more to me than the basis points. With other gateways I was assembling all of that myself.

As a Stripe customer I can attest to its simplicity: you have API that you call and that's it. You don't have to deal with any of the PCI stuff if you would do it in-house, just an SAQ once a year.

The back-end is also super simple and easy to set up antifraud rules and so on.

Do you have 3d secure or whatever the marketing name is for it this week?

Because it's my impression that either Stripe doesn't support it or it's so hard compared to the rest of their API that no one does it...

https://docs.stripe.com/payments/3d-secure

> Do you have 3d secure or whatever the marketing name is for it this week?

Stripe takes care of that for cards that are enrolled into 3D Secure (I think it is a Visa thing - the naming) and other kinds of card 2FA validation (Mastercard has their own and so on).

Not in my experience as an european cc user (where non 3d secure is rejected by default) using stripe based (us located mostly) stores.

The ones i've tried to pay on bull rush to charging me with no 2FA and my bank just rejects them.

Which part that makes them look bigger than they are? Which services are larger than stripe?

Adyen isn't self-serve, so it's difficult for common people to be hyped with it.

More importantly, Adyen doesn't have a messiah-like founder. Patrick is like the second coming of Jesus.

Stripes revenue is ~$20B seems pretty big to me...

Stripe has a useful tool and markets it well. With that said, I'm glad there are other options.

Stripe processes like $2T in txns per year – how do they look bigger than that?

Adyen is used by Microsoft, Meta, Netflix, Booking, etc

Stripe only outpaced after last year 34% vs 8% growth. Volume 1.9T vs 1.6T

Marketing is really Stripe's main competency and focus.

Really? I thought Stripe was a company that sells CSS stylesheets.

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