Stripe completed the metronome acquisition their usage billing offering just 8months back , that hardly makes Stripe the largest player in this place when they are not even fully integrated .
It's take a lot to persuade me that there is another payment provider close to that volume.
Lago did around $10B in total API payment volume for comparison.
That's rarely a hit to origin though? That's mostly cached at the browser, if not at the CDN.
I used to work in payments myself and I was shocked by how little the throughout is in terms of actual transactions per second. There simply aren’t that many payments happening globally at any moment, especially when compared to other industries.
A single games company can be doing far more API requests than the total volume of payments happening concurrently in the world, ditto for ads companies or observability companies.
At a payments company, 500 payments per second is considered high throughput and 1000 payments per second is a huge amount of volume. I’ve worked at games companies where 5000 transactions per second is low throughput.
The hard part in payments companies is consistency and reliability and “correctness”, the actual load and volume is embarrassingly small.
I realise I live in a strange world when my first thought reading this is "Worldwide? That’s low. Fits in the basic one region, one account concurrent AWS Lambda quota. No need to even ask support for the 10k."
> How many times do you buy things during a day? Once? twice? Maybe thrice?
None most days. But then some days eight or nine subscriptions go through. Guess it averages out.
Might be spiky though, around the beginning and ends of each month. If paying out wages monthly, and at the end of the month or beginning of the next one is prevalent across countries where a significant share of the population has both access to a bank account and sufficient enough income to regularly spend either by card or online.
Did this turn into a systems design interview?
Anyway, joking aside, I was mostly amused by what my frame of reference for throughput / service load has become.
And let me state again, if you're a payments processor and you're processing 500-1000 payments PER SECOND on average, that makes you a very big company indeed (multi billion dollar company).
You can do the math, work out how many payments that is, what an average value of payment is, and what the TPV would be for a month. You can easily run into huge numbers that way.
And don't forget, the payment processors are taking percentages in most cases, so that 120 payments per second can turn into a huge amount of revenue at the end of the month.
That seems like something they would have prominently on their homepage.
-Global Payments: $2.8 trillion
-JPMorgan Chase: $2.45 to $2.6 trillion
-Fiserv: $2.2 trillion
-Stripe: ~$1.9 trillion
-PayPal/Braintree: ~$1.9 trillion
Stripes fees are uncompetitive, even their negotiated rates, so businesses tend to leave them as their volume grows.
You are way off here
> Sentry processes 594 trillion events a year across 200,000 organizations.[1]
That translates to an average of 18.8M events/sec , peak is likely 3-5x of that rather than evenly distributed 365dx24h.
Even in 2019/2020 they were doing 500B events a year[2]. There are few single applications anywhere close to that scale, (it is nature of the error monitoring stack), certainly not outside Hyperscalers -Google's Zanzibar [3] comes to mind as definitely larger and equally complicated to be precise as its surface involves security.
The parent poster misunderstood my statement, I only said Lago is likely more self-hosted than cloud(like Sentry), not that some single's tenant self-hosted instance is larger than Sentry cloud (!). In terms of reliability they need pretty high nines - nobody would accept their error logging infra to go down, not that different from as payment gateway. While payments is more complex for precision and all the banking integrations you need to manage and reconciliation, error monitoring tooling is orders of magnitude more scale buy its nature.
[1] https://blog.sentry.io/self-healing-software
[2] https://sentry.io/about/press-releases/sentry-application-mo...
[3] https://research.google/pubs/zanzibar-googles-consistent-glo...