My company started charging for things in April 2012, but I made the decision to use Stripe months before that, something like January 2012. Only 4 months after you launched!
We only did 1500 transactions on our launch day, yet at the time it was enough to break your service for a little while due to load. Your customer service at the time was really great and you refunded all the transaction fees for our launch day and gave us a list of all the customers who had tried and failed to make transactions so we could contact them.
I don't think I realised at the time how small you guys were. We are lucky that you guys didn't fail, and I doubt that the me of today would have relied on such a young company. Certainly we could have moved to a different payment processor, but losing all the saved card data would have sucked a lot.
So great work on that!